Watching the Israelis carry out their liquidation of the Gaza ghetto was for anyone with a human soul still somewhere inside them a total psychospiritual catastrophe. We saw what was happening because it was literally being livestreamed to us, carnage flickering through the chinks in our feeds. And we didn’t know what to do with that except maybe to try to show it to other people. Because we thought, this information cannot be suppressed and hidden, I have seen the limbs of a small child???? splattered across the courtyard of a hospital???? and the world must know. But we misunderstood. The world knew. The people in power knew. Everybody knew.

The boomers in suits rolled their eyes through the whole annihilation of Palestine. Could anyone really be so naive as to think we care that the entire civilian infrastructure of Gaza is being systematically destroyed, they asked incredulously. Why on earth would we care about such a thing? Is it bad for our stock portfolios???? What do these fucking communists think, that the world runs on feeling sad about dead children? Do they think this stuff about ‘international law’ is real????

The latest pack of hideous ghouls to haunt the White House has claimed even more ground in the relentless war against basic decency. These ones don’t even roll their eyes. It’s never crossed their minds that anyone would think that law is real. It’s never crossed their minds that they might be constricted by any kind of ethical structure whatsoever. They are demons who have grown tired of wearing stolen flesh and croaking out words in our languages and generally keeping up the pretense of being human, and have simply reverted to their true shambling lipless rotted forms. What’s the point? The meat will do what it’s told.

So now they just announce on Truth Social that they will be committing war crimes. And we stagger and try to adjust to the new reality. The emperor is a predatory cadaver which has proclaimed that it will be eating our babies: should we let people know about this? But they already know. They are discussing which babies to give the monstrosity. They are reading articles about how true freedom is found in eating babies. They are scoffing at the notion that anyone would have a problem with eating babies. Eldritch horrors with fangs growing out of their eye sockets stalking our babies is the law of nature. Are you delusional? You think you know better than nature?

Everyone look! The shrieking shadow-fiend from the netherworld has lied! I have proof! Everyone see here! The jerking ravenous bone monster covered in other people’s blood has threatened to do something wrong! Okay. Okay! Okay?

How do we transition fully into this new reality? We might have to stop registering it as meaningful when they lie; they don’t even understand the concept of truth in a human way, something having to do with honour and respect for others. Honour and respect for others are completely meaningless, there is only power. Lying is exactly the same as not lying. The only truth that matters to them is the accuracy of proprietary data used in the furtherance of power. We might have to stop being shocked when they tell us directly that they will commit insane acts of violence and vandalism; we’re past the point where it’s shocking, anyway, at some point you have to believe what people tell you about themselves. And we might have to stop thinking that just showing people what’s going on will change anything. Everybody who isn’t balls deep in some kind of delusional late-capitalist post-reality sub-‘culture’ already knows. And a lot of them think it’s great.

So what’s next? Speaking truth to power is a joke when power is a keening void of abject malevolence. Asking nicely, ditto. What are they going to do, stop? Praying, and related activities such as playing make-believe, calling the manager, and having a demonstration, will also not have the desired effect. Eyes on the prize I suppose: a world where these freaks are in prison, and work backwards from there? We stand at a turning point, socialism or barbarism, biosphere or wasteland, future or holocide, democracy or government by howling monster. I don’t fucking know. I hope we get there before one of these death-worshipping cannibals gives Claude the fucking nuclear launch codes.

One-time donation

Snow isn’t white. It’s mostly purple, blue, orange. Periwinkle. Argentinian. Tangerine. If you take a photo of a snow-covered landscape and then put that photo into some kind of image software and select a pixel and check its colour, it will not be #000000.

Read more

There is no difference between God and the world. What the world does is what God does. Therefore when there is a message in the world it is a message from God. What God does is what the world does. Therefore when God expresses something it is expressed through the world.

The world objectively exists. Every part of it is miraculous because for it to exist is a miracle. Within it there are further stupendously unlikely events such as those that lead to our own existences. We objectively exist. So do each creature and spore and cell and viral particle. These are also miracles.

Everything and every thing is miraculous and also could not have been otherwise. Unbeing contains within it all possible time and therefore all possible synchronicities, as yet unexpressed; but the coincidence that brings unbeing into being is contained within unbeing and therefore must be expressed.

Within these contradictions lies reality. The motive and the medium, the miracle and the fact, are constitutive of one another.

The world does not require your belief in order to exist. Nor does it require you to validate its existence. Therefore God does not require your belief in order to exist and God does not require you to validate God’s existence.

God expresses God; the world expresses world; we can see or not see this. A whale breaches in the bay and I would not have seen it had I been looking at my phone. A firefly stays above me all night on my late mother’s birthday. I can see this or not see this but it happens either way. The tree falls in the forest.

To be closer to the world is to be closer to God. To be closer to God is to be closer to the world. We are the apes who sing to plants; the plants are God, we are God, we are both the world. The I and the Thou are expressions of the same thing.

To be cut off from the world is to be cut off from God. We are of the world and cannot be apart from it and therefore cannot really ever be apart from God but we can be further or nearer. We can perceive and understand or we can ignore and forget.

To perceive the plant is to get closer to the world. To perceive the plant as the Thou is to get closer still. To feel what it is to be a plant is to get closer yet. To forget that the feeling of being a plant exists is to be further from the world. To forget that the plant is not an It is to be further still. To not perceive the plant at all is to be further yet.

All things are remembered because the past is unchanging and the present is the result of the past. The past is encoded into the world which is how it is remembered by God. The world is the memory of God. Nothing can ever be forgotten because the past cannot be destroyed. All things which have been will always continue to have been.

To be a plant feels like a long, slow orgasm. The plant is blind and deaf and does not feel but the plant perceives. The plant is a coursing, jittering fire. It flings its embers outward and they catch and grow and fling their embers outward. The plant does not know fear but it knows its enemies. It does not hate its enemies but accepts them. Its enemies skitter sinuously, usually too fast to see, but they are out there in the blindness, many-legged, dampening the flame. The plant feels the enemies in its soul and is one with them.

The plant anchors itself and accepts everything as acceptance is its register. It ingathers and basks and encompasses. The world sustains it and it accepts the sustenance in ecstasy. It entwines itself into the medium and touches the other entities there, talking to them. The medium is never silent and neither are the entities. Their cells connect and exchange. The plant knows the entities well and is allied with them. The hyphae. They are always together.

To be a plant feels like rolling your eyes back into your head until you see starshot blackness and the inside of your own mind. To be a plant feels like slowly feeding bubbles of joyous elixir into a gap in your chest over your heart. To be a plant feels like melting into the ground and flinging yourself into the air very very slowly at the same time. To be a plant feels like holding every moment inside yourself, trapping each second in translucent gelatinous fluid for safekeeping. You perceive so much but it’s untranslatable, untransferrable. In the mind of the mammal it is just flashes and tuggings and the acid flavour of an alien awareness.

You are not a plant; you are a different kind of thing. You are a mammal.

Your genes reach back two hundred million years into the Triassic jungles and they know things. You are a bundle of nerve endings, a sensorial experience that moves around, feeling the world through your whiskers, transforming the light into glorious images, capturing waves in the air and acting, acting, always acting.

As a walking nervous system you cannot help but to feel, all the time. Dissociating from the sensorium only shunts it into another place where it is felt anyway. You’re a mammal; you are meant to shake it off. You are built to shake it off. To reset the buffer by taking your small warm body and thrashing it about for a few seconds.

You suckled your mother’s milk. That is what it means to be your kind of creature. Watching your mother die is a cataclysm for your kind of creature. The thing to do here is scream, and gnash, and throw yourself into the dirt, and feel the flood. For as long as it takes.

You have to take the world into yourself to survive. You have to crush it into bits and swallow it. You have to know which bits you can eat. You have to learn. Your body will convulse and expel it if you make a mistake. That is how you know you are alive. It’s part of being part of the world. It’s part of knowing the world.

You are not only a mammal. You are an ape. You are one of the singing apes.

The purpose of the singing apes is to know the plants, and the other people in the world, such as the animals and the rivers. You are meant to know their names, and their songs. We are the ones who do this. It makes us what we are. When we forget this we get very lost.

Before we came there was no one to sing to the plants and the other people in the world. The world is happy to have us but we keep forgetting.

We wonder if the tree falls in the forest if people are not there to hear it. But the forest is made of fallen trees. The forest is made of people. Instead of wondering if they are there we should be singing to them.

Our species-nature is to spin meaning out of the world and then tell it back to the world. If we only tell it to each other we become something else. We introduce a rupture into the universe and we get very sick. The world keeps on regardless because it doesn’t need us; but we are not doing what makes us us, and that is very sad, and very mistaken. We wonder if God is listening to us; God is everything. We wonder if we are alone; there is no such concept. We wonder if there is meaning; the meaning is the fabric of things and it is what we evolved to take pleasure in.

Your life has been very hard because you have been looking at it through a window instead of living in it. This lack of presence pains you and yet you could not escape it.

If you ask the plant gods their awareness will turn toward you and without anger or love you will be told that you are a mammal and you are a singing ape and you seem to have forgotten.

Shake yourself and feel; learn the names of the other people.

You will receive visions, if you want them. They are not a fantastical future or a shining light; they are your life. You cook food and smell it. You clean your mammal’s nest and hear in excruciating clarity the subtle scrape of the broom bristles on the wood. You walk and look up and see the flock alighting. You will not see it but the birds will be reflected in miniature on the film of your eyes.

You will realize that your life has been waiting for you, and that finally you are ready for it.

This spring the NDP, Canada’s left-wing federal political party, fumbled the election so badly that they lost official party status. Amidst an atmosphere of widespread economic discontent and populist rage, the ostensibly pro-worker NDP ran such a miserable campaign that they ended up with just 2% of the seats in Parliament, their worst showing in history. Their leader, Jagmeet Singh, stepped down, leaving the party to reorganize and recoup.

At a recent press conference, Heather McPherson, one of the NDP’s seven remaining MPs, announced her candidacy for the party’s vacant leadership position. Attempting to address the party’s disastrous showing in the election, she said that the NDP needed to widen its appeal significantly. “We need to stop shrinking into some sort of purity test,” she said. “We need to stop pushing people away, and we need to invite people in.”

McPherson’s colleague Leah Gazan, another NDP MP, reacted to her speech by immediately calling her words appalling, disappointing and racist. McPherson’s use of the phrase ‘purity test’ is deeply problematic, Gazan explains, because the term is “used to dismiss calls for justice from marginalized communities — especially Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, disabled, and immigrant workers”. Criticizing purity tests becomes a “justification for white supremacy culture,” she continues, in a Twitter post that looks alarmingly like it was written by ChatGPT1, because, quote:

•It centers comfort over justice — suggesting that confronting racism, colonialism, or misogyny is “divisive” or “too pure,” rather than essential for liberation.

•It protects the status quo, which has historically privileged white, male, and able-bodied workers as the default voice of the working class.

•It erases the realities of a diverse workforce by pretending that the fight for good jobs can be separated from the fight against racism, sexism, and colonialism.

•It delegitimizes leadership from racialized and marginalized people by framing their calls for justice as “ideological purity” instead of principled resistance.

A few days later, Reclaim Canada’s NDP, a grassroots caucus within the NDP, also put out an infographic in response to McPherson. It was titled ‘No Politics Without Identity’. ‘The NDP cannot blame its shortcomings on marginalized communities,’ reads the text, which continues:

There is a narrative being pushed that “identity politics” is too prevalent or divisive, implying that considerations being made for marginalized communities’ experiences is something to blame today’s problems onto [sic], including the NDP’s electoral shortcomings.

I should say here that I’m not terribly familiar with McPherson’s stances, though I know she’s widely seen as an establishment figure and I know I have disagreements with her on some important issues. But she’s obviously right about this, and the reactions from Gazan and Reclaim are themselves a case study in exactly the kind of thing that she was talking about. This mode of politics – where you seize on innocuous turns of phrase like ‘purity test’ and use them to openly accuse your peers of being misogynist, ableist, homophobic white supremacists, while completely ignoring the substantive content of any critiques – peaked around five years ago and is still popular in the more annoying circles of libworld, but is almost universally despised and mistrusted outside of quite small circles of progressive activist types with close ties to NGOs or academia. It makes normal people feel scolded and surveilled, not hopeful or uplifted, and is alien to how most people interact with one another. It certainly doesn’t win elections, and overall, it has been immensely detrimental to the left.

Mercifully its iron grip over left-wing scenes and movements has lessened considerably in the past couple years, but there are still true believers trying to keep it normalized. And while many people on the left have finally gotten over it and are more comfortable ignoring it than was the case a few years ago, a lot of people still don’t really understand how to respond to it. There has definitely been a vibe shift, I think mainly because of how many people were eventually burned by this type of thing, but the vibe shift has taken place without a corresponding shift in understanding. It’s important for us to understand what is actually going on when things like this are happening; to be able to look underneath the hood, so to speak, and understand the rhetorical tricks and ideological underpinnings of this mode of politics.

As so many have noted over the years, a bizarre aspect of the mode of politics we’re discussing here is that it almost never names itself. It has no central text or clear founding figure. Its opponents have tended to call it ‘woke’, I’ve sometimes called it ‘the nexus’, and some people call it ‘social justice’ politics, but in general it declines identification, preferring to use eye-watering euphemisms such as ‘good politics’. I think the most accurate way to describe it is as a variety of leftish identitarianism — identitarianism being the obsessive political focus on identity at the expense of nearly everything else —married to the widespread use of cancel culture tactics as a means of disciplining adherents and maintaining internal cohesion. Regardless of what we call it, its refusal to name itself or to really even acknowledge its own existence allows it to perform a couple of very interesting rhetorical tricks.

The first is the way that it presents itself as being functionally identical with basic concepts such as justice and equality, treating all challenges to itself as challenges to those concepts. If you criticize this brand of identitarianism, or even just its more dysfunctional excesses, you are criticizing the basic pillars of what is considered good and ethical in modern Western political culture. You can see this unusually clearly in Gazan’s post. By drawing attention to something objectively dysfunctional and alienating – the endless purity spirals and circular firing squads of the turbolibs – McPherson is in fact ‘dismissing calls for justice’. She hates justice! And worse than that, she ‘justifies’ all the evils of the world and ‘erases’ all good things and all good kinds of people. This sets up a dichotomy between those who love justice and hate evil, on the one hand, and those who hate justice and love evil on the other; and the way you can tell who’s who is that if they criticize the good guys, they’re the bad guys.

The second rhetorical trick is the way that it presents itself as entirely coterminous2 with marginalized people themselves. This mode of politics is marginalized people and marginalized people are this mode of politics. Again, this sleight of hand is on display clearly in Gazan’s comments, and especially in the Reclaim infographic. To blame the NDP’s weak showing in the election on this brand of annoying, widely hated politics is actually somehow to blame it on ‘marginalized communities’, even though of course most members of ‘marginalized communities’ (a group of people consisting of a large majority of the Canadian population3) think this kind of thing is stupid and embarrassing and mostly just want cheaper rent and better healthcare. In effect, this mode of identitarian politics ventriloquizes vast numbers of people, purporting to not only speak with their voice, but to represent them morally, in the sense that an insult to the self-declared spokespersons is an insult to the people they claim to represent.

More and more people are able to roll their eyes and move on when they see this kind of grandiose bullying in the wild, but it’s also important for leftists grounded in reality to learn how to actively shut it down, clearly and courageously. We need to shed our fear of pointing out the obvious. First of all, identitarians using AI-generated screeds to libel their colleagues don’t have a monopoly on concepts like justice. But most importantly, their politics are not the natural, organic expression of the collective will of marginalized ‘folks’. Their politics are a specific, nameable strain of thought within the left wing of liberalism, and are not particularly popular among the people they are about. Not to put too fine a point on it, but how many Punjabi migrants working low-wage service jobs in Toronto are deeply invested in the right of transgender children to access puberty-blocking hormones? How many young black guys driving Ubers in Montreal think the NDP is too dominated by cis men? The fact is that anyone with a cursory familiarity with real people in the real world knows that just like anyone else, people from ‘marginalized communities’ are frequently quite socially conservative, often believe insane things about other marginalized groups, dislike thinking of themselves primarily as victims, and dislike being scolded by nerds using annoying language.

These ‘problematic’ beliefs aren’t just incidental or occasional, and they shouldn’t just be hand-waved away by muttering about false consciousness or internalized this or internalized that. These are real adult human beings, not children or props, and their beliefs should be taken seriously. Yesterday I struck up a conversation with a dude in the park who turned out to be a Turkish immigrant. Within five minutes he was ranting to me about how Syrians were ruining his country and how Canada should stop letting Arabs in because they are violent. When I worked at an Indigenous community centre in Montreal, multiple clients told me about their elaborate antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish world dominance. Caribbean guys I worked with at a warehouse in Lasalle were shockingly homophobic and I’ve met plenty of queer and trans people who harbour racist views ranging from dumb to alarming. And everyone who has had contact with working people in the real world has had these kinds of experiences.

This doesn’t mean people of colour, queer people, disabled people etc are more ‘problematic’ or dangerous or whatever than abledbodiedcisstraightwhitemen. It means that having a perfectly curated set of 2020-era progressive takes on every subject is very rare and cannot be the litmus test for inclusion in a political movement. The purity tests McPherson is talking about are alienating for everyone, not just for privileged people. In fact it is somewhat the opposite: relatively privileged people, that is, people who have graduate degrees, lots of well-heeled liberal peers, and the time to read a lot, are far more likely to be able to ‘pass’ these purity tests. That is because progressive purity tests are not primarily a measure of how committed someone is to upholding dignity for everyone; they are a measure of how well that person has assimilated the kind of rhetorical gobbledygook Gazan employed in her Twitter post.

When confronted with people who are still convinced that politics is primarily about competing to see how many identity groups you can list as you call your peers transphobic racists, the rest of us on the left need to start standing up a lot more often. We need to point out clearly that this type of shit is grating, slanderous and antisocial. We need to defend the idea that the left needs to be popular and relevant in order to win power and that winning power is the point. We need to get comfortable denying that identitarians have a monopoly on basic moral precepts. We need to refuse the idea that identitarianism is the only possible left-wing stance on identity, or that it is a natural or even popular stance among the people it concerns itself with. Correspondingly we need to offer an alternative vision of what it means to stand up for human dignity.

The fact that scolding and purity tests consistently destroy the left doesn’t mean we have to put up with virulent racism and homophobia. I don’t write about this a lot but I am a bisexual. I sleep with men, my voice and mannerisms often give me away as a queer person, I have been the target of homophobic violence on a number of occasions in my life, and I don’t like to be around crazy homophobes because it sucks. Now, if I was too precious about this element of my identity I literally would not be able to work with large numbers of ‘marginalized’ people, as people who live in reality understand. At the same time, if I allowed myself to be walked all over by idiots, it would be very bad for both my mental health and my fundamental dignity as a human being. So is there a middle ground between requiring everyone to tiptoe around me and allowing myself to be insulted and mistreated?

I believe that there absolutely is. In my life, confronted with situations in which the people I’m trying to work with are spouting stupid hurtful shit, I’ve made good use of the very popular sentiment ‘live and let live’. I’ve found that most people in Canada subscribe to this idea on a pretty deep level, and reminding them of that can go a long way toward getting them to get their shit together. Our new co-worker is trans, and you think of me as a bro, and you get me alone in the hallway to waggle your eyebrows at me and make incredulous noises about her appearance? I’m gonna tell you, in a friendly but pretty firm way, that it’s none of my business, it doesn’t affect me at all, and that I think people can do whatever they want. This is obviously true and so you settle down, and I’ve set a precedent wherein the cool, calm and collected thing to do is to just act normal.4

I think the movement-level version of this is to convey a fluency with identity politics without getting bogged down in identitarianism and grievance politics. Zohran Mamdani in New York has totally mastered this stance. He is able to talk to and about anyone in any identity group very convincingly, with an easy manner and a lot of familiarity with their circumstances and norms. Watching him do a sassy interview with a drag queen and then walk down the street with a Puerto Rican reggaeton bigshot handing out props to the boys was impressive as hell from this perspective, because he was able to do this with total comfort, without looking like he had a gun to his head or like he couldn’t wait to get away to wash his hands. Crucially, it communicates that the normal stance for a cool, modern guy in the city is that some of your friends and neighbours are freaky queers and others are construction workers who wake up at 5am and that isn’t weird to you.

This extends to his own identity as well; he is a progressive Muslim from a complex diaspora background, but he resists the temptation to position himself as a victim in constant need of special rules and protections. Instead he effortlessly conveys the sense that in 2025 in New York, having a problem with a guy eating rice with his hands is just kind of sad and cringe and a distraction from the issues at stake, which are relentlessly economic and therefore affect everyone. The guy can’t go fifteen seconds without explaining how he’s going to make things cheaper and better for all ordinary workers. This easy fluency with identity and simultaneous determined commitment to universalism, coupled with a refusal to identify with victimhood and instead positioning yourself and your movement as gunning straight for power on behalf of the working class, is the winning combination for the left.

One of the great things about being a socialist is that you can simply stop worrying about which working people are worthy enough to deserve good things: you just know that they all are, automatically. It doesn’t matter if some of them believe stupid things. Canadian workers deserve workers’ policies put in place by a workers’ government, not scolding and whining brought to them by the tiny, imploding party of queer landlords of colour. Identitarians are, in the end, far more interested in using their swiftly vanishing cultural clout to police each other’s words than they are in wielding political power. But political power is what leads to the ability to make policy, and making policy is the entire point of politics. Not one single working person, of any identity category, is helped by an NDP with no political power. As fascist clowns backed by supervillain billionaires seize power across the world, it’s more important than ever that the left has something to offer normal people beyond identity-slop so dismal and generic that it’s impossible to tell if it was even written by a human. Let’s give it to them.

One-time donation

There is an endless carousel of people like him being propelled into prominence by the billionaires: slick, arrogant, tanned men in dark blue suits and sadistic women with blonde helmets and cavernous eyes, using the words of the radical pacifist Jesus Christ to propose the most insane cruelty one can imagine. Their betrayal of the basic principles of decent human existence is so profound, and the degree to which they are simply products constructed by the think tanks and foundations of the enemy class is so advanced, that in some ways they scarcely qualify as real people. Of course there is a real individual behind the mask but they are simultaneously simulations of a real individual assembled and designed to fulfill a specific purpose in the mediasphere. They advocate for fascism with American characteristics, a kind of libertarian fascism: unimpeded freedom and authority for the hyperwealthy, brutal and violent discipline for the dispossessed masses, covered with a thin veneer of the sickest variety of faux-Christianity and all wrapped up in an American flag.

These grotesque marionettes see most of their fellow humans as contemptible and worthy of nothing but scorn. Their vision of God is an evil delusion which they use to give gravitas to their worship of naked power. Watching capitalism propel their country and their compatriots ever further into a nightmare of alienation, misery and melted brains, they clamour more, more, harder, harder. Grinning his death’s-head grin the simulated man demands: give the enemy class even more power! Crush the working poor like bugs! Strip mine the land and dump the sludge in the rivers! Kill every last wild animal and keep the rest in torture factories! Strip the stranger of his sacred personhood, leer at him in his cage, cackle at the dismemberment of his children, spit on him and hold hands and pray.

He and his accursed ilk are ‘opposed’ by neoliberal weasels who see no real problem with any of this but just wish that it wasn’t quite so nasty. There’s no need to say all the quiet parts out loud, they whine on their dismal morning shows. Yes, all conceivable power should be concentrated in the hands of the enemy class and yes, daily life for most people should be a miserable grind ending with the bank taking their homes to pay for a hospital bill but they should be allowed to use their preferred pronouns, come on, we’re not barbarians here. These useless moaners are as bad as the bloodthirsty MAGA freaks, and together they have gibbered and snivelled us into this brave new world of peak alienation and the resulting phenomenon of pointless spectacular violence.

In the old days when someone tried to shoot a president or a fascist or whatever it was because they were an Italian anarchist who had gone to an Emma Goldman meeting and gotten riled up. These days it is deeply unwell post-political young people who are haunted by the internet and would have just as easily carried out a school shooting or gunned down worshippers in a mosque. They put memes on their bullet casings for the police to find and broadcast, as a way to reach out to each other. They livestream the insane violence they perpetrate so that their online friends can watch it on smartphones. They sacrifice other human beings in a bid to gain notoriety and then are killed or, in an outcome so gut-wrenching I can hardly think about it, spend the rest of their lives in prison, having thrown away their one and only life in some kind of hellish screen-induced fever dream.

There is a growing prevalence of young people who are ‘radicalized by the internet’ they say. But so many are not radicalized into any actually existing group or even a real political ideology. They are radicalized into being insane murderers who don’t believe in anything, who carry out acts of terrorism ironically. In what kind of society can such a thing take place at any kind of scale? A society in which human life is self-evidently worthless. The glaring anti-human policy environment of North America and especially of the United States is made even more twisted by the ranting of white-toothed ‘Christians’ and the bleating of pointless liberals. Whether we know it or not we all understand it; it leaches into our psyches like toxic effluent into the water table. To believe these obvious liars is to be a sucker; the truth is all around us; human people do not matter, animal people matter less, it is not even possible to conceptualize plant people mattering. Lacking any other ethical structure to keep us above water some of us drown in the churn of worthlessness and aloneness and what comes dragging itself out of the waves is a corpse clutching a gun, cut off from itself, from God and from the world. A vicious and suicidal society induces an ambient sociopathy in its constituent parts.

When one of these simulated fascists is snuffed out by a walking corpse with memes on his bullets what is there to say? The machine is devouring itself. It’s one more blip of spectacular violence in a progression which reaches into the past and the future, which is an inevitable outcome of the world and worldview expressed by these pitiless monsters. Human lives are sacred and the individual was perhaps redeemable in some distant timeline but what are any of us supposed to think? He hated human life and served a cabal of leeches and lechers and was devoted to the heretical demon god of total objectification. 150,000 human beings die every day. Each is a universe. He joins them. We go on.

Recently, a slumlord slash speculator in Montreal got up to such nefarious shenanigans that he managed to get himself on the news. The CBC and Ricochet both reported on his schemes, which mainly involving buying apartment buildings full of low-income tenants, taking out mortgages with extremely high interest rates, and then getting rid of the tenants as quickly as possible in order to flip the buildings, leaving some homeless. Par for the course for the parasite class, of course, who produce nothing of value and instead use their access to capital and pathological lack of regard for other human beings to squeeze rents and profits out of the rest of us. Clearly the guy is a pitiless freak: no surprise there. But what struck me about these articles was the following insane incident.

According to a pair of decisions rendered by the rental Tribunal (Tribunal administratif du logement — the TAL), last summer this landlord visited several of his tenants unannounced. These tenants benefited from a program for low-income people through the OMHM, the body administering municipal housing programs in Montreal, under which the portion of their rent that they paid was capped at 25% of their income, the rest being subsidized by the city. The landlord handed these tenants paperwork informing them that their rent was being increased significantly and that appliances, heat, and hot water would no longer be included in the lease. The paperwork was on fake letterhead from the OMHM, giving the tenants the impression that this rent increase was coming not from the landlord, but from the government body that was subsidizing their rent. Frightened and shocked, they signed.

Later, realizing what had happened to them, the tenants filed complaints at the Tribunal. The landlord didn’t even bother showing up for the audience. Upon reviewing the evidence, the judge found ‘unequivocally’ that the landlord had ‘deliberately’ committed fraud, that he was clearly attempting to take advantage of a vulnerable person, and that his actions were ‘inexcusable and reprehensible’1. The Tribunal ruled against him, and declared that the documents the tenants had signed were null and void.

And… that’s it. I cannot find any record of this landlord suffering any legal consequences whatsoever after getting caught knowingly defrauding vulnerable elderly people. The only thing that seems to have happened to him was that a judge said that he was not actually allowed to benefit from the fraud that he had committed. It’s like if you got caught going to the bank and taking out a loan in someone else’s name and your punishment was that you had to say sorry and give it back.

Reading this made something inside me snap. It brought back all the times over the years that my landlords have behaved in outlandishly antisocial ways, constantly breaking the law, neglecting their responsibilities and practicing various kinds of fraud, deception and extortion, always without any consequences at all. Backdated rent increase letters, documents referencing rental rules that don’t exist, imaginary ‘major work’ being cited as justification for raising the rent, emails threatening legal action over totally standard lease reassignments, attempts to extract ‘first-and-last’ rent payments and deposits which are not legal in Quebec, months of radio silence whenever basic repairs need to be done, unannounced visits and entry without permission, refusal to pay for exterminations, broken smoke detectors, floods and leaks going unaddressed, disgusting hallways, busted heaters, and on and on and on. Everyone in this city will start rocking back and forth and muttering to themselves if you bring up the topic of bad landlords. We are all held hostage by this totally pointless and often actively predatory stratum of profiteers. Why — apart from the class structure which makes this miserable system of housing allocation possible in the first place — are things so, so bad?

To get a driver’s license in this province, you are obliged to take 40 hours of instruction at a government-mandated driving school over the course of minimum one year. You must pass three tests, and then drive with a probationary license for two years. You will spend at least a dozen maddening hours at the government office in charge of driver’s licenses, the SAAQ, trying to explain weird problems you’re having with their online portal to people who stare at you blankly and ask you if you’ve tried calling. If at any point in this whole minimum three-year long process you get four demerit points, you’re out (touching a cell phone while driving, by the way, is five demerit points). If you want to become a real estate agent, you need a college degree in brokerage and a permit issued by the industry body. If you want to be a notary, a translator, or an accountant, you need specialized training and to be part of a mandatory professional order. If you break the rules of the Order of Optometrists of Quebec, you are not allowed to be an optometrist anymore. Yet to be a landlord — a social position so central to the economy and so fraught with conflict that there is a special Tribunal and whole chapters of the Civil Code dedicated to its administration — there are no requirements.

There is no government-mandated class you have to take. You don’t have to get on Zoom on a Saturday morning and learn about Module 2: You Are Not Actually Allowed to Ignore Black Mould. There’s no test at a government office where they make you sit in a little booth and show you little scenarios on a screen and ask you to identify which regulations the little characters are violating and make you retake the test in a month if you don’t pass. There’s no permit that says you are allowed to own other people’s houses and extract rent from them. And since there’s no permit, there’s nothing to take away.

There is also basically no scenario in which the police walk into your office and put you in handcuffs for repeatedly breaking the law as a landlord. If you hit somebody with your car, or even speed fast enough, you might very well go to prison. If you’re a doctor, you can be held criminally liable if you do something negligent enough at work. By contrast, a landlord can be ruled against over and over again and essentially nothing happens, because everything a landlord does is under the jurisdiction not of the police and the regular courts but of this dinky little Tribunal, the TAL, which has no ability to convict anyone of a crime. Even when landlords are taken to real court, which is rare, they always get away with fines. Two different buildings owned by Montreal landlord Emile Benamor burned down recently, killing nine people in total; inspectors found that he had not been keeping fire exits clear, and the city took him to court. He was fined $650 and plans to appeal. Long story short, there is essentially no way to actually compel these people to follow the laws governing their “““profession”””.

The reason there is no gruelling licensing process for landlords is the same reason there is a special parallel court system for landlords that can’t really punish them. Incidentally, it’s also the same reason there’s a special parallel court system for when your boss steals money from you: class rule by the people who own all the property and businesses. The development of liberal capitalism was the result of that class seizing power for themselves a few hundred years ago, and our institutions all reflect that to one degree or another. The result is this system wherein if you steal money out of the cash register you are arrested and possibly imprisoned but if you steal money by fucking with your employee’s paycheck you are summoned to an office building and asked by a bureaucrat to please not do that anymore; a system where a landlord can call the police to have you evicted but you cannot call the police to have your landlord deal with the black mould from Module 2. Technically everyone is equal before the law (one’s ability to pay a gazillion dollars an hour in legal fees notwithstanding), but conveniently if you own rental properties, you’re violating a different, special kind of law, one with no cops, courts or consequences.

I’m sure this has been lots of fun for the ruling class up til now but it’s getting pretty ridiculous, so I propose that we solve this absurd problem by the simple expedient of treating landlords the way we treat drivers. (Trust me, this is a really generous compromise.) Here’s the vision: landlords are required to take a class on the regulations governing rental housing and then pass a test on the material. If they pass, they can apply for a landlord license. If a landlord is found by the Tribunal to have knowingly violated any rental regulation, that landlord then receives demerits on their license. If that landlord exceeds a certain number of demerits, their license is suspended. This means that their right to collect rental payments from tenants is rescinded for the duration of a penalty period, during which their tenants pay rent to the government instead of the landlord. After the penalty period they must retake the test and reapply for their landlord license. For certain violations — such as deliberately committing gross fraud!!! — suspension is automatic and immediate and also comes with criminal charges. If your license is suspended three times, you lose the right to be a landlord permanently. A lawyer from the city estimates the value of your rental property and informs you that the government will be buying it, minus (large) fees and fines. For certain offences your building is simply seized without compensation in order to prevent you from committing more crimes. All buildings taken over by the city are turned into cooperatives or converted into affordable housing. A mobile inspectorate is set up so that tenants can call and report violations the way that you would call and report a crime. Eventually, if you want (I do), you simply stop issuing new permits to for-profit entities and transition away from landlordism entirely.

Such a system would certainly be met with an ungodly amount of bitching and moaning by parasites convinced they have an inalienable right to have poor people give them all their money in perpetuity. Among other things they would also threaten darkly that such a system would force them, force them! to raise their rental prices. To which I would respond: first of all, luckily the amount by which it is legal to raise the rent is not up to you. And secondly, are you saying that your current prices are possible because you are… breaking the law? The inspectors, sir, are on their way.

I’m on a mission to have my coffee addiction pay for itself via Substack money. If you want to buy me like one third of a latte, click on one of these buttons:

One-time donation

Subscribe now

The article starts,

An ‘Anti-Canada Day’ barbeque and fundraiser will be hosted in Montreal on July 1 by the McGill students’ union, a group called the ‘Palestinian Feminist Collective’, and other equally worthy student activist groups. They form one of many cancerous cells of post-secondary students who spend most of their energy trying to undermine and demoralize everyone around them. To McGill’s credit, it moved to cut ties with the students’ union in April after it helped to lead a storming of the campus to protest the Israeli government and western support for it. Nevertheless, academia has much to answer for after spending years fostering this toxic political climate.

This petulant little bitch, who can’t handle a fucking barbecue organized by some teenagers because it’s ‘demoralizing’, has, along with the rest of his craven conservative ilk, pivoted from solemnly declaring war on ‘woke’ to espousing the maximalist ‘woke’ identitarian position that people should be institutionally and possibly legally silenced for causing offence, speaking out of turn, or saying things one doesn’t like about one’s favourite ethnicity. In beating a full retreat into tearful censoriousness the instant they are offended by anyone’s views, these brave free speech warriors remind us all that being a preposterous coward has always been the true domain of the right wing, and that the liberal interest in such things over the past decade has really been a form of cultural appropriation of a proud conservative tradition.

Russ continues,

Universities are packed with derision and outright slander for those who make higher education possible. Businessmen are portrayed as greedy, exploitative capitalists, while blue-collar labourers are portrayed as akin to racist zoo animals that must be studied as such. Those same people help ensure that public university tuition in Canada is generously affordable by covering the lion’s share of the costs through taxpayer subsidies.

Several of the words in this passage are links to ‘evidence’ that ‘universities’ are hives of Marxist villainy. Two of them are ridiculous: the word ‘capitalists’ links to a three sentence blurb on the UBC website about an Associate Professor in geography who studies ‘Black dispossession under capitalism and the resistance Black communities have put up in response’. Chilling! The word ‘racist’ links to a PDF of the introduction to Volume 7, Number 2 of the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, which is boilerplate critical race theory stuff from 2020 about ‘white rage’.

The funniest link, though, is attached to the word ‘exploitative’. This links to Chapter 12, entitled ‘We Must Abolish Capitalism’, of The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success by Mark Jaccard, a Canadian economist. Hilariously, Russ didn’t bother reading past the title because he is a fucking joke and a hack. If he had, he would have noticed that the subtitle of the book is Overcoming Myths That Hinder Progress. The chapter is about how Naomi Klein’s idea that we need to abolish capitalism in order to fight climate change is a myth and why it is not necessary to abolish capitalism. The author is a pro-capitalist liberal who thinks that Naomi Klein is too radical. Even for the National Post, this oversight is fucking embarrassing.

Ironically, the article in the critical race theory journal actually gets at one of the things that is definitely going on in Russ’s piece. The article is written in the overstated, hyper-identitarian and somewhat hysterical manner typical of lefty academics, but it’s not wrong when it points out that in North America, reactionary anger is often organized through “a defence against – rather than a commitment to – class politics” (p. viii)1. Russ is doing this classic delusional right-wing sleight of hand where ‘businessmen and blue-collar labourers’ are set up as one group in opposition to another group made up of ?????school?????. Class politics is thereby not just obscured, it’s put into an industrial blender, extruded in disgusting wobbly tubes, and sold back to us as mechanically-separated, finely-textured class product. In this conservative pink slime version of the world, capitalists and Real Workers2 pay for everything, while frivolous Palestinian feminists set money on fire and spit on white factory workers or whatever.

This favourite trick of right-wing psychos serves to reinforce the completely hegemonic idea that the people who own absolutely everything and hate normal people and think of us as bugs somehow have the same worldview and material interests as white guys who operate forklifts. It also of course reinforces the remarkably resilient idea that working people are all white guys who operate forklifts. In reality, obviously, the working class is multiracial and full of women, is in large part made up of service workers, and obviously has interests which are diametrically opposed to Geoff Russ’s billionaire bosses. Don’t get me wrong, lots of working people are indeed white guys who operate forklifts, and they deserve a worker’s party and worker democracy and to watch the Liberal cabinet be jailed for crimes against the population just like everybody else. But this attempt to rhetorically create a cross-class alliance between capitalists and the people they boss around, disrespect and exploit all day long, on the basis that both capitalists and workers ‘have to pay for’ teenagers having edgey barbeques at McGill, is ludicrous.

Gurgling dork Geoff Russ rambles on, calling Frantz Fanon a ‘bloodthirsty militant’, and brutally misunderstanding the point of his writing. He calls colonizers ‘so-called colonizers’, apparently in the belief that colonization was not a real thing? And of course he hysterically whines about ‘anti-Israel mobs’, ie people taking a stand against one of the most sickening episodes of mass violence against civilians in modern history. This last obsession is the real focus of the ‘woke right’, with conservatives across the continent clutching their skirts and fainting theatrically at the prospect of being offended by people wearing keffiyehs. These fucking losers, lips quivering and eyes brimming with tears, are totally unable to handle the concept of students who think it’s wrong to maintain a close alliance with a country which commits psychotic war crimes every four hours. People who spent the last decade huffing and puffing about freedom of speech now demand that someone protect their delicate ears from having to hear words they don’t like, and retreat into accusations of anti-Semitic racism that are such a wild reach they would make the most shameless liberal race-hustlers positively blush. This flagrant hypocrisy would be deeply funny if it wasn't so worrying to watch.

But it doesn’t end there. True to his conservative-goblin credentials, Russ finishes up by floating the fun idea of a little privatization, as a treat. He writes,

Instead of continuing to fund the cultural, social and political disintegration of the country, Canadians should demand true reform as part of a renewed social contract. This includes a debate on how public universities are funded and how the money is spent.

I’m sure that his evil bloodsucking bosses would love a little debate on how public universities are funded, considering that people from their class invariably prefer absolutely everything to be privatized. When things are privatized they can be bought. Normal people and ‘blue-collar labourers’ don’t have enough money to buy universities but rich people do. Not only do they have enough money, they actually materially need more stuff to invest their money in. One of the main economic motivations for the colonialism and imperialism that Russ doesn’t believe in was specifically that once capitalists in a given country have invested in everything there is to invest in, they need additional places to invest their capital so that it can continue to grow, and if there’s nowhere left at home, you go get yourself some colonies to do it in. Privatization is a continuation of the same logic. The class of ‘people’ that Russ works for want all our hospitals, schools, housing and everything else to be privatized so that they can own even more of our common institutions, extract our wages from us in even more ways, and, of course, pay less taxes.

This is the simple reason why the bitching and moaning of the elites and their propagandists – on either side of the liberal-conservative split – so often ends with a pitch for disgusting rich people being allowed to own more of our shit. You dress it up with some culture war nonsense about how nobody should be allowed to offend you and throw in some securitarian scare-mongering about Islamist terror-mobs or whatever your fear-flavour of choice is. You imply that the ‘good elites’ are on the side of the ‘good workers’ and the ‘bad elites’ are in league with the ‘bad workers’ and totally deny any possibility of the existence of real class politics or working-class solidarity generally. You say it’s ‘time for a change’ and that we need a ‘bold new vision’ and the bold new vision is just the relentless march of ice-cold neoliberalism. Contrary to the classless fairytale world of the National Post, we live in a class society ruled by an elite class. And at the end of the day, all this shit, this whole genre of article, is just a reflection of one fact that we should all be aware of: the elites cannot stand the idea of anything being off-limits to their capital, and fundamentally believe that their money entitles them to collect a profit off of absolutely everything, no matter what.

I drank three coffees writing this article. If you would like to buy one of them for me, considering clicking one of these buttons:

One-time donation

Subscribe now

Another year, another miserable and embarrassing fiasco at the anarchist bookfair in Montreal. This year, presumably taking a break from updating their lists of things their friends aren’t allowed to say and arguing about whether astrology is racist, an anonymous group of “““anarchists””” at the bookfair took it upon themselves to beat up a local activist in public. They subsequently distributed a zine, complete with art depicting a black and pink fist, solemnly explaining their totally normal and reasonable motivations for doing so.

This guy, they explain, was a ‘manarchist’, something which cannot be tolerated and should be met with unapologetic physical violence. His list of crimes includes taking up a lot of space by doing a lot of activism, sending an eggplant emoji to a girl he was dating, calling identity politics distracting, and doing not one but two accountability processes of some sort (the zine calls them ‘interventions’) without changing sufficiently. As punishment, he needed to be physically beaten, then banned from all anarchist spaces and organizations, as well as banned from dating, indefinitely, or I guess until this anonymous group of vigilantes decides he’s allowed to fuck again. I assume they’ll let him know.

The zine features a kind of introduction entitled ‘Why We Jump’, as in, assault people in public. It starts,

Call it “street justice”, call it consequences, but when transformative justice fails (given the inherent centring of the abuser), shit is gonna go down. Call it ‘escalating the accountability process’. What do you do when accountability processes fail, again and again? Well some folks decided to jump an abuser. And before you decry it as “violent”, is abuse not also violence?

In some ways, I’m almost impressed that these people have finally moved on from endlessly putting their friends on trial in directionless, dystopian kangaroo court ‘accountability processes’ and have just cut directly to the chase: beating people up. Frankly it simplifies things, and getting jumped by Montreal anarchists is probably less painful than watching them trying to organize one of their transformative justice nightmares. But still, it is fucking insane that this happened.

Obviously, they use the words ‘abuse’ and ‘abuser’ every five seconds in the zine. I’ve written before about the way the overuse of this word has made it effectively meaningless. In documents like these (this zine is part of a whole genre), it functions less as a descriptor of the target’s behaviour and much more as a securitarian thought-terminating cliche which justifies the behaviour of the attackers. Securitarians in the government use the word ‘terrorist’ to mean someone who should not have any rights, someone who can be dealt with summarily, someone with whom it is politically forbidden to empathize. Securitarians in the ‘social justice’ milieu use ‘abuser’ in a very similar way for a very similar purpose, albeit obviously with different stakes and on a different scale.

Now, clearly if we are talking about somebody who beats up his girlfriends or roofies girls in bars or something, nobody is going to cry much over him getting jumped. That’s the point of repeatedly using the word ‘abuser’ to describe your target. But, true to the genre, the zine – even though it includes no less than 8 testimonials of people who were ‘harmed’ – doesn’t actually accuse him of anything of the sort. The closest it gets is in this passage:

I had an intimate relationship with this man. From the beginning, I set sexual boundaries and they were repeatedly tested and violated, knowing my vulnerability as a survivor. I gave him many chances to take accountability yet instead he chose to deny it and gaslight me to the point I barely believed myself.

This is kind of a callous thing to say but I’m going to say it: who knows what that means? It’s meaningful that in an anonymous document exclusively dedicated to justifying vigilante violence against this man, it doesn’t simply use the word ‘rape’. This kind of document is always purposefully written to make the accused seem as awful as possible and the alleged offence as egregious as possible. Events are recast to establish ‘patterns’ of ‘harm’, anything that can be seized on is used as evidence, and everything is worded for maximal reputational damage. For example, elsewhere in the zine, him going to the Anarchist Library after anonymous people ordered him not to is described as a “breach of boundaries, something he willfully crosses often in a test of power.” In another place, him glaring, later that day, at the people who beat him up is described as being abusive and making people feel unsafe (yes, really). So given that the language used in the document is already being stretched to its breaking point, and nowhere does it accuse him of rape or even of the slightly more vague term sexual assault, what can we assume is being described in the passage above? I don’t know, because it doesn’t say, but I find it hard to imagine that it is the kind of thing most people would imagine when they hear the word ‘abuse’. I wish I wasn’t so cynical about this kind of thing but at this point, I’ve simply seen it too many times.

Much of the rest of the zine is taken up by complaints that the man in question is, basically, an annoying guy. He is said to take up too much space in the organizations he is part of, to react badly when criticized, to be dismissive, and so on. I don’t know if this is true because I don’t know the guy personally, but I also don’t think it matters, because it’s not a crime to be an annoying guy, especially when you’re in your early 20s, as I believe this guy is. And even if you don’t believe in crimes because you’re an anarchist, let’s be clear that if the punishment among anarchists for being annoying was summary assault, the streets of Montreal would be running with blood.

One thing I think the zine gets right is where it explains that people being too conflict avoidant can lead to bad outcomes in anarchist scenes. This is absolutely true; where it goes wrong is by apparently forgetting that there is an entire range of interactions available to adult human beings in between the two extremes of being a pushover and getting together with your friends to railroad and/or jump somebody you don’t like. For example, if somebody in your organization is being fucking annoying, you can say so. If you’re dating a fuckboy, you can stop. If somebody you’re organizing with tries to get you do something you don’t want to do, you can refuse – a noted benefit of being an anarchist. The zine uses the term ‘coerce’ repeatedly, for example in the passage, “His lack of consent extends into organizing spaces. For example, by coercing people to take tasks they are not comfortable with”. But it is not explained how he accomplishes this ‘coercion’. Coercion is when you force or threaten someone into doing what you want. Someone needs to tell these ‘anarchists’ that they’re sovereign beings who are masters of their own destiny and they’re allowed to say no to some keener being bossy at the meeting.

I’m sort of kidding but mostly not. I think one of the most important things we can do to interrupt this type of thing is teach people about their power and sovereignty. I’ve been in settings where very bossy anarchist men tried to make me do things I thought were stupid; I just didn’t do those things. What’s he going to do? Worst case scenario he leans on me more and I tell him to fuck off. This was easy for me because I’m kind of naturally inclined to ignore bullies, and because I’m confident in my ability to stand up for myself, and because of my socialization and so on. It’s not as easy for everyone, in particular for many women, and that’s a fact worth keeping in mind. But let’s be clear that we’re talking about volunteer activist organizations here, and informal anarchist affinity groups, and subcultural scenes and so on. There’s no bosses. Nobody can use their position of authority to hold your income over your head and force you to do stuff on pain of homelessness. Nobody has access to any real power because it’s all a bunch of skinny punks with part time jobs and no drivers license. And the only person threatening to beat anybody up is you.

Forget the ‘radical consent workshop’ the zine insists this guy must be forced to attend; we need radical fuck off workshops where we train people to say fuck off. I’m not saying this guy said anything like the following because I don’t know him, but let’s say he’s the most insufferable variety of lefty bro imaginable: tell him to fuck off. “Hey babe the only reason I want to also date your best friend is because I’m soooo radical”? Fuck off. “Hey comrade we just really need you to lend the organization 200 bucks”? Fuck off. “Hey pal can you take care of the dishes real quick, me and the boys just really need to finish this important discussion”? Fuck off. “Well if you loved me you would do this weird fucked up sex thing with me”? Fuck off. Fuck off fuck off fuck off.

Obviously people are responsible for their actions and if you’re being an insufferable fucking bro you should be told so. And I’m glad that mean feminists in like 2011 told me what ‘taking up space’ means because, even if the phrase can be overused, sometimes I’m confronted with men in political contexts who haven’t heard of this concept and I just have to kind of gape in astonishment as they waste everyone’s time gabbling on for 25 minutes about nonsense as everyone visibly winces and wilts. But this is the point – people who do this kind of thing need to be told. And they need to be reminded, and interrupted, and ignored, and made fun of, and verbally confronted, and elected out of positions of power and so on if they can’t get their shit together. And we, the collective we, are all responsible for that. And anarchists, of all people, should be the first to understand this. You can’t let yourself be ‘coerced’ by some 23 year old activist kid who has no conceivable method of forcing you to do anything. This is something we desperately need to be instilling in people.

Anyways, this assault and this zine are part of a bit of a resurgence of this kind of stupid shit noticed by myself and others recently. Ideas and attitudes that a lot of people on the radical left have quietly been abandoning over the past couple years because they are fucking insane are being pushed again, loudly, by those who are worried that they may be losing their clout. In this case, the perpetrators of the assault are happy to spell it out directly: “join us or get out of the way”, they write at the end of the introduction, giving us the two options of participating in their crazy antisocial behaviour or submissively accepting it. Their goal is, after all, to create a climate of terror in their scene where people fear being marked as deserving of physical violence from masked assailants. But participation or submission are not our only options.

Anybody remotely connected with this world should actively condemn this attack. I don’t accept the authority of this gang of anonymous losers to assault people they don’t like, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. It sets an absolutely awful precedent, it isn’t okay at all, and we don’t have to accept it. If you’re a leftist in Montreal and you know about this and don’t say anything, you’re ‘getting out of the way’ – and you don’t have to. You can intervene in some small way on violence in your community and refuse to be terrorized into silence by these fucking creeps. They want the message to be that they can make the rules and enforce them with violence; we can remember our training at the radical fuck off workshop. Our message, that we don’t accept their bullshit and won’t let it happen again, should be broadcast widely enough that they hear about it even on whatever loudly echoing Mastodon server they’re lurking on, and have to at least briefly wonder if they might be the baddies.

High on my long list of things that make me feel completely insane is the fact that we have entered the era of technologies that we can plausibly call artificial intelligence and nobody seems to have anything that remotely resembles a plan — unless you consider the techlords’ schemes for planetary domination a plan, which I suppose they are. But I’m talking about a plan for coping with this technology on a civilizational level that makes life better and more democratic and less alienated, rather than infinitely worse and more dystopian and less free.

One symptom of the total capture of the state by evil capitalists is that even the concept of having a plan for this technology seems to be considered beyond the pale by our governments. It’s either that or the people running things literally just don’t understand what’s going on, which is I guess also possible because a significant proportion of these people are effectively walking corpses fuelled by pure hatred of life itself and propped up with just like piles of lobbyist cash. They would be hard pressed to rotate a PDF let alone imagine the consequences of a rapid technological transformation, especially if they had to imagine the impacts of this transformation on ordinary people, whom they regard as annoying bugs. Either way it’s incredibly concerning.

When I say a plan, I mean what policies are we envisioning to help us weather the impacts of AI? What do we want to use it for and not use it for? Who should be allowed to own it or control it? What limits should be set on its development and implementation? What laws should govern its use? What long-term vision do we have for its place in our societies and economies? Why is this not even a conversation?

This is even leaving aside the question of whether we want it at all. Personally I despise this shit and try to turn it off on every device and app I use (though this is becoming increasingly impossible). In general it creeps me out and on a spiritual level it strikes me as an escalation of already terrifying trends toward total disconnection from the real material world. This being said I am, as they say, a student of history, and I’ve noticed a thing or two, such as the fact that technologies, once invented, are essentially never put ‘back in the box’, except sometimes when there is catastrophic social collapse and people literally just forget how to do things because too many people die all at once.

So I might not like AI, but it exists, it has diffused everywhere, the technology behind it is well-understood, and there’s essentially no chance of it disappearing. Fine. I accept this, with bad grace. But then this still leaves me with the question of what the hell we are going to do about it. Because it seems obvious that there are enormous questions at stake here, and the gormless goblins running this continent appear to have no answers whatsoever.

What are some of these questions? First and foremost I think there’s the ‘simple’ matter of the social ramifications of this technology and the future iterations of it that are sure to follow. Currently AI is prone to a lot of fuckups and for many serious uses can’t be trusted not to hallucinate wildly. We’ve all heard of lawyers using it to write legal arguments and being outed when it comes to light that the AI made up whole cases or laws, for example. I’m told that AI is quite good at writing code, but I imagine you’d still want humans checking the code if you’re planning on using it for anything important, because the chances of it just inventing lines of code are significant. When it comes to writing copy, AI can be surprisingly good at first glance, but again has a tendency to insert random errors, and also it has a pretty unmistakable writing style that most educated people can recognize right away. But frankly it won’t stay this shitty forever. There are too many people being paid too much money to work on it. I don’t pretend to understand the technical side of this but I understand how historical trends work, and I know that soon they are going to marry the pattern-recognizing LLMs to other kinds of clever programs and algorithms, and in the context of the continually exponentially shrinking price of processing power, this will result in AIs that are much better at doing what we want them to do. This will not take a long time to happen. So what then?

Is there any way this could not result in extreme shocks to the economy? Won’t AI be widely applied to practically everything within like 20 years if it allows capitalists to get work done without workers? Is anybody proposing protections for the people who will be directly put out of a job by AI? Let alone measures to protect them from being put out of a job? Are we thinking about what jobs might be vulnerable to AI takeovers, but which absolutely should not be permitted to be taken over (teaching comes to mind)? Speaking of teaching, what about the effects of this technology on the way our societies work more broadly? The gibbering freaks of the Trump administration seem to think putting AI in all the schools is a great idea, but they don’t seem to necessarily understand what it is and they’re also abolishing the Department of Education, so who the fuck knows. Personally I think it might be a good idea to think about this a little bit, and perhaps restrict the policy conversation to people who aren’t so fucking stupid and evil that they’re basically orcs.

Some people argue, possibly correctly, that it’s all hype, and AIs suck at most of the stuff they’re supposed to be doing, and that they’re not going to get better. I feel like it’s unlikely that they won’t improve, but even that aside, we do know for a fact that AI is quite good for one thing — making life more miserable for precarious gig workers, who make their living on apps run by various kinds of AI and are at an incredible disadvantage vis-à-vis these opaque processes running their working lives. Capitalism already has a lot of opaque processes running people’s lives but the rise of AI gives the bosses yet another layer of plausible deniability and freedom from responsibility: we are doing it this way because the AI told us to do it, we can’t explain it because it’s just what the AI says works, no you can’t talk to a human being about it because there’s just the AI. This alone is cause for huge concern and a carefully elaborated set of policies to protect people from this shit, but nobody is bothering — in this case presumably because the people ruling us think this is an excellent perk rather than a disaster in the making.

On a similar note, one of the most obvious applications for AI is for use in surveilling and/or slaughtering surplus populations, a use which has been innovated to great international acclaim by the Israeli military. Lavender, their evil murderbot, is fed ‘intelligence’ and then spits out names; the names are then rubberstamped by officers and the people to whom they belong are then turned into mangled corpses, along with anybody nearby such as for example small children, old ladies and starving parents looking for food. When it runs out of names they just adjust the search parameters and voila, more names! Anybody running a murderous death cult would be thrilled to have such a machine at their disposal, and of course our governments are controlled by people very much interested in running murderous death cults. Frankly I would be shocked if the activists currently being disappeared by the secret police in the US weren’t being selected by a similar AI. Is this something we want? I mean I know it’s something they want, but do we want this?

And fuck — what about the weird lonely people who are definitely going to fall in love with the chatbots? Granted maybe it’s not really my business, but also maybe it is, maybe it’s everybody’s business that we’ve created artifacts which can mimic human connection so well that dumb people with mental health problems begin to form emotional attachments to them. It’s all well and good to laugh and shake your head at some lady in Europe who insists that she’s marrying an airplane or something, but airplanes can’t hold a conversation. The religious conservatives have spent my whole lifetime turning blue at the thought of gay marriage devolving into mass zoophilic debauchery, but you know what’s a thousand zillion times more likely than everybody deciding they want to fuck their cats? Your fucked up teenage son deciding he’s in a relationship with an algorithm. Good luck sorting that shit out without universal mental healthcare. Talk about being far from God.

Even deeper are spiritual questions about what the point of being alive is, what the good life means, and how much we should allow machines to mimic life for us so that we don’t have to live it ourselves. But these kinds of questions are ones that our societies have become remarkably bad at answering, or even asking. The Christians are no help, for the most part; the farthest they get tends to be insisting that God gave them the Earth to build Chuck E. Cheeses on and that everyone should be maximally fucked up about sex and sexuality. The secular world is of course also really into Chuck E. Cheeses and sexual pathologies. There’s not a lot in the way of conversation about what the actual point of it all is, not that leaks into politics anyway, other than of course the far-right hyenas with blood dripping from their teeth yammering about how we should bring back executing people for disrespecting the flag or whatever, or quivering techlords high on designer drugs suggesting that maybe we should be sacrificing the human population of Earth so that we can colonize other planets and build Chuck E Cheeses there.

But like: is it good to have tools that don’t just help us with our writing but actually come up with the words and speak for us? Does that bring us closer to the good life or further away from it? Does it make us more alienated or less to have our phones predict what we’re going to do next? Is it helpful for us, spiritually, to have apps that can generate pictures of ice-skating hippos to be used as emojis? Maybe this is less important to some people but in some ways for me it’s central, or at least it’s part of a conversation that I wish was more central, the conversation about where we are actually going with all of this wealth and power and technology that our civilization has accumulated, what are we trying to do with it? Is the goal to build a prosperous, free and sustainable civilization living in harmony with the natural world or is it just Chuck E. Cheeses all the way down?

This ‘conversation’ I keep talking about would require something resembling a democratic decision-making process around the future course of our cultures, and this is something we really don’t have. I dream of it though, and I hope that when we finally arrest the billionaires and dismantle their Saw movie of a society we will be able to build something that allows such a thing. China is not my ideal model of a socialist society but I have to say I do really deeply admire the way that the people in charge over there seem to be thinking a bit further ahead than like, 2028. I hope that one day we can build a people’s state here that has a similarly long view of history. In the meantime, we might need to start forcing these issues into the conversation a little bit, because if we don’t, the vampire class is going to have us all in thrall to psycho AI-run work apps, in love with chatbots, and surveilled by Israeli murder-systems very soon.

Like my writing? Help me keep doing it by subscribing (free or paid) or sending me a one-time donation:

Subscribe now

One-time donation

Politicians of different stripes in a number of places including Quebec have over the last while floated or instituted the idea of requiring immigrants to make some sort of pledge to uphold the civic values of their new country, or to pass a test showing that they understand and support these values. Typically the values in question are things like the equality of men and women, the rights of queer people, and the secular character of the state. The argument in Quebec is that people who move here should at the very least not be hostile to principles considered basic to our society, and as far as that goes, I don’t have very strong opinions one way or the other. I can see that this urge to grill immigrants on their values often comes from a place of underlying nastiness, and I roll my eyes a bit at the narrative that human rights are inherent to ‘Western values’ and so on because as a civilization we discovered universal human rights about five seconds ago. I can also see that it’s fundamentally better for everyone if there’s somewhat of a consensus on the concept of women having rights and the state not being run by religious lunatics, and I don’t see any reason why immigrants trying to move here permanently shouldn’t be expected to be on board with that kind of thing. So: whatever. I don’t care that much either way.

However -- I am in the habit of always, always, always asking: what about class? And as usual things immediately start to get more interesting when you do that.

First of all, here’s a value that I consider pretty fundamental to my society: we have the right to unionize. We have the right to a decent wage. We do not, in Quebec, expect people who work a normal, legit job to live in poverty. We do not expect there to be a destitute underclass available as a permanent source of cheap labour for foreign corporations. As a society we remember when Quebec looked like that because it wasn’t very long ago, and we remember that we transformed our society completely so that it would never look like that again. Labour in Quebec has rights. Working people live in some dignity. Dire poverty is an outrage. The belief that this should be so is part of what makes us who we are as a people, and the widespread and deeply-held nature of that belief is part of what sets us apart in North America. Yet labour rights are never mentioned in discussions about immigration and Quebec values.

Second of all, here’s a group that regularly comes into Quebec and sets up shop and considers itself above our laws and norms and, for some reason, never has to sign any solemn oaths to uphold our values: foreign megacorporations. In particular, there have been repeated instances of giant American companies moving into Quebec, setting up stores and warehouses and so on, and then shutting down sites or even pulling out of the province when Quebecois workers organize themselves into unions. Most recently, Amazon decided to permanently shut down all its worksites in the province of Quebec and lay off all its employees after warehouse workers in Laval organized, forming the new Amazon Labour Union-CSN. And yet, no one seems to be accusing Amazon of having failed to integrate and learn about the democratic values of Quebec society.

In both cases, the reason is fairly obvious: class rule by the rich. Even the progressive elements of the ruling class, such as they are, obviously have no real interest in enshrining the rights of labour into any official catalogue of national values. And they would of course never dream of forcing American billionaires to respect the basic norms around labour rights that were established in this province following the Quiet Revolution. But just because it’s obvious that rich people and their pet politicians in the liberal and conservative parties are traitors with alien values doesn’t mean we need to accept this situation as normal.

An embarrassing thing about the right-wing nationalists who rule Quebec right now is that they are enormous pussies who cannot even imagine standing up for normal people and who love nothing more than getting pissed on by Americans. They think of national dignity solely in terms of bullying broke immigrants and they clench their pimply asses and whimper whenever the possibility of standing up to foreign capital presents itself. Luckily, Quebec has a strong left which understand that Quebec’s self-respect as a nation is inseparable from our self-respect as a class – as a society we refuse to ever again be nothing but cheap labour for foreign capitalists. As the Americans continue to spiral further and further into imperial dementia and their billionaires take ever more formal control of the American government, the need for a socialist government in Quebec grows ever more pronounced.

Once in power, the left in Quebec needs to set down some red lines and not allow them to be crossed. One of these should be that foreign corporations who engage in blatant union-busting, such as Amazon, should simply have their assets in the province seized and distributed to new crown corporations operating with government charters. And moving forward, foreign corporations trying to move into Quebec and do business here should, at the very least, be asked to prove that their business model is viable should their employees choose to unionize – because labour in Quebec has the inalienable right to unionize and because our values as a society include this right. If your business cannot operate with unionized labour then your business obviously cannot operate in Quebec, nor should it. You’re trying to run a business premised on conditions – permanent non-unionization – which, by law, cannot exist in this province.

It makes no sense to obsessively scrutinize immigrants over their commitment to democratic norms while allowing infinitely more powerful foreign corporations to operate here with values that openly contradict our own, and it makes no sense to omit something as basic as the right to unionization from our conception of our fundamental values. When we think about enforcing our values, putting all the emphasis on individuals, the majority of whom are workers, and completely ignoring corporations is a classic blind spot made possible only by the massive and overwhelming quantities of ruling-class propaganda to which we are subjected. In order to stand up for ourselves on a very basic level, foreign corporations must be asked to show that they understand and support the democratic values of Quebec, which should include the right of labour to organize itself, and on this they must be held to account, if anything more stringently than individuals. Their business models must provide for the existence of unions and their actions must align with Quebec values and Quebec laws. And if they can’t? Good riddance: no amount of American cash is worth the stripping away of the rights of Quebecois workers.

Like my writing? Help me keep doing it by subscribing (free or paid) or sending me a one-time donation:

Subscribe now

One-time donation

Donald Trump has shocked, shocked! apparently well-educated liberals the world over by doing such things as appointing a cabal of fascist billionaires to government positions, threatening to take over or intervene in neighbouring countries, enshrining conservative ideas about race and gender into law, and doing dipshit nationalist stunts like renaming the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t understand how we’ve gotten to a place where literate people who pay attention to the news haven’t noticed that the US has always been a belligerent reactionary empire run by fascist billionaires. What did you think was going on?! Did you think America’s two political parties were both imperialist conservative parties for no reason? Like it’s just a wacky coincidence that the US has been militarily involved in 191 out of the 194 countries recognized by the UN? Did you think the oligarchs who control the economy of the US didn’t own its political system? Did we all forget that the US fought the Nazis with racially segregated troops? It makes me feel insane; I really need everyone to stop acting like they’re in the fucking sixth grade.

The thing that’s unprecedented about Donald Trump isn’t that he’s a Nazi clown. The history of the American empire is full of disgusting psychos motivated by insane greed, unchecked megalomania and a deep-seated hatred of people with real jobs. The difference is that most of these monsters have believed in maintaining some kind of half-assed pretense at democracy or civility or whatever and Trump delights in not having to. Donald Trump is in no way an aberration from normal American politics. He is the embodiment of normal American politics, with the mask taken off and abandoned. Normal American politics consists of naked class rule by the capitalist elite, plastered in American flags and covered in the blood of poor people and foreigners. He gets off on being totally open about American oligarchy and American empire, and that is the only real difference between him and any other evil creep that might have slithered into the Oval Office.

All of us, Americans and non-Americans alike, need to snap out of whatever liberal delusion we’ve been hypnotized by and recognize reality. Americans must accept once and for all that the political system under which they are ruled at the federal level is not a democracy but an administrative apparatus by which deeply antihuman business interests control the country. Both parties are not only unwilling but fundamentally unable to represent the interests of working Americans because their capture by elites is total. The ebb and flow of the culture war is a circus and the people running the circus are entirely hostile to normal human beings. Any attempt to herd people back into the Democratic camp must be resisted because it is not only futile but actively works against the interests of workers just as MAGA does. People in other Western countries need to work on extricating ourselves from the American empire however we can, starting with excising the traitors and quislings who rule us on behalf of the Americans and breaking the power of our own elite classes by seizing and nationalizing their property. We cannot afford to keep this up.

And most of all we all need to become very serious about loyalty to our class. Because above all else, this is a class conflict and always has been. We need, in all our messaging and all our art and all our organizing and all our slogans and in everything we do politically and socially, to constantly inculcate in ourselves and others an accurate understanding of class. There can be no more confusion in people’s minds about who their enemies are. We need a massive and sustained revitalization of class politics, by any means necessary. Ideologically it is the only thing that can break the spell of the culture war circus and materially it is the only thing that can threaten the power of oligarchy. It is our only real weapon.

And further: it’s not enough to just explain to people about their class interests, or tell them why CEOs are meanies, or give them the details of the corporate agenda or whatever. All that is fine but people need to be made to feel a nauseated disgust for their rulers. We need to show them that the people in charge of everything getting worse and worse are not just bad people, they are completely twisted and corrupted by their wealth and power until they are barely even human. Their wealth makes them inhuman and makes it so that they live in a different reality, a reality constructed out of the subjugation of normal people, and they can only be redeemed by making them human again and bringing them back to reality, and that can only be done by rescuing them from their wealth.

But in the meantime what are they? Sick and sickening monsters; sadistic aristocrats wandering from one outrageous sin to another. They are incestuous rapists, pedophiles and kidnappers, of course -- witness the Diddy trial or Trump’s disgusting treatment of his daughter or the Epstein child rape circuit -- but their tastes run stranger still. They clutch their dicks while they order the destruction of unions, when they offshore jobs that is them stealing your underwear to sniff. When they tell their pet journalists to inject their views into the media ecosystem that is them ejaculating into your hair in secret. They love to hurt you and they get off on it. They stuff their assholes with your suffering and they rub themselves raw thinking about how you are nothing at all.

The assassination of the UnitedHealth vampire was shocking to the whole establishment because the entire population of the US immediately was like fuck that guy. Talking heads and pundits from the New York Times to the far right were trying to get people to condemn this act of senseless Marxist terror and instead absolutely everyone was like go fuck yourself, people like him deserve to die in the street like a fucking rat, or at the very least, expecting me to give a shit about people like him dying in the street like a fucking rat is a completely absurd. It revealed a gaping chasm between the genteel clucking of the media goblins and the permanent water table of rage in the population at large.

That rage is organic because people can be as brainwashed and misdirected and uneducated and zoned out and softened up as you like but they will still be able to notice that some fucked up monsters have effectively infinite money which they scrape out of normal people like you or I scrape the flesh out of an avocado for our Millennial toast. They will also be able to notice this in a much more specific and immediate way when a corporation is extracting hundreds or thousands of dollar from them every month in exchange for the promise to maybe kind of pay for some of it if they ever get sick but don’t get your hopes up. It’s a state of affairs so evil and sadistic and self-evidently immoral that everybody knows Jesus would have been whipping the insurance CEOs if they had been set up in the Temple. We can and must tap into this organic rage at the vampire class.

Live in reality. Stop being shocked by evil American elites doing the shit they’ve always done and were always going to do. Forget whatever fairy tales you believed about liberals. Join a socialist organization and a union. Abandon the culture war completely. Express your vitriolic loathing for the ruling class at every opportunity. And I promise you this: with determination and a little luck, we will put some of these fucking freaks in prison before they manage to completely destroy the biosphere.

One-time donation

I’ve felt for a long time that I no longer want to talk much about cancel culture. I’ve written and spoken about it extensively for years, and on my podcast and in various articles I feel that I’ve said pretty much everything I want to say about it: gotten into its causes and effects, theorized about how it works and why, analyzed it to death. At this point not only do I feel like I’m repeating myself, but I’m also just very tired of dealing with it. I also feel that the leftwing pushback against cancel culture, in which I’m happy to have played a part, has been pretty successful, and cancel culture is no longer as hegemonic on the left as it once was.

This being said, it’s still a real concern, and I’ve realized recently that there isn’t really a single, cohesive document out there bringing together all the different threads and laying out the left-wing critique and analysis of cancel culture in a clear way. So, I’ve decided to pull together all my thoughts on the subject, once and for all, after which I hope to never write extensively about it again. I’ll be releasing it in a couple of parts, starting with this one, which is a detailed look at the characteristics of cancel culture. The next part will examine the ideological and political context of cancel culture and the role which it plays within that context.

Although I wrote this piece, most of these concepts were developed with my partner and colleague Clementine Morrigan and are the product of our long collaboration on this topic.

A note about the term ‘cancel culture’:

A lot of people get bent out of shape about calling cancel culture cancel culture, but to be honest, I haven’t heard a better suggestion. After all the term touches on the two most important elements inherent in the practice. First, targets are indeed cancelled – a term originating on the left, used to describe the ongoing harassment and blacklisting of targets. One reason I don’t like alternatives like ‘callout culture’ is that being ‘called out’ or criticized is typically a one-time thing, for some kind of specific reason (even if it’s a silly one), which isn’t expected to extend to every area of the target’s life indefinitely or to be taken up by everybody else. I also don’t prefer ‘disposability culture’, though it gets closer to the mark, because disposability doesn’t capture the specific, extremely politicized register of cancellation; it’s not just that people are being callous or cutthroat with their friends, it’s that they subject their friends to ideological witchhunts.

Second, it is indeed a culture, in a few important ways. It’s a culture in the sense that it’s a normalized social practice which ends up structuring the behaviour of the people involved in it, even people who are involved in it unwillingly, like rape culture or intoxication culture. It’s also a culture in another interesting sense: cancellation as a practice exists in a kind of feedback loop with a specific political subculture. It flourishes within this subculture, and in so doing reproduces the subculture in its own image and makes the subculture more hospitable to cancel culture.

More on all these points later; the point is that ‘cancel culture’ is a clear and well-known term which accurately describes the phenomenon we’re talking about. It’s true that many people on the right use ‘cancel culture’ to describe basically anything they don’t like, while hypocritically engaging in the bloodthirsty dehumanization and repression of their political opponents, but most people on the right are congenitally confused about nearly everything, so that’s no surprise and needn’t bother us much.

What is cancel culture (and what is it not?)

Cancellation occurs when an individual (sometimes an organization) is successfully targeted for ongoing harassment and social blacklisting, usually beginning online, using a highly politicized framework nearly always rooted in identitarian1 concerns and calibrated for maximum reputational damage. There is almost never any attempt at a truth-discerning process (something analogous to a trial) or any kind of limitation on the outcome (something analogous to sentencing guidelines), and accusations almost always drift widely and mutate over time. Partly this is because cancellations are very rarely carried out by organized groups of any kind, though groups may participate; rather, they are structureless ‘crowd-sourced’ processes. The accused is not presumed to have any right to defend herself, nor to enjoy any presumption of innocence, and indeed defending oneself is considered proof of guilt and presuming innocence is considered proof of complicity. The blacklisting is enforced by also targeting people who don’t participate in the blacklisting. The more embedded in a ‘social justice’ oriented scene or subculture the target is, the more likely the cancellation attempt is to stick.

Cancellation is not when someone is removed from their position as a result of a fair and structured disciplinary process within a workplace or organization. Cancellation is not when someone’s ideas are rebutted online. Cancellation is not when a celebrity takes shit in the tabloids. Cancellation is not when someone boycotts a brand, company or genocidal ethnostate.

Cancellation in the sense it is usually meant occurs in progressive and/or left-wing subcultures, and this is the type of cancellation I am talking about in this piece. However it is true that right-wing scenes, in particular on the radical and far right, participate in similar social practices: purity spirals, scapegoating, and ideologically-driven campaigns of character assassination.

Some people are insulated from the process of cancellation through immense wealth and material power. It is effectively impossible to socially blacklist someone if they are rich enough, eg Taylor Swift or JK Rowling. In this way it may not make sense to refer to the ‘cancellation’ of powerful people, though it is worth noting that ordinary people can be cancelled for their perceived affiliation with such figures. In any case when I talk about cancel culture I am very rarely concerned with wealthy celebrities or public figures with bigoted opinions because they represent a tiny minority of people who are cancelled, most of whom are not rich, or powerful, or even right-wing. The vast majority of targets are ordinary people from the working or middle class who are affiliated in some way with very progressive and/or left-wing subcultural scenes. The demographics of cancelled people reflect the demographics of scenes afflicted with cancel culture and for this reason actually tend more toward being female, queer, trans, racialized, and disabled than the average.

I will now go through these characteristics of cancellation in more detail.

Ongoing harassment and social blacklisting.

Targets of cancellation usually receive various forms of ‘hate mail’, often on social media, which is the most direct and basic form of harassment normal within cancel culture. This stuff can range from demands for ideological compliance to nasty messages to deranged death threats. Sometimes it spills out into ‘real life’ (slashed tires, destroyed property, stalking) and in some cases people have been beaten and, rarely, killed.

Cancellers attempt to bar their targets from as many parts of social life as feasible, often with no reference to the accusations involved (ie someone losing their job over something totally unrelated to work). Targets can lose their housing (roommates pressured to evict them), their educations (school environment becomes too hostile to continue), their jobs (employers pressured to fire them), new employment opportunities (new employers unwilling to hire them), self-employment opportunities (banned from fairs and markets), opportunities for self-actualization and creativity (bandmates or studio pressured to kick them out), romantic opportunities (new dates warned or pressured to stay away), friend groups (friends forced to abandon them), and so on. In severe cases people can lose all of these at once, leading to severe isolation and immense psychological distress.

Notably, this blacklisting can follow people around the country or even internationally as it is facilitated by the internet. Crucially, it is not organic, as peripheral people are actively pressured into participating rather than choosing to do so of their own accord because of something the target actually did. People always have the freedom to cut ties with somebody they don’t like, but it’s a different story when they are being threatened into cutting ties with someone they have no real problem with. It usually continues for years, and can even go on indefinitely, though usually the intensity wanes eventually. Often the core material of the cancellation is archived online and never goes away. The ongoing and sometimes inescapable nature of the phenomenon contributes to PTSD and suicidality in many targets.

A highly politicized framework rooted in identitarian concerns.

People are never cancelled for robbery or drunk driving or being late all the time or whatever. Almost exclusively, they are cancelled for ideological deviation from progressive orthodoxy around identity and privilege, or for relational issues framed through progressive orthodoxy around identity and privilege. Both categories can involve accusations that are more accurate or less, about behaviour that is more worrisome or less, but they are always articulated through that particular ideological lens.

For example, people might attempt to cancel someone for ‘being silent’ about a trending topic on social media. This may or may not be true, but the important thing is that the topic must be related to identitarian ‘social justice’ culture. It can’t be environmentalism or sports or something. It’s got to be Black Lives Matter or the Trans Day of Remembrance. Likewise an accusation of plagiarism might be based on a valid complaint or not, but in order to really make it as a cancellation, it must be articulated as the theft of the emotional labour of femmes of colour or something similar. In my unfortunate experience as a pretty keen observer of this stuff over the last decade, this is essentially always true.

When a cancellation involves accusations of being a bad friend or partner, it is basically always framed through the lens of abuse. The accusation is never that someone was inattentive, or emotionally unavailable, or withholding, or needlessly argumentative or whatever. These imply some level of equality in the situation, a scenario you can walk away from. Abuse on the other hand implies being trapped and oppressed and lends itself well to identitarian framings, which are always used to their maximum effect. Notably this is true even when the accused person holds multiple marginalized identities themselves, as long as the accuser holds similar or different marginalized identities. For example, I know multiple (!) racialized lesbians who have been accused of ‘preying on femmes of colour’ or something similar.

At the risk of being slightly callous I will also note that while accusations of rape in cancel culture often tend to be less dressed up with identitarian language, presumably because the crime involved is on the left universally seen as horrible enough in its own right to not need it, sexual assault still carries an inherent identitarian connotation because people automatically think of a man raping a woman (regardless of the identities of the people involved). I have seen dozens of cancellations over sexual assault but I have never seen a single one over simple assault, eg, he got drunk and fought someone at a bar.

All this is to say that cancellation on the left takes place exclusively within a particular ideological framework, to which it is intimately and inextricably tied. All accusations in cancel culture are either based on identitarian concerns or are recast to fit an identitarian framework.

Calibration for maximal reputational damage.

In every single cancellation I have ever seen, the accusation is stated in such a way as to make the supposed offence as egregious as possible. This is unsurprising because one of the goals of a cancellation is to make its target look like a good person to target, but it can lead to some very wild places. It’s often accomplished at the same time as the recasting in identitarian terms. You might be accused of, say, hiring a grad student to help you with a book project and not giving her enough credit in the final product; she gets thanks and an acknowledgment but wanted to be credited as a co-author. This will be recast as stealing labour and embodied knowledge from queer, fat women of colour, part of a long history of white entitlement to the bodies and souls of racialized people, making you no different from someone who owned slaves and exterminated Indigenous people. If you’re a fuckboy you are ‘preying on nonbinary femmes’; if you’re mildly critical of some of the wackier things people say about gender you’re a ‘trans-exterminationist’; if you have a materialist understanding of race (or get into any kind of conflict with the wrong person) you’re a ‘white supremacist’ or are ‘weaponizing your proximity to whiteness in the service of white supremacy’.

The upshot here is that while many people would shrug if they are told that their friend got in an argument with someone on Twitter, they might sit up and pay attention if they are told that their friend is a known abuser who wants to exterminate trans people. They will also have to wonder why anyone would say such an extreme thing if it wasn’t true, and whether it’s worth it to remain friends with someone who is being accused of such egregious shit. The same goes for employers, bandmates and so on.

Accusation drift.

I’ve already noted that in cancel culture accusations are almost always recast in the most egregious light possible, using the most inflammatory identitarian language the cancellers can think of. But there’s a further distorting mechanism, which is the tendency of the accusations to become unmoored from the initial cancellation and ‘drift’.

A very common example is that people who are accused of ‘abuse’ – given the context, itself often an inflated accusation referring to events most people would identify as normative conflict – rapidly find themselves in a situation where it is ‘common knowledge’ that they are a rapist, even though no one has ever actually come forward and alleged such a thing. Somewhere along the line someone figures that abuse and rape are pretty much the same thing, and rape gets added to the list, and afterward no one is going to question such a serious accusation. Sometimes this drift can reach truly comical proportions, as when a severely mentally ill stranger began publicly accusing Clementine of being involved in a sex trafficking cult. Even though this accusation is self-evidently completely insane, just by being repeated it got added to the lore by the more hardcore haters, who are of course totally uninterested in checking to see if the things they say are delusional or not. Through this kind of internet-wide game of broken telephone, cancelled people can find themselves being asked to ‘respond to the accusations’ and being confronted with totally bizarre stories of things that never happened and, often, that no one is even alleging actually happened to them.

Another kind of drift can take place in cancellations which I call ‘Afropessimist drift’ because it has a tendency to play out most plainly in cancellations having to do with alleged anti-Blackness (though the same mechanism can and does play out in other genres of cancellation). It’s a bit more rare but you see it play out every once in a while. This kind of drift often happens when the accused is able to some degree to ‘beat the accusations’ – say they’re accused of stealing labour from Black femmes but then everyone is clearly able to see that the aggrieved party was actually well compensated for precisely defined work as spelled out in an unremarkable contract. In such a scenario, if the mob is really fixated on blood, people will perform a kind of bait and switch where the actual accusation is replaced with a general observation about the existence of anti-Black racism in the world: the whole field of fat liberation owes a debt to Black femmes, so it doesn’t actually matter that in this specific instance, this specific Black femme was actually paid for her work in a totally normal way. Trying to prove that you did in fact pay this particular person is simply denying the existence of the systemic marginalization of Black femmes in the fat liberation movement. The accusation, such as it is, then drifts away from ‘not paying an intern’ towards ‘refusing to be accountable for anti-Black racism’ or similar. (Notably, this is absolutely not limited to white targets; I’ve seen someone try to pull this exact thing on a Black woman on the basis that their skin was darker than hers.) Essentially, it is the equivalent of cops or inquisitors declaring that even if you’re not guilty of what you’re being accused of, you must be guilty of something.

One reason for all this is that cancellations exist in a social ecosystem with a heavy online component; they are content, and they are ‘competing’ with other content. If an articulation of a cancellation is boring, it doesn’t get reshared and thus dissipates. If it’s lurid and exciting, it gets reshared and is successful. There is a kind of evolutionary pressure towards accusations being as extreme as possible.

No trials, no limits

In the criminal justice system an accusation is brought forth and then the guilt of the accused is adjudicated with reference to evidence in a systematized way designed, in spite of all its faults, to apply the law equally to everyone. The accused is allowed to know who is accusing them, and what they are supposed to have done, and what proof there is. The accusation must be related to some sort of clearly delineated criminal offence. They have the chance to defend themselves before a professional judge. They have the right to be considered innocent before proven guilty. They have the right to appeal the judge’s decision. If they are found not guilty, it’s over. If they are found guilty, there is a specific sentence. In many jurisdictions they have the right to a certain degree of privacy during this whole process.

By contrast, in a cancellation none of this applies, most notably I think in that the accusation is itself the proof of guilt. This is so engrained that asking for evidence, or pointing out that the evidence shows that it’s all bullshit, is usually treated as a very grave crime in and of itself. In court if you can clearly show that you didn’t do it, you’re exonerated. On Instagram, it’s evidence that you’re a liar, or an apologist.

An even weirder element that can make it all particularly Kafkaesque and crazymaking is that sometimes there isn’t really an accusation at all. I’ve gotten into ‘accusation drift’ already; as a related phenomenon I’ve seen cancellations end up with a situation in which the cancelled person is widely seen as just generally bad news, even though nobody can really come up with a specific reason why. Everybody knows she’s transphobic or racist or abusive – but nobody can point to something she’s actually said or written or done. Sometimes too there are no accusers, because everything is anonymous, and sometimes there is an accusation but it is kept from the accused in order to ‘protect’ the accuser. All in all it often creates a situation in which it’s completely impossible to try to defend yourself, you can’t even respond to accusations because they’re so vague or bizarre, and even if you did it would make things worse.

And, most saliently, there is in a very real sense nobody to defend yourself to, because there is no judge, and no court, and no one keeping track of any of it. I’ve seen people try to respond to accusations and end up writing these endless Google docs that read like the ramblings of an insane person from some distant clown dimension: “REGARDING ACCUSATIONS OF WHITE SUPREMACY: On June 5^th, I spoke with Emerson on Discord about creating the Covid Conscious Queer Walks group. On June 9^th, Kai posted in their stories about wanting to be able to go on walks with fellow queers who were still masking. I messaged them and told them I was working on CCQW with Emerson. When I officially launched CCQW on July 2^nd, Kai claimed that I had stolen their idea and that launching CCQW without the input of Indigenous voices was violent. In fact Emerson, the co-founder of CCQW is Métis” etc etc etc. Very often, it just ends up with people ruthlessly picking apart the statement and finding a dozen new things to be angry about; certainly there is almost never the thing every cancelled person secretly wants, which is for a well-respected arbiter to pop up, slam the gavel down and proclaim the innocence of the accused.

The lack typical to cancel culture of any kind of structure also means that the punishment rarely ‘fits the crime’ in any meaningful way. First of all the demands of the accusers may be, and often are, unrelated to the accusation: someone is accused of making an oppressive joke while hosting queer trivia night at the bar, so they’re not allowed to be in a band anymore, for example – one has basically nothing to do with the other. But further, the initial demands are often forgotten more or less immediately. If the original cancellation material only demands that the accused be barred from participating in lesbian speed dating in the future, no one is going to point that out when she is also barred from volunteering at the Dyke March. If the accusers throw in a line about not wanting their target to be harassed, nobody’s going to call a community meeting to deal with the fact that cancellers are commenting ‘abuser’ every time she posts a picture of herself on Instagram.

Cancellation is a pretty classic example of mob (in)justice and, in its form if not its severity, it exists on a spectrum alongside phenomena like McCarthyism, witch trials, show trials, lynching, and the Satanic Panic: unaccountable group expressions of fear and vengeance acted out on individual scapegoats.

Contagion and chains of cancellation

As noted already, the blacklisting of cancellation targets is not an ‘organic’ process, in that people are coerced to some degree into participating. More than once, I have made friends with a new person, only to learn that that person’s friends were threatening to cut them off completely unless they cut ties with me. To their great credit, some of these people were so disgusted by this controlling behaviour that they told their ‘friends’ to take a hike, but it’s frankly unrealistic to expect most people to have that kind of strength of character. Social pressure of that kind can be an extremely powerful motivator.

But this practice of enforcing the blacklisting by pressuring people peripheral to the target doesn’t end there. In many cases, people who refuse to cut ties with the target end up experiencing consequences not very different from those experienced by the target. They become ‘tainted’ by their association with the cancelled person, and can and do lose friends and community and opportunities as a result. This is especially brutal for the romantic partners of cancelled people, who often experience immense pressure to end their relationships and can be targeted with equal vitriol if they refuse.

Sometimes, this contagion effect can form chains of tainted people, a phenomenon which was I believe first described by Natalie Wynn. In some cases these chains can reach ludicrous lengths: someone being cancelled for being associated with someone who remained friends with someone who interviewed someone who publicly defended JK Rowling.

The upshot of all this is a climate of paralyzing fear and extremely insecure relationships for people who are very deep into these subcultures, as well as people’s lives being upended for stupid and inexplicable reasons.

The ‘social justice’ context.

There is a scene, or subculture, or series of overlapping scenes and subcultures, which we can call the ‘social justice’ context, in which cancel culture flourishes most readily. Notably, I think there has been a very marked decrease in the power and scope of this context from the height of its influence around 2020. Cancellation campaigns which would have been totally life-destroying a few years ago are having more trouble getting off the ground, and the more deranged cancellations are now happening mostly in certain holdouts of very hardcore ‘social justice’ ideology, in scenes like the forever-maskers, or the ‘it/its pronouns’ end of the trans scene.

However cancel culture remains a salient factor on the left, and the broader ‘social justice’ context remains its main medium. I will explain in more detail the particular relationship between social justice and cancel culture later, but for now I want to point out something which may be obvious but is nevertheless worth mentioning: cancel culture depends on people participating in it for it to work, and not everyone is going to participate in it.

The fact is that many people outside of the ‘social justice’ context are much less likely to take seriously the kinds of accusations often levelled in a cancellation. Or, if they do take them seriously (most people think abuse is a very bad thing), they are much more likely to be totally baffled and annoyed when they find out that the ‘abuse’ in question consists of being polyamorous while white, or agreeing to date someone and changing one’s mind, or whatever it is. People outside of ‘social justice’ contexts are also much less likely to be afraid of their entire social world evaporating because that kind of thing never happens to them or anyone they know. Conversely, people deeply embedded in these scenes are primed to take certain kinds of accusations very, very seriously, regardless of the actual content, and are also deeply aware, whether they are honest about it with themselves or not, that peers in their community are somewhat regularly blacklisted, exiled and scapegoated and end up totally isolated. They are much more likely to tacitly endorse or actively participate in cancellation campaigns, both because they may be ideologically invested in cancel culture and because they may be terrified of becoming a target themselves.

What this means is that the deeper you are in the ‘social justice’ context, the scarier cancel culture is and the worse its effects are likely to be. For people whose social world has come to exist almost entirely within the confines of the ‘social justice’ context, the effects of cancellation are often so extreme that people in the wider society literally cannot believe it; it sounds completely made up that 95% of someone’s friends and acquaintances would abandon someone overnight because they did a workshop on herbs which didn’t adequately centre Indigenous voices. But for people immersed in these scenes, it is not only believable but something they may have to spend a lot of time thinking about, consciously or unconsciously; and for people in these scenes who end up cancelled, the resulting isolation can be crushing. This is especially true for queer and trans people who can have great difficulty finding peers outside of these scenes.

Who is actually getting cancelled?

Some people are under the impression that cancelled people are largely straight white men who ‘deserve it’. Others believe that white people or men cannot ‘really’ be cancelled because their privilege protects them, and that cancel culture, if it’s real at all, affects only people of colour or people holding other marginalized identities. Clementine and I have talked to countless cancelled people over the years and we have noted that neither of these assumptions is correct. The biggest predictor of being cancelled is your proximity to hardcore social justice scenes, and other major predictors include being a promiscuous top, being high profile and outspoken, being autistic, and not having a college education; identity barely plays a part. This seems somewhat bizarre, because ‘social justice’ contexts are so obsessed with identity. But that obsession with identity means that anyone can be taken down using expertly weaponized identitarianism. You can literally be a racialized transgender wheelchair user and find yourself being viciously dogpiled online, or you can be the hot white frontman of a popular band and watch your career be permanently destroyed overnight; we’ve seen both.

Neither being ‘privileged’ nor oppressed will save you. What might save you is having relatively few sexual and romantic relationships, in which you rarely do any pursuing or take the lead in any meaningful way; not being noteworthy or, if you are, never really saying or doing anything unorthodox or interesting; having very adroit social skills, at least when it comes to navigating the high-stakes vibes-based world of ‘social justice’; and having a top notch university education in the humanities, where you learn the extremely specific linguistic patterns of the professional-managerial class, the vocabulary of postmodernism and critical theory, and the mode of engaging with the work of others where you ignore its content and instead skim it expertly for anything problematic. Even these things, though, can easily not be enough, if they decide to really come for you. What will certainly help is having a diversified social world and some distance from the really rabid members of the ‘social justice’ crowd, and what will make you immune is having almost no contact with these people at all. Unfortunately, however, if you are involved with the left in almost any capacity, it is impossible to be completely insulated from that political subculture.

Thanks for reading Part I. Subsequent parts, coming soon, will cover the causes and consequences of cancel culture as well as its social and ideological context in more detail. If you liked this piece, consider subscribing to my Substack:

Subscribe now

The Earth is alive. Not metaphorically; the soil is teeming, frothing with life. Single-celled microorganisms of course in their uncountable kaleidoscopic species spectra but animals too: tardigrades bumble dreamily through tiny droplets of moisture in the dirt alongside countless tiny rotifers squirting around slowly like weird little microscopic jellyfish; nematode worms, a million of them per square metre, are found from the leaf litter on the forest floor to the cracks between rocks ten thousand feet below the surface. Moss mites, which are as small as a quarter of a millimetre and which can draw their legs up into their shells like turtles, are the most common bugs in forest soil, typically thousands of them in a few square feet. There are snails and spiders so small that a grain of rice lying on its side would be five or ten times taller than them, and moths so small that their caterpillars live inside leaves, between different layers of tissue. There are of course the ants and beetles and the woodlice, and parasitizing the woodlice there are wasps so small that they are thoroughly microscopic and smaller than some bacteria. And interpenetrating all this the mycorrhiza, the ubiquitous symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants, infinitesimally fine threads of fungal life reaching out through the soil matrix, extracting nutrients, and passing them continuously into the cells making up the roots of plants.

There are blind, nocturnal, wingless insects that live on glaciers and ice sheets and die if the temperature gets above 10 degrees. There are bugs and bacteria living in the lava tubes of active volcanoes and in the silent still water of undiscovered caves. There are thriving ecosystems around geothermal vents in the total darkness and crushing pressure at the bottom of the ocean trenches. There are mites, basically tiny highly specialized spiders, living on your eyelashes right now, eating the oils that accumulate on your follicles. There are trees that are 80,000 year old single organisms with thousands of trunks, there are sharks older than the USA, there is an ant colony covering a territory six thousand kilometres long. It’s almost impossible to find a surface that isn’t completely covered with a film of life, or a medium that isn’t a solution of uncountable cells, or a substrate that isn’t utterly permeated with roots and rhizomes and mycelia and amoeboids and microfauna and trillions and trillions of bacteria.

All of it is God. No fairy tales about virgins or ribs or pillars of salt could ever come remotely close to the eyeball-tingling, tooth-itching hook in the gut that is the manifest objective reality of a billion years of evolution surrounding and enveloping and interpenetrating us and every other thing. Every single organism is both completely unique and irreplaceable and in a totally real sense continuous with the entirety of the world around it. None of it is nothing. None of it is meaningless. None of it is dead. None of it is empty. None of it is uninhabited. None of it belongs to you. We feel this in our bones.

God doesn’t care when primates fuck. God doesn’t care when primates covet and trespass and beget. God isn’t even a god because God is much vaster still than that. But God wants to be with us, and we are cut off from God when we dream nightmares so tortured that we look at her and see just a bunch of rocks and sticks and dirt, and delude ourselves into pretending to own parts of her, and turn away from her and shut our eyes tight and imagine other gods that look just like us and think just like us and want us to sterilize and despoil the divine ecumene.

The darkness we find ourselves in when we are cut off like this is deeper than any oceanic trench. How lonely to have to go looking for life on other planets. How lonely to be surrounded by God and to be unable to feel her, convinced that she is somewhere else entirely, in a shimmering throne room in another dimension. How lost, how hopeless, to have to force yourself to ‘believe’ in something that is right in front of you, that is you. The Kingdom of God is not a kingdom and it is already here. The most sinful thing we can do is treat it like a series of lifeless things. The most beautiful thing we can do is to put our fingers in the dirt, to feel the love inherent in the covenant of life; and then drag the rich from their mansions, tear down their evil economic system, and reorganize our societies completely so that we can raise our children to be part of the whole again.

I like reading the business news sometimes because it’s so mask-off. It’s the enemy class, or at least the professional-managerial minions of the enemy class, telling you exactly what they think about things in a way that is usually obscured. Last week an absolutely bananas article came out in the Financial Post entitled 'Not addicted to cheap labour' — Businesses feel unfairly targeted by foreign worker cuts. The gist of it is that the Trudeau government, having pretty much destroyed the longstanding consensus among Canadians that immigration is basically a good thing by flooding the country with way more immigrants than the labour market or the housing market can absorb, has flipflopped on immigration policy and is now promising to cut the number of temporary foreign residents slightly, to 5% of the population (right now it’s at 7%); and as a result, capitalists are mad.

One guy quoted in the article, Michael Aitkens, runs a restaurant with two locations in Mississauga called, unfortunately, El Mariachi Tacos and Churros, featuring such exotic delicacies as “Burritos: Flour tortilla rolled with rice, beans, guacamole, Pico de Gallo, sour cream and your choice of protein”. According to this guy, it is literally impossible to run a Mexican joint in southern Ontario without importing temporary foreign workers. “I tried hiring cooks locally in my first year and it didn’t work out,” he says in the article. “Today, I have 14 foreign cooks who are able to maintain the food’s authenticity consistently. Without them, I have to shut down and that will put 60 people, mostly Canadians, out of work.”

Keep in mind that Mississauga is part of the Greater Toronto Area, one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world (in both Mississauga and Toronto, Canadian-born whites are a minority). Obviously not all non-white people are going to magically be able to make good tacos, but the point is that it’s not like we’re talking about the middle of Saskatchewan here. Downtown Toronto is a 45 minute drive from this guy’s restaurant. The idea that Aitkens can’t find anyone among the 7 million inhabitants of the ‘majority-minority’ GTA and needs to specifically bring in cooks from Mexico in order to make “your choice of protein” authentically, seems more than a little bit suss.

And indeed, the article goes on to reveal the real issue. It’s worth quoting at length here:

[Aitkens] hired local cooks in his first year as a business owner, but they “didn’t last” as they moved on to other businesses, which made maintaining his restaurant’s consistency difficult. Culinary school graduates in Canada prefer working in “bigger, corporate” restaurants where they have a chance to move up the ladder and not in an independent restaurant like his, he said.

“In a restaurant like my own, you are hired as a cook and you are basically going to stay a cook, because that’s what we need,” he said. “So, that’s difficult.”

As a result, Aitken decided to use the [Temporary Foreign Worker Program] to bring in cooks from Mexico. The move resulted in bringing a more “authentic” flavour and added more stability, since workers who come into Canada through this program generally tend to work for the same employer until the end of their work permit.

“The government tells us to invest in Canadians. How am I going to teach knife skills, cooking skills, temperature? That’s not my job,” he said. “That’s what schools are for. My job is to look for experienced people to do the job. If I hired people with no experience, imagine the number of work complaint claims I would have with people cutting half their fingers off.”

Absolutely amazing.

What Aitkens really wants is experienced workers with no demands and no ambitions. He acknowledges that in order for workers to get experience, somebody has to pay for it one way or another — whether that’s in the form of school, on-job training, or just an employer hiring somebody green and dealing with any issues that arise — he just doesn’t think it should have to be him. And he acknowledges that workers typically want the option to quit if the job sucks, but again, just feels that he shouldn’t have to be the one to deal with such uppity employees. Leaving aside the fact that it’s extremely doubtful that he needs culinary school graduates to make a $20 chicken burrito in Mississauga, there’s no way it’s the case that in his first year of business, 14 cooks left because they wanted to work in ‘bigger, corporate’ restaurants where they could become head chef or whatever. I spent years working in kitchens. Nobody at a place like that has a cooking degree and lofty ambitions, it’s just working people trying to make the rent. We all know that what actually happened is literally just that he didn’t want to train anybody and doesn’t pay his cooks enough, and is probably an asshole boss, so Canadian hires kept leaving, and he solved the problem by applying for a semi-indentured workforce through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program: a special category of labour with reduced rights and reduced mobility, dropped into his lap by the federal government.

The article goes on to spotlight a number of resorts and hotels complaining that they can’t find Canadians to work for them. Similarly to Aitkens, the owners of these businesses explain that the concept of workers who wish to be able to leave their place of employment at will is simply too complicated to deal with:

Sabrina Donovan, a general manager at the Pacific Sands Beach Resort in Tofino, said it’s easier to plan ahead with workers coming through the foreign workers program since they are bound to work for the employers that bring them to Canada for as long as their work permit remains valid, which has generally been around two years.

“That’s something we haven’t been able to do relying solely on Canadian employees,” she said. “We know that TFWP employees are here to stay for up to two years. This way, we are able to have a core group of employees who help us provide better service to our customers, which in turn helps our businesses grow.”

Furthermore, they explain, it isn’t fair that hotels and resorts should have to hire fewer temporary foreign workers just because there’s an unprecedented housing crisis in Canada. This is because in this industry, “[most] employers house their own employees”. Again, the quiet part is being said out loud remarkably clearly here. What these managers want is a workforce made up of people who cannot leave and do not expect to be able to live in their own homes, people who will accept living in dormitories or hotel rooms for years in remote locations without the kind of corresponding pay that the Canadian labour market would otherwise demand for such a sacrifice.

As the title of the article suggests, these business owners bristle at the idea that they have become ‘addicted to cheap labour’. They are, of course; the restaurant owner’s claims that he needs Mexican foreign workers in order to make authentic burritos is absurd, and the resorts simply find it difficult to attract Canadian workers because nobody wants to go live in a hotel room for years in some tiny town for 25 bucks an hour. But here’s the thing: of course they’re addicted to cheap labour. As a whole, capital will always attempt to find the cheapest labour with the fewest rights possible. Individual capitalists might prefer to pay better wages and offer benefits and so on, but there is a process of competition always ongoing which rewards those businesses which are able to pay the least for labour. There are also associations of business owners and various other organs of the capitalist class which advocate for laws and policies which will benefit capital at the expense of labour. In the US many industries rely very heavily on ‘illegal’ immigrants for this reason. In Canada exactly the same demand — cheaper labour with fewer rights — has come to be fulfilled more formally, with temporary foreign workers.

This issue is one which, I think, has bamboozled the Left completely. Hypnotized by identitarian or anti-racist arguments, we’ve been boxed into a corner that we have found ourselves sharing with some of the most despicable members of the liberal ruling class. But from a pro-labour perspective — which to be clear is the basis of what it even means to be on the Left — it’s disastrous to allow capitalists unfettered access to an alternate source of labour in this manner.

First of all, the people being employed through these programs, or through the shadier alternate route of student visas, are being exploited. If Canadian workers wouldn’t do it, nobody in Canada should be doing it. If some asshole in Mississauga wants to be able to invest money and circumvent the Canadian labour market and basically just purchase a ready-made docile workforce from abroad, too bad. In Canada working people should be able to leave their jobs. They should be able to demand better working conditions. They should be able to turn down jobs that suck. The fact that the people we’re talking about in this case are not Canadians and are overwhelmingly people of colour shouldn’t change this stance.

Secondly, it’s clearly terrible for labour standards in Canada if employers can just go over our heads to find people who will work for cheaper and in worse conditions. It lowers the floor for everyone, especially because these workers usually are not unionized, leading to wage deflation and undermining the power of organized labour in relation to the capitalist class. The benefits of the situation accrue only to business owners, especially when we stop thinking of ourselves as ‘consumers’ and think of ourselves as workers. Our loyalty is to our class, and it makes no sense to support policies which help capitalists at the expense of workers both from Canada and from abroad.

I have what I think is an elegant solution to this issue. Years ago Ottawa abolished a rule requiring employers to check with relevant unions before hiring a TFW. We should go a step further than bringing this rule back: socialists and organized labour in Canada should demand that only unionized workplaces be eligible for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program — or even better, that unions should be in charge of applications to the program. This way, any worker entering Canada through these programs would be automatically protected, and it would be impossible for the capitalist class to depress wages using foreign labour. If they don’t want a unionized workforce able to make concerted demands of them, they have to find local workers. If they don’t want to find local workers, they have to go through the unions. Workers, both Canadian and foreign, are protected; capitalists are put in their place.

Another nauseating spectacle come and gone. The American Democrats, in all their self-satisfied glory, patted each other on the bum all the way to their inevitable defeat by a billionaire supervillain from the evil clown dimension, reenacting 2016 like they were stuck in a time loop. Kamala is brat, they recited to themselves, and orange man bad; did you hear what he said? You’re not allowed to say that. There is only one party you can vote for and it’s us. If you don’t vote for us, the one party you’re allowed to vote for, you won’t live in a democracy anymore.

I’m not American but I did grow up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in the midst of the Iraq War, and a kind of background loyalty to the Democrats was instilled in me from a young age, at least in relation to Republicans, the party of warmongering, free trade and xenophobia. Then came Obama, of course, and his multi-fronted imperialist wars, neoliberal free trade agreements and record-setting deportations, shattering the illusion pretty thoroughly; and then came Trump, with his literally unprecedented albeit possibly accidental policy of not starting any wars whatsoever, and his somewhat incoherent but apparently sincere opposition to free trade, two policy points which used to be literally the core of the American progressive movement. In the meantime we all watched the Democrats nuke Bernie Sanders from orbit, twice, their palpable terror at the idea of leftish policies made clear for all to see, and then we saw the Biden-Harris administration falling over itself to support Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza while establishment Republicans applauded and endorsed them.

The point is that it became impossible quite a while ago for any reasonable person to imagine that the Democrats were in any way a left-wing party. And if they’re not a left-wing party in any way, the Left shouldn’t support them. And if the Left shouldn’t support them all of a sudden it becomes a lot easier to see the whole rotting charade for what it is. Rather than being the bulwark that stands between the American people and fascism, the Democrats are the major impediment to the existence of a real Left in the US. And rather than defending democracy from an authoritarian foe, the Democrat-Republican axis is the authoritarian foe and the stranglehold that this axis holds over American institutions precludes real democracy. The Democrats are the enemy party of the enemy class. The fact that the American enemy class has two parties, and our class has none really, doesn’t make the Democrats any less the enemy party of the enemy class.

Americans often hear shit like this and think it’s just being edgy. And to be fair there are people who talk like this who are just being edgy. But in the end I think it’s more about being realistic than anything else. Hoping and hoping and hoping that Democrats are going to stop being evil for some reason isn’t living in reality. The Democrats will not stop being evil. Why would they? They literally do not have to. As an institution it doesn’t particularly matter to them if Republicans win. They reliably have around half the seats, they fund-raise, they campaign, internally people jockey for status and power, and in four years they’re likely to get the Presidency again, worst case in eight years. Ideologically they have no reason to stop being evil either. The class they represent is not going to suddenly decide it doesn’t need to infinitely accumulate capital in the context of a well-managed American empire. On the contrary, more than ever the class they represent is interested in having at least one of its parties dedicated to defending the stability of the status quo at any cost.

Fascinatingly I think the Republicans, by virtue of the fact that the party is the home of open fascists and also insane Christians, in some ways encompasses more hostility to the interests of capital right now than the Democrats do. Their hostility to capital comes from the right and is not in and of itself a good or useful thing because it’s extremely reactionary in character. But there’s a reason why huge swathes of the American establishment loathe Trump and his MAGA followers. Fascists and insane Christians are animated by convictions that go beyond simply maintaining the status quo no matter what, which at this point is the main platform of the Democrats. They’re certainly pro-capitalist but they can be very hostile to parts of the capitalist class that stand in their way. In general capital is quite conservative, in the sense of not wanting circumstances to change much, because their ability to accumulate endlessly is based on the status quo; and in that sense the prospect of spittle-flecked mobs of red-hatted zealots trying to overturn the way things run can be frightening.

By contrast Democrats are so beholden to the status quo they can’t even murmur the words ‘public healthcare’. They’re so locked into “Republicans are scary” as their main selling point that they refuse to codify the right to an abortion. They’re so loyal to capital that they will never, ever rock the boat. In general they have no convictions whatsoever beyond their own self-importance as the rightful mandarins of American power. They don’t even really care about winning elections. In ‘the most important election in American history’ they first tried to run a demented corpse, then swapped him out for an evil cop no one ever voted for, then just tried the Hillary Clinton campaign again even though it lost resoundingly last time, all while relying on messaging that basically consisted of making smug expressions and threatening people with fascism if they didn’t vote for genocide and the continued power of the mainstream political establishment. Truly a disgusting display which, if you were someone who’d had some residual faith in the Democrats left, I’m sure would also have been very demoralizing.

In any case if there is anything I want the Left in both the US and elsewhere to take away from this ‘election’, it’s that liberals absolutely will not save you. Liberals don’t even care about saving you. If they even knew how to save you, they wouldn’t do it. They’re fundamentally opposed to saving you. And that’s because the way to defeat right-wing populism is to run a working-class candidate for a working-class party who focuses relentlessly on economic issues affecting working-class people while constantly calling the opponent a hopelessly compromised member of the ruling elite; and Democrats will never do that, and never could. The Left must break with the liberals completely and build parties of our own for our own class, and by any means necessary grow these parties into functional forces. Where such parties sort of exist but have been stolen, as with the NDP in Canada, we need to expel members of the enemy class and retake them. This business of allowing the vampires to run everything and acting dismayed when they act like vampires must end, and now is a perfect time for Americans to realize it. We all need to start beating fascism ourselves instead of begging our ideological and class enemies to do it for us.

Recently the City of Montreal announced that it was going to begin holding public consultations on ‘social cohabitation’ with homeless people. “Residents, parents, families and business owners are concerned about the way resources are planned in their sector and we must do better at predicting the increasing needs,” said the mayor, Valerie Plante. This came on the heels of complaints about a new supervised drug-use site in St-Henri, including from the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations, which accused the City of not consulting with other marginalized groups when setting up its new initiatives. All of this is occurring in the midst of a very visible spike in homelessness in Montreal. Miniature tent cities have sprouted up all over the city, including in the small park a block from my house where I play fetch with my dog.

I worked in homeless shelters and as a street outreach worker for around five years. I care deeply about the needs of this population and tend to side with them, within reason, against the interests of business owners and so on because their position is so utterly precarious and their needs are so great. I think that homeless people are far and away the most thoroughly dehumanized and degraded subset of the population, so much so that when I was working in that field, it sometimes became legitimately difficult for me to take seriously the claims of marginalization coming from other groups. I’ve revived homeless people from overdoses, I’ve dressed their wounds and washed their bodies, I’ve let them cry on my shoulder. My own uncle was homeless for most of my adult life. And I’ll tell you right now that I don’t want to ‘cohabitate’ with homeless people.

It’s not because I think they’re dangerous and disgusting and unworthy of my respect. It’s because homeless people are not, as me and my partner Clementine joke and as liberals seem to believe, ‘a special kind of trans person’, who we just need to learn to understand and accept. Homelessness is not an identity, it’s a condition that people are, generally, forced into in one way or another, and here’s the thing: it’s an unacceptable one. There simply should not be any such thing as someone living in a tent in the park in a country as wealthy as Canada. And no amount of public consultations and ‘social cohabitation’ workshops is going to end this sickening failure of Canadian society.

I believe that almost anyone who has worked in the homelessness sector for five years could probably more or less immediately solve the homelessness crisis if you put them in charge of policy. The problem is not that we don’t know the solutions. The problem is that governments are unwilling to spend the amount of money up front that it would take. Instead we add one more bandaid to the gunshot wound every election cycle, ultimately prolonging the problem, making it harder and harder to eventually fix, and in the meantime spending far more on it over the decades than we would if we just dealt with it. This is a classic symptom of liberal politics, where the goal is always to spend just enough money on a problem to make it seem like you’re doing something, but never enough to address any underlying realities; and of conservative politics, where the idea is to just throw cops at a problem until it goes away.

Clearly, these approaches have not been working. It might be time for a different method — one that actually works. So without further ado, here’s how we can solve this crisis.

1. General housing

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as the common leftie mantra of ‘housing first’. More on that later. But it’s a fact that whenever housing prices spike, the craziest and least functional half a percent of the housed population simply falls out of the bottom of the housing market. People who were basically getting by, on some combination of disability checks, odd jobs and general scheming, get priced out and end up on the street. At the same time, the number of people who become homeless as a result of three or four bad luck disasters in a row also increases (the type of story where someone loses their job, experiences some kind of severe personal tragedy like the death of a spouse, runs into trouble with the bank, gets evicted and can’t find another place to live). This influx of people into the homelessness resource ecosystem puts extreme stress on shelters and other organizations, who are unable to cope with the need, resulting in more people visibly living outside and, generally, becoming crazier and crazier as the traumatic experiences of homelessness pile up. In turn there is even less of a chance of any homeless people eventually finding a place to live, already a near-impossible task for all but the most functional.

Therefore general housing needs to be made more accessible, by any means necessary. Absent the possibility of abolishing landlordism altogether, rents need to be frozen. Landlords need to be fined for keeping units vacant unnecessarily. AirBNB should be banned entirely in large cities. Landlords found guilty of repeatedly violating rental law should have their units confiscated and converted into social housing or housing co-operatives. Governments at municipal, provincial and federal levels need to coordinate to rapidly build large numbers of low-cost rental units to be owned by the city or by not-for-profit cooperatives. It would also not be unwise to peg immigration targets to the number of actually existing available units in the country.

2. Specialized housing

Homeless people can be roughly subdivided into two main groups. The first are people who are transiently homeless or ‘housing-insecure’. These are people who are reasonably well-functioning and are experiencing more or less temporary setbacks related to poverty or personal disaster. They often have some support networks they can make use of, often are able to sleep on friends’ couches for some period, typically can hold down a job if they get one, and sometimes have assets they can sell or cars they can live in. For people like this, the mainstream shelter system often works reasonably well; it’s a place where they can sleep and store some belongings while they get back on their feet, and following the usual rules, such as curfews or bans on intoxication, isn’t much of a problem for them. These are also the people for whom ‘housing first’ works very well; if you just hand them the keys to an apartment, no questions asked, their most pressing problem disappears and they are usually able to find work and regain stability.

The second are people who are chronically homeless. In my experience virtually 100% of such people have backgrounds including very severe trauma and experience the complex and often debilitating mental health problems that that’s associated with. The kind of trauma I’m talking about includes things like repeated episodes of brutal sexual violence; long-term severe child abuse; repeated neglect and abandonment in the foster-care system; long-term incarceration; or, often, some combination of the above.1 The kind of PTSD that such experiences produce is distinct from the kind of PTSD experienced by soldiers or survivors of random violence, which usually leaves the individual struggling, and susceptible to flashbacks set off by specific triggers related to the traumatizing event, but otherwise fairly functional in core areas of their life, and with established treatment protocols. By contrast, people with PTSD related to severe, repeated and prolonged trauma from which there is little chance of escape, such as survivors of long-term child abuse, often develop what’s called Complex PTSD, which is characterized by serious personality shifts and crippling, ongoing feelings of terror, helplessness, worthlessness, and distortions in thinking and self-image. Treatment is extremely difficult and requires long-term specialized therapy. People with Complex PTSD typically have great difficulty in functioning and are at extremely high risk of addiction and further abuse, which further exacerbate the problem. Not everyone with Complex PTSD ends up homeless, to be sure, but I would say that of the chronically homeless people I worked with, the vast majority exhibited symptoms of Complex PTSD.

For many such people, especially those who have been homeless for years experiencing compound interest on their original trauma, giving them a job and keys to a regular apartment simply won’t work. They aren’t capable of maintaining these things by themselves. To paint with broad strokes, their most pressing problem doesn’t disappear because their most pressing problem is internal. They require long-term access to specialized services. They’re not going to get what they need in prison or locked in a psych ward, either – in fact these ‘solutions’ often make the problem much, much worse. What they require is specialized housing. And the model already exists – it just isn’t nearly as widespread as it needs to be.

What you do is you build or acquire apartment buildings and staff them with full-time nurses, intervention workers, social workers and cleaning staff. You give people the keys to these apartments. They are not temporary accommodations; people can live there as long as they want, though if they want to move out they can get help finding a regular apartment. They can bring their kids and pets. They have access to services which help them maintain their apartments, services which are in the same building and consist of familiar faces, rather than a visit from a random city social worker every month. They can access classes and workshops on basic life skills they may be lacking. Their neighbours in the building are people who have been through the same kinds of things and often are their actual community, people who they know from the street – one common failure of housing-first is that you set someone up with an apartment in some far-off part of the city and people simply get so lonely that they abandon it. You create tiers, where some buildings are much more service-intensive and others are for people who require less help. You ensure that there is a realistic pathway to independent living for anyone who wants it. You ensure that there are buildings only for women and their kids, buildings only for Inuit with staff who understand Inuktitut2, buildings for First Nations individuals with a high proportion of First Nations staff, units for people living with chronic longterm alcoholism (more on this later) and so on.

Once you have systems like this set up on a very large scale, what you do is every time the authorities or intervention workers interact with a homeless person, that person is offered a spot at one of these facilities3. Over a short period of time, the number of people living on the street will shrink to a tiny number of very extreme cases or the kind of punk kids who are just travelling through town having an adventure. Almost everyone else will be extremely happy to be offered a spot and stop living in a tent under an overpass.

3. Same-day detox and rehab

For many years there has been a heavy emphasis on a safe supply of street drugs to combat the overdose crisis, with some advocates going so far as to suggest that the government should supply users with chemically pure narcotics. In my opinion, something along these lines is desperately needed, but -- and this is the really really important part -- CANNOT be the only measure in place. It absolutely needs to be paired with massively increased access to addiction health services.

Addiction is an extremely cruel disease which stems largely from alienation on a social level and trauma on an individual level. People who study addiction note that almost all chronic, extremely high risk users, the types who end up on the street, have severe PTSD of some kind or another, and as noted above, this is my experience working with homeless people as well. Drugs being difficult to access and cut with dangerous chemicals does not deter these people, and leads directly to a lot of the more dangerous behaviours we see such as survival sex work and petty crimes for cash. It also leads directly to the ongoing overdose crisis which, if you work on the street, means you are watching people die on a regular basis. The criminalization of drugs also of course leads to gang control over the supply and the associated violence.

However, safe supply doesn't solve the problem of addiction, and this is where I diverge from some of the more gung-ho safe supply advocates. I know that criminalization isn’t effective, but I also know from personal and professional experience that addiction is real, and crushing, and robs people of control over their one sacred life. I don't want addicts to just have government dope. I want them to have access to recovery. When I was working doing street outreach I would have the experience on a regular basis of someone having a moment of clarity and begging me to help them get clean. Remember that withdrawal is unimaginably painful for dope and often literally lethal for alcohol; for most chronic users it absolutely needs to be medically supervised.

Think about our healthcare system and imagine how easy it would be for a dirty, belligerent, penniless Inuit woman, who is homeless, and does street level sex work to survive, and lost all her ID years ago, to get access to medically supervised detox. Someone in that abject state usually has a near-zero capacity to show up to an appointment in three weeks for an initial evaluation at the hospital and then show up in another three weeks to begin detox then, once out, to organize rehab for herself and get herself there. Maybe a street worker like me could find her in three weeks and drive her to the hospital; maybe her moment of clarity has lasted that long but almost certainly not; maybe she's still willing to actually do detox in another few weeks after the first appointment but most likely she's despaired and is back in the mix; if everything goes well maybe the shelter can scrape together money and transport for the rehab. But those are an awful lot of maybes for a process that is already extraordinarily difficult for a chronic user to pursue and follow through with.

Addiction as a phenomenon will probably never be solved completely because alienation and trauma are unlikely to ever be solved completely. But I know, and other people who work on the street know, that same-day detox and free rehabs with no wait lists are absolutely crucial to any policy that seriously wants to make a dent in the problem. It needs to be made almost absurdly easy for someone to get access to these services, even if they have no ID and no money and no car and no friends and nowhere to live, even if they’re crazy and sketchy and dirty and rude, even if they don’t speak French in Quebec, even if they’ve been in and out a bunch of times, even if, even if. At the end of the day, giving people all the safe government dope in the world is just evil if it’s not accompanied by the possibility of recovery.

4. Managed alcohol programs

It might surprise some people, but in my experience alcohol is one of the most dangerous and destructive drugs used by chronically homeless people. First of all, harm reduction for drinkers is very difficult; for dope and crack you can give people clean needles and pipes and testing kits and Naloxone and so on, but some of the major dangers associated with drinking aren’t hepatitis or fentanyl overdose, but instead are drunken fights or freezing to death; and there’s no instantly-administered reversal drug for an alcohol overdose that you can carry in your pocket like there is for fentanyl. Secondly, very heavy drinkers are often among the most low-functioning of the chronically homeless population because it’s simply so difficult to accomplish anything with very high levels of alcohol in your system. Very heavy drinkers also often struggle immensely to comply with basic rules at shelters and service centres, and thus can become totally isolated from services, because alcohol reduces your ability to control yourself and often makes people aggressive. It’s also very easy to access and, notoriously, very very difficult to quit, with withdrawal symptoms that can literally kill you. There are drinkers who, to put it simply, are never going to stop, and for whom there is relatively little that street outreach workers can do to make them safer.

Pilot projects have sprung up over the past little while called managed alcohol programs (MAPs). In particular I’m interested in MAPs which are also permanent living arrangements. This is another type of (very) specialized housing, where a smallish number of people can live and their needs met while being given to a prescribed dose of alcohol at regular intervals, something like one beer an hour. If they choose, they can ask to have their dose gradually reduced, but they don’t have to. In some ways, MAPs like this can be thought of as a type of hospice care for people who realistically are almost certainly going to die of alcohol-related complications and aren’t functional enough to access other services. I think that facilities like these are incredibly important and should be adopted universally. Many drinkers I worked with were very interested in getting into the pilot project in Montreal, but there was never space; introducing these facilities en masse would get a lot of the old-timers off the streets, the types who live curled up in the doorways of abandoned buildings, soaked in body fluids, never able to hang on to any belongings, cut off from almost everyone. I want these people to be able to have some dignity and frankly so should we all.

5. A fourth emergency service

During the years I worked doing street outreach, I often fantasized about what it would look like if we had even a fraction of the resources that the cops do. Dispatch centres, radio cars, full-time 24/7 staff, college programs dedicated to training us, some legal powers, that kind of thing. The thing is, street workers who’ve been working for a couple years usually end up knowing almost everyone who’s chronically homeless in a given area, and we develop relationships with many of them. If someone describes a person – there’s a woman wearing giant Hello Kitty slippers standing in the middle of the intersection at Parc and Milton yelling at cars – there’s a really good chance we know exactly who it is and will be able to do something about it. They know us, too. They’ll confide in us, ask us for help, and, often, listen to us in a way they’re unlikely to listen to anyone else.

We don’t just end up knowing the really destitute people either. We end up getting know people in the whole street ecosystem – dealers, squeegee kids, assorted sketchy hangers-on. And often we can ‘deal with them’ in a way that cops can’t or won’t, again because of the personal relationships and because we’re so self-evidently there to help. It doesn’t always work but it’s often relatively straightforward for us to get some dealers to move to a different spot or to ask a group of people to stop using in the doorway of a particular business or whatever, and they do it because they have some respect for us, not because they’re just trying to avoid the cops.

All this has led me to believe that something that would help profoundly is a fourth 911 service made up of unarmed civil mediators dedicated to addressing mental health issues, substance use issues, ‘public nuisances’, atypical healthcare needs, and similar. The teams could be made up of a street nurse and an intervention worker, for example, equipped with radios and a vehicle, operating in collaboration with local outreach services, and served by a dedicated dispatch centre. 911 calls not requiring an ambulance, firetruck or police presence would be triaged to this fourth emergency service, freeing up the resources of these three traditional 911 services and allowing professionals who are actually trained for this work to do it. Because frankly, having witnessed hundreds of interactions between cops and paramedics and the homeless population, it’s very clear that they typically have absolutely no idea how to handle a public mental health crisis, have few tools with which to do so, and anyway don’t care because they have other things to be doing which they see as much more important. Ambulances will often take hours to respond if they understand that the subject is a homeless person, and will often simply leave without taking the subject if the individual is being belligerent. Cops in Montreal usually just resort to yelling ‘calm down’ in French and then pulling out weapons or handcuffs when that doesn’t work. Their understanding of trauma and how it works is usually verging on non-existent. In other words, the existing public response institutions are totally unsuited to dealing with this kind of situation, which is a major reason why they don’t.

6. Therapy

I am, obviously, not a psychiatrist. But I can say this: though medication can be useful for some people for some things, most of the chronically homeless people I’ve worked with have shit haunting them that pills can’t fix. The constant torment being generated by their own brains isn’t the result of a mysterious ‘chemical imbalance’. It’s a direct response to series of severely traumatic events, events which would fill any person with feelings of terror, rage and hopelessness. Modern research on this type of Complex PTSD indicate that psychiatric interventions like antidepressants and anxiety medication are next to useless in treating the underlying issues and not very effective in treating the symptoms. Further, such medication is usually contraindicated for people struggling with alcohol and street drugs because of the potential for harmful drug interaction, and many people in this population have precarious relationships with alcohol or street drugs. What people need is therapy.

Mental health services need to be rolled into the public healthcare system entirely and be offered for free. At the very least, well-staffed public options for long-term mental health therapy need to exist, with a program offering priority access for people coming off the street. People currently on the street might benefit to some degree too but in my experience, for many people it’s practically impossible to gain mental stability before gaining material security. In collaboration with the specialized housing system and the fourth emergency service, non-coercive therapy with short wait times and no end date needs to be offered to those who are exiting the street, since, as noted, many of these people are among the most thoroughly traumatized people in society and need very extensive follow-up over very long periods in order to get their lives back.

Indigenous Canadians are hugely overrepresented in the chronically homeless population, and I could write another whole article about specialized services and policy interventions which would work well to address this fact. But for now, I’ll just say that I’ve seen Indigenous-led mental health options including traditional healing practices like sweat lodges and so on work very well for some people, and programs offering these services should be well-funded. On a broader long-term basis, huge efforts should be made to be able to offer mainstream professional therapy options in Indigenous languages with comparatively large numbers of native speakers, such as Inuktitut. Because of the very small total number of speakers of these languages and the small pool of speakers with professional credentials, this will be a difficult and lengthy undertaking, but I believe that Canada has both the resources and the responsibility to provide services like these in Indigenous languages. This is important not only for reasons of justice and dignity for Indigenous peoples (though justice and dignity are in themselves positive for mental health outcomes) but also because expressing oneself in one’s first language is usually going to be more effective in a therapeutic setting.

And that’s my six part plan for dealing with the homelessness crisis. It looks insanely expensive until you realize how much our current giant patchwork of ineffective revolving-door nonsense is costing us. Fuck ‘cohabitation’; let’s eradicate the phenomenon to the best of our ability. There is no good reason for it to exist. Time to finally deal with this horrific stain on our collective conscience once and for all.

The other day some moist, finger-sniffing poser in a mask walked up to my partner Clementine’s table at the anarchist bookfair in Montreal and dumped hot coffee all over like $500 worth of her writing, and then ran away. Chatter on the internet the next day indicated that people were referring to this as a ‘deplatforming’. On the one hand it’s a real little-bitch move, which a friend of Clementine’s correctly identified as deeply bébé lala1 ; it’s petulant and cowardly to destroy literature, with a mask on, especially the literature of a five foot one woman who mostly writes about having PTSD. Plus, Clementine did a fundraiser to make up for the lost income and her audience, disgusted by this stupid bullshit, hit the target in like fifteen minutes, so it’s not like it succeeded in hurting her financially. Mostly, it’s just exhausting and juvenile live-action role-play stuff, an attempt at bullying carried out by the kind of people who fart nervously when someone walks too close to them on the sidewalk.

On the other hand, it speaks to something really fucking rotten and frankly scary infesting the anarchist scene: the sincere belief held by some groups and individuals that they personally should be in charge of what other people say, think and write. Obviously, they would deny this, but it’s exactly what it is. They think, on some level whether clearly articulated or not, that in the matter of policing speech, everyone should defer to them. They believe that they are invested with a special knowledge regarding what ideas are acceptable. They believe this in spite of there being no evidence that this is so, or that such an authority is needed, wanted or warranted; and they believe that it is their right and their duty to enforce their decrees in the milieu.

Insofar as people try to overtly justify this kind of thing, this notion springs from the old antifascist tactic of deplatforming. Basically, the idea is that the attempts of fascists to organize in public represent such a danger to ordinary people that it becomes acceptable to override concerns about liberty, speech, and political expression in order to disrupt fascist rallies, tear down fascist posters and so on. As far as this goes, it makes sense and I don’t have any particular problem with it. Where it becomes a problem is when the slippage starts to occur. If you can deplatform neo-Nazis, why not other ‘dangerous’ people? Why not people who have a difference of opinion about hot-button issues like puberty blockers or vaccines? Why not people who support the wrong kind of leftist ideology? Why not people you heard vague rumours about years ago? Why not Clementine?

The reason it’s arguably alright to waive the political rights of fascists is because fascists, openly and overtly, want to waive the political rights of everyone. They want dictatorships, death camps, and deportations; torture squads, secret police, and mass murder; the worship of hierarchy, orgies of violence in order to renew the nation with the blood of the degenerate, and so on; they want fascism. It’s not because we think they have a ‘shitty take’ on something, and it doesn’t take a special caste of brave speech-police to identify neo-Nazi views. The minute people forget this and assume that they can just ‘deplatform’ anyone they want, on any basis, the whole concept loses all political and ethical credibility, and simply becomes a variety of very unevenly-applied, very disorganized authoritarianism. That would be frustrating enough in any other political scene, but when self-proclaimed anarchists do it it’s doubly demoralizing because it just completely negates some of the most basic tenets of the anarchist tradition.

Regardless of the fact that this is some asshole pouring coffee on some books and zines, and not a mob setting fires or something, it points to a disturbing lack of really basic political principles. These people need to sincerely ask themselves what gives them the right to decide who gets to say what where. It’s not a trivial question; in fact it’s central to anarchist thought. On what basis is it permissible for political actors to constrain the speech of others? Is it when we disagree with them? If that were true, it would be permissible for all actors to always constrain each other’s speech at all times. Is it when we disagree with them plus we’re super duper sure that we’re right? Sorry, still doesn’t cut it. Is it when we disagree with them plus we’re super duper sure that we’re right plus we heard rumours about them? Still no. A difficult pill to swallow, maybe, but the fact is that it isn’t ethically permissible for you to destroy literature or constrain speech on the basis of how you feel in your tum-tum. Doing so just makes you a little tyrant; an inept and ineffective wannabe little tyrant, but a little tyrant all the same.

If you don’t like Clementine, that was always allowed. If you don’t like Clementine’s ideas, that was always allowed too. If you want to write an article about why you disagree with her, go for it. If you want to write a zine about, I don’t know, how cancel culture is actually super dope and really helpful for the Left, you are not alone. If you want to write an entire set of essays carefully considering and responding to every major political claim Clementine has made, well, I know you won’t because no one ever does, but please, go ahead. No one is stopping you and it would be completely defensible, even productive, to do so. It’s fine. Do it.

But, you miserable little wannabe tyrant, that’s different than what you did. I don’t agree with the idea that you should be in charge. I don’t want you in charge and I doubt a whole lot of people would. I don’t think there should be some guy who gets to decide if my girlfriend can distribute her writing in peace, and if I did, I wouldn’t pick you for the job. I don’t think that position is needed and I don’t think I’m the only one. If that position did exist and for some reason was needed, I don’t think it should be occupied by an anonymous person in a mask. I think believing that you have the right to do shit like this is narcissistic and individualist to an extreme degree. I think you should reassess what you actually believe in and make sure you’re in the right place. And I believe that you are failing to understand some of the most basic proposals within anarchism, such as respecting the autonomy of others, and not being a narc-ass little fucking coward.

For most of my life I shared the belief common in Canada that immigration is unambiguously a good thing. Before you stop reading, I haven’t turned into some kind of anti-immigration crusader, or even anti-immigration in general. But, as Trudeau’s Liberals and provincial governments have succeeded in more or less destroying the long-standing pro-immigration consensus in Canada by jacking the numbers of immigrants, temporary foreign workers, and foreign students up enormously over the past few years, I’ve begun to think more about this issue from a leftist perspective.

I’ll begin by saying that any attitude toward immigration that is directed primarily at immigrants themselves is cretinous and should be immediately dismissed. That goes even more for anti-immigrant sentiment based primarily in hysteria about their ‘race’ or ethnicity being ‘incompatible’ or ‘alien’. These are the talking points of right-to-far-right populism, have a long and ugly history, and are irrelevant to a left-wing discussion on immigration. I’ll also note that although immigration levels are currently very, very high, Canada has always been, from its inception, a capitalist project whereby a powerful elite imports enormous numbers of workers from elsewhere in the world in order to staff what is basically three mining companies and a logging company in a trenchcoat (these days the trenchcoat also includes UberEats and Tim Hortons). Canada’s population has grown enormously since its colonization, pretty much doubling every fifty years, and a large proportion of that growth has always been through immigration. So in that sense there is nothing totally unprecedented about an immigration boom.

However, that last fact should probably give us pause as socialists. While liberal institutions have very successfully convinced us all that openness to immigration is a fair stand-in for anti-racism, we need to be clear that immigrants are not admitted to Canada because of anti-racism. Immigrants are admitted to Canada because of economic policy overseen by the aforesaid powerful elites, who have long held that growing the population quickly and ensuring a ready supply of labour is the way to go. In other words it is very good for business. If it wasn’t, immigration would be marginal. Although it’s not always a zero-sum game, it’s true that what’s good for business is rarely particularly good for workers, and when the corporate world gets its way, the working class tends to get fucked. So when we keep that in mind, what observations can we make about immigration policy?

Right off the bat we can notice that this enormous immigration boom coincides with a period in which wages were rising rapidly in Canada for the first time in forever. Liberal economists like to call this situation a ‘labour shortage’, also known as a ‘situation in which employers have to pay people more because otherwise they’ll just find another job’. Basically, a lot of Boomers retired early during the pandemic, and a lot fewer people were moving across borders, and the workforce shrank a bit, forcing some employers to actually have to compete with one another for workers for the first time anybody can remember. This was seen by the powers that be as very bad news. The cost of labour is crucial to doing business, and the powers that be all like doing business a great deal. There was also the concern about inflation. Ghoulish economists noted that when people get paid more, it can lead to prices going up, which can lead to too much inflation. Much better to just have the prices go up, without the people getting paid more! Tidier that way.

Well, if the issue was a ‘shortage’ of labour, there’s always more where that came from: India, China, the Philippines, Pakistan. With companies like Tim Horton’s clamouring for more hyper-exploitable workers to hyper-exploit, and agricultural industries whining that their supply of indentured temporary foreign workers had dried up, the government rose to the occasion, raising immigration targets and overseeing a huge increase in the number of temporary workers and foreign students (who, conveniently, could register as students, come to Canada, and work at a Timmy’s for 40 hours a week without ever going to class). Wage growth was successfully clamped down on, and fast food joints got their supply of desperate people willing to put up with whatever.

When we look at things that way, it starts to seem less like the kind and benevolent spirit of generosity and anti-racism and more like a cynical ploy to continue to exploit poor people and give the capitalist class whatever they want. Essentially, the capitalist class have a lever that they can pull, whenever they want, to push wages down: more workers in the labour pool equals less reason for any company to pay decent wages. The working class, conspicuously, does not have an equivalent lever. They used to, and it was called the union; the ability to withdraw labour en masse is more or less the only thing that can force capitalists to grant higher wages and better benefits to their workers, but the union movement was crushed decades ago and has yet to recover. Certainly there is no union for the people working at Subways and Tim Hortons across the country. We’re left with a very one-sided situation.

I was talking to my friend Kai Cheng Thom about this recently and she voiced the thought that a lot of us have had: basically, wouldn’t it be wrong to stop people from developing countries to come to Canada? From a progressive perspective, Canada, as one of the heirs of European world colonialism, is at least partly to blame for the conditions of underdevelopment that persist in large parts of the world. This is a common, almost reflexive thought, I think, among people on the left, and one which I used to have myself. I have a couple main things to say about it.

The first is that obviously, not all of Canada’s immigration program is temporary workers being paid pittances. A very large part of our immigration program is geared toward attracting well-educated professionals from other countries and putting them to work in places where Canada has labour needs. Nurses and doctors are a good example of this: we need them, we can’t seem to produce enough of them ourselves, so we source them from elsewhere. They’re happy to come; we’re happy to have them. Never mind that some such people arrive and find that their degrees aren’t recognized, and end up driving taxis — lots of them do end up doing professional work in Canada, and this has always been one of the ways that Canada’s immigration system has worked well. But when I take a step back, this migration pattern constitutes an obvious brain drain from developing countries to rich countries. Large numbers of their professionals emigrate, leaving the home country with acute shortages.

The second has to do with a really fascinating account of slavery that I came across in David Graeber’s work. Graeber noted that around the ancient world, and up until the industrialized chattel slavery pioneered by European colonialism, slavery usually took the form of war captives being rounded up, brought back to the motherland, and being forced to work. While it was undoubtedly brutal, there usually wasn’t the idea that the slaves constituted a completely separate kind of humanity. Manumission was relatively common, and in many places the children of slaves were not automatically regarded as slaves themselves, unlike with American ‘race’-based chattel slavery. In such a scenario, a primary economic motivation for slavery was this: it takes an enormous amount of energy, time, and commitment to raise a child to adulthood, and by stealing large numbers of captives from an enemy society, you were not only taking the people themselves. You were also stealing that energy, time and commitment. You were essentially making it so that workers popped up, without your own society having to actually expend any resources on creating them. You were stealing the reproductive labour of another society.

With this in mind, Western immigration programs quickly can look quite a bit uglier, because in many ways they operate with the same logic. Other, much poorer countries produce human beings, with all the labour that that entails. They are loved, fed, housed, clothed, and educated for a couple of decades, at enormous expense, and then ‘we’ take them, fully formed into adults capable of work. The reproductive labour that goes into them is invisible because reproductive labour usually is. And the capitalist class ruling in Western countries does not have to pay for the expense of producing these workers, unlike with native-born workers, who depend on infrastructure and public programs financed by taxes.

Right-wing populists convinced of plots to destroy the ‘white race’ through immigration and similar are unable to grasp any of this because they lack an analysis of capitalism. Cut off from an accurate understanding of ruling-class interests, they are relegated to conspiracism instead to explain why anything is happening. They are also fed a constant drip of anti-immigrant sentiment from the reactionary rags marketed to them. Consequently, the only real stance they have is that both immigration and immigrants are wrong and dangerous, which is not helpful from a socialist perspective. So what would be?

I confess I don’t know, but I have a couple of ideas that have been kicking around in my mind. I think that extremely aggressive unionization of industries making heavy use of immigrant labour would be a start, though I concede this will be extremely difficult. But destroying the economic motivation for corporations to hyper-exploit immigrant labour, by protecting those workers with strong unions, would undoubtedly protect all workers in Canada from the depredations of the kind of bootlicking economists who want to keep wages as low as possible. Because immigration in Canada is not the result of a plot by anti-white cabals to destroy Western Civilization, but rather is the result of economic policy formulated by neoliberal monsters trying to exploit the working class as efficiently as possible, this would likely have the result of lowering immigration numbers ‘naturally’, but would also result in both immigrants and Canadians having a higher standard of living. We need to make sure that the working class — the whole working class, including migrants — also has a lever. And unions are, and have always been, our best bet.

So basically, we need to unionize Timmy’s.

More to come on this topic as I work my thoughts out.

On December 18^th, thermometers in Quebec City recorded temperatures of 11.5° (52.7°F), fifteen degrees above the median December high of -4.2° (24.4°F). This bizarre winter heatwave came after a summer marked by completely unprecedented forest fires, affecting all 13 provinces and territories of Canada, which resulted in an area of forest being burned comfortably more than twice as large as the previous all-time record for North America. The fires started weirdly early in the spring and major outbreaks continued into mid-October. 200,000 people were placed under evacuation orders, or one out of every 200 Canadians; two thirds of the population of the Northwest Territories had to be evacuated. All told 5% of the entire forest cover of Canada was burned in one season, releasing truly nightmarish amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and producing clouds of choking smoke that rendered skies blood red all over the continent and eventually reached all the way to Europe.

As climate collapse becomes more acute and less possible for even the most fervent denialists to ignore, factions within the Western ruling classes will belatedly begin to support measures to mitigate it. We have already seen some movement in this direction in the European Union, and increasingly in the Anglo countries as well. In Quebec, all mainstream political parties, even the rightwing ones, profess some degree of environmentalism. It was the rightwing CAQ party that enacted Quebec’s decision to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, for example, a decision which preceded an identical policy later adopted by the federal Liberals.

Barring unforeseen political upheavals, green policies in the immediate future will largely be imposed on the population by powerful elites which view ordinary people with hostility and contempt and are deeply invested in maintaining their own privilege and dominance. They will almost certainly ensure that they are exempt from having to suffer any real consequences or quality of life changes themselves, while sacrificing to a lesser or greater degree some of the convenience or affordability that working people have become accustomed to. For example, they will ban the sale of gas-powered cars (in concert with the transitions major automakers are undertaking anyway), but they will not ban the horrifyingly polluting private jets they themselves use to move around. Importantly, this side effect of capitalism’s inbuilt extreme wealth inequality and class rule by the rich does not necessarily imply that such green measures are ineffective, fake or undesirable. Removing gas-powered private vehicles from the roads as quickly as possible, for example, is indeed likely to be an important component in mitigating runaway climate collapse.

Some supposedly green policies, however, are likely to be ineffective or fake, especially as environmentalist concerns grow in popularity among the electorate. Factions of the ruling class will use greenwashing to push through legislation or enact corporate policies which benefit them and do not meaningfully address climate collapse in any way. The oil and gas industry in Canada has adopted this strategy whole-heartedly. Over the past few years they have transformed their industrial lobbying group OSCA (the Oil Sands Community Alliance) into ‘Pathways Alliance’ (website byline: ‘Supporting Climate Action’, description: ‘competitors working together to meet our shared goals’). This is an organization with the ludicrous goal of ‘net-zero’ tar sands, which will be accomplished using expensive carbon capture technology. They want the federal government to pay 75% of the bill for this greenwashed publicity stunt instead of just doing it themselves, and neglect to mention in any of their extensive propaganda that they are only proposing to capture carbon generated by the actual exploitation of the tar sands, and that net-zero oil and gas is by definition impossible because burning oil and gas always releases carbon. In a similar move, the premier of Manitoba recently claimed that tar sand exploitation was ‘renewable energy’; maybe he’s been in touch with Pathways Alliance, which has been shown to meet with Canadian government officials on average four times a day.

It’s also possible that some factions of the ruling class will attempt to enact green or greenish policies that are not just pro-business in the usual obliviously suicidal kind of way but that are actively repressive and antihuman. As disasters become worse and more frequent, the movement of displaced people becomes more difficult to control, and disruptions to the economy destroy stability, social unrest will heighten, and elites will seek novel means of repression. Elites may begin to use environmentalist pretexts to punish marginalized groups, restrict movement, further surveil populations, and so on. Fears of this sort of thing are often expressed on the right as conspiracy theories about conniving liberals using made-up hysteria about the weather to institute draconian restrictions on people’s ability to drive around. An entire conspiracy theory cottage industry has grown up around the ‘15 Minute City’ urban planning movement in the UK, which aims to create dense, liveable neighbourhoods served by highly effective public transit and ubiquitous bike lanes, in which driving will become largely unnecessary. Complimentary strategies to deter driving, such as fees for driving in certain areas on certain days, have been framed by right-wing activists as an attempt to imprison inhabitants.

On the left similar fears are usually framed through the spectre of ‘eco-fascism’, an ill-defined green reactionary tendency purported to be influential among the alt-right. A journalist once approached me asking to interview me about my Master’s thesis, which dealt with contemporary far-right extremism in Canada. Specifically she wanted my take on how best to combat the ‘rising threat of eco-fascism’. She became quite rude when I pointed out that ‘eco-fascism’ barely exists outside of the fever dreams of ultra-fringe white supremacist activists, and has a near-zero chance of impacting anyone’s lives anytime soon, whereas the denialist climate policies of the actually existing ruling class are incredibly dangerous and absolutely will result in catastrophe, so maybe we should focus on those. In any case, eco-fascism is a popular expression of people’s fear that climate collapse and authoritarianism will collide in the near future. Although both the right and left versions of this fear tend to be misguided in their specifics, the fear itself is completely rational, given the track record of the cruel, arrogant criminals who rule us.

There are factions of the ruling class which will certainly oppose any climate collapse mitigation whatsoever right up until the bitter end, motivated by a mixture of nihilistic free-market extremism and thoroughgoing denial. They will use green policies as a focal point for mobilization, organizing reactionary counter-movements against anything that may help. The character of this mobilization will almost certainly be right-populist, since that is the most vital and dynamic form of right-wing activism today. Right-populism seeks to identify one faction of the ruling class with ‘the people’ and another faction with all that is wrong in the world, and eliminate the latter to the benefit of the former. Typically the ‘enemy’ faction is associated with alien class values, pathological greed, and sneering hatred of the common man, which is all completely correct; where right-wing populists go off the rails is by imagining that these characteristics are not also shared by their preferred faction of evil billionaires.

As we already see today, some parts of the ruling class will double down on appearing green and will occasionally actually impose effective policies out of necessity. This will set off an increasingly bitter front in the ‘culture war’, with the ‘recycling liberal’ versus the ‘F-150 conservative’ thing spiralling further and further. As this continues, it will become more and more common for heterodox leftists, nauseated by the self-satisfied liberals patting each other’s bums, to pick up on more populist ideas about climate policy filtering out of the right. I already witness this fairly often on forums like r/stupidpol, where many self-described Marxists, socialists and anarchists are quick to scoff at green policy initiatives regardless of their content and dismiss them as elite ploys.

The inverse of this is also visible. The inspiration for this article came from a post on a right-wing subreddit complaining about the Canadian government’s newish fuel tax. The poster suggested that maybe the liberal elites passing these taxes should have their private jets banned – an excellent point that I think we should take seriously. But the point is that it’s sometimes possible for right-wing populism to surpass mainstream liberal and even social-democratic rhetoric in its willingness to directly target ‘the elite’; and there is certainly room for right-wing populists to end up adopting left-wing positions if they start to become aware that they are essentially being swindled by another faction of the elite that they claim to oppose.

To recap: it’s likely that good or at least not-bad climate policies will begin to be passed in the near future out of sheer necessity and the growing obviousness of the problem, and these policies will be passed by utterly unlikeable ruling-class liberals with whom leftists will share almost no common ground. It’s likely that fake and/or repressive climate policies will also be adopted by governments and corporations. And it’s likely that right-wing populist opposition to all of the above will grow, and that left-wing populists may be taken in by this rhetoric, resulting in a part of the left being essentially opposed to climate collapse mitigation.

So what do we do? I believe that the antidote to all this is green left populism1: being laser-focused on enacting good climate policies while relentlessly blaming rich people for everything and taking as much as we can away from them. We need to be discerning about climate policy, being able to determine what’s good and what is window-dressing, and we need to usually be taking a ‘yes, and’ approach to everything liberals do, with the ‘and’ being something that will help normal people and enrage people with a hundred million dollars. This is how we get things going while taking the wind out of the sails of the right-populists and deterring the rightward drift of disaffected leftists. There is, obviously, an enormous appetite for populism, and we cannot afford to let the right wing dominate that playing field, especially when their brand of populism simply results in different billionaires commanding the apparatus of the state, while ours results in no billionaires existing.

Let’s look at some examples. Canada is banning the sale of new gas-powered cars in a decade. What’s the yes-and? Yes, ban ‘em; and, pull out all the stops to fast-track a state-owned national energy grid based completely on hydro, wind, solar and nuclear, and subsidize the electricity which everyone will need in order to charge electric vehicles to the point where it is significantly less expensive than filling a tank up with gas. It helps normal people because it will result in cheaper cleaner electricity, and it pisses off evil rich people because it takes energy companies out of their hands and deals a death-blow to the oil industry. Win-win.

Here’s another one: Canada has two new carbon taxes, levied primarily on gasoline and natural gas, which will raise the price of fuel significantly. This will be particularly difficult to manage for people who heat their homes with natural gas. Wealthier people can just install heat-pumps in their homes, which are cleaner and over time, cheaper than gas heating, and they are; but even with government rebates they cost tens of thousands of dollars, putting them beyond the reach of most people. In any case, everybody I know rents. The yes-and here is yes, tax gas; and, along with the national energy grid mentioned above, put people to work installing a system of geothermal heat-exchange pumps all through Canadian towns and cities. Geothermal heat-pumps are a) by far the most energy-efficient form of heating and b) characterized by being very expensive to build and then very cheap to operate, exactly the kind of project it makes sense for the state to finance. This would help regular people by providing jobs and slashing electricity bills and would anger rich people by once again taking energy out of their clammy little hands.

And here’s another: like that right-wing commenter said, as we progressively ban gas cars, we should absolutely ban private jets, and why not, limousines too. The civil disobedience climate activists in Europe have gotten a lot of bad press, including from leftists, but one of their stunts that was universally popular was when they blocked private jets at a German airport. Everybody hates people who travel in private jets, and nobody wants to sacrifice anything while rich people are still doing whatever they want. Make it clear that we won’t settle for less than rich people taking trains.

Speaking of trains, here’s another ‘and’ for the gas cars thing. People are, obviously, looking around and being like, if I can’t drive anymore, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Outside the cores of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, pubic transit is a pathetic joke in Canada, and even in those three cities it’s pretty cringe compared practically any town in Europe. Even more concerning, if that’s even possible, is the fact that Canada, a country basically consisting of a thin strip of cities in a long straight line along the US border, doesn’t have high-speed rail. If you want to get from Thunder Bay, Ontario to Toronto, Ontario you have to get in a car and drive for fourteen and a half hours (or fly). Existing Chinese bullet trains could make the trip in less than four hours, and their new generation of maglev trains could do it in two and a half. Massively expanding Canada’s transit network, both in terms of urban public transit and a new network of bullet trains, would help working people immeasurably. It would provide a huge number of good jobs, first of all, while making our quality of life infinitely better and reducing the need to drive. It would also connect Canada’s far-flung cities properly for the first time, allowing people to live in places like, for example, Thunder Bay without (correctly) feeling like they are completely cut off from civilization. This would massively reduce housing pressure in Canada’s major cities and encourage the growth of our mid-tier cities, helping regular people be able to afford houses again. And the best part is, if we did this by re-nationalizing CN Rail (CN stands for Canadian National – ever wonder why?) it would infuriate a cabal of capitalists to no end at the same time.

We can’t reactively oppose things like getting gas cars off the road, but we can’t let them get away with doing shit like that without giving us decent public transit, either. All climate policies should help regular people and make rich people angry. This is just common sense – but it also maybe, just maybe, would help the left start winning an election or two, if the ostensibly left-wing parties like the NDP ever regain their backbones and become able to take aim at the ruling class again. It can also give restless lefties something to throw their energy into rather than drifting away into the embrace of wacky right-wing conspiracy theorists, and win over right-wing conspiracy theorists who come to realize that sickening capitalist ghouls don’t have the best interests of the everyman at heart — as well as winning over regular unpoliticized people who can see the clear benefits of these policies and who enjoy seeing rich people squirm. It can give unions, activist organizations, local governments and individuals a platform and a way to think about climate change moving forward. It can revitalize a defeatist, doomery environmentalist movement and give us all something to look forward to. We can do this, and we must. Let’s get used to thinking ‘yes, and’ and relentlessly demanding more for ourselves and less for the rich.

Yadda yadda it’s good to support independent writers and I’m broke and in debt, please subscribe:

Subscribe now

My mom’s got a rare and dangerous form of cancer. She’s on her second round of chemo for it. After the first round, the sites on her arm where the IV was connected became infected, and my brother went with her to the emergency room so she could get antibiotics. After her second round, it happened again. Now I’m with her at the ER, waiting to be seen.

The oncology centre isn’t open on the weekends, and her family doctor — which, unlike millions of Canadians, she’s lucky enough to have — is also not available on weekends. Her arm is red, hot, and swollen, and her temperature has been hovering around a fever for a few days, so she needs to get seen. It’s particularly urgent because chemo destroys your immune system, and you need to be really vigilant about infections and illnesses. So: we’re at the emergency room.

We got here at 8 am. The screens in the waiting room notified us of an estimated 10 hour 15 minute wait for basically everyone who wasn’t currently bleeding out from a gunshot wound. All around us, dozens of sick people sat, coughing.

We get seen by the triage nurse, who takes my mom’s blood pressure and temperature and sends us back to the waiting room. I remind the nurse that chemo patients really aren’t supposed to be sitting around in hospital waiting rooms, a fact stressed to us by the oncology team. I know, she says, smiling sympathetically with her eyes above her blue surgical mask. But there’s nowhere else to put you.

Is it better for a chemo patient with an infection and no immune system to wait ten hours in an ER, uncomfortable and hungry and miserable and stressed, around a bunch of people with colds and covid and RSV and brain-eating amoebas, or to just go home and hope the infection doesn’t get worse? It’s a completely insane choice to have to make.

Eventually I complain and they let us wait in a hallway elsewhere. A while after that we are allowed to wait in an unused eye exam room. We are now six hours in. All we need is for someone to prescribe an antibiotic.

I can’t fault any of the people who work at this place. My ex, whom I love very much, is an ER nurse. The job is demanding beyond belief and the entire healthcare system is understaffed, underfunded, and under-resourced. Everybody is on permanent mandated overtime and nobody can remember the last time their unit had a safe level of staffing. Everyone is mad at you all the time and there’s only so much you can do. You have to follow protocols or it fucks everything up.

I do blame someone, though. As far as I’m concerned, everyone in office who has presided over the planned demolition of our public healthcare system is a criminal and traitor. They are responsible for staggering amounts of suffering and death. They have also stolen our birthright as Canadians. We are descended from people who fought and struggled for the right to prompt and high-quality healthcare, free at the point of access. It was one of the most important concessions the working class has ever gained. And a specific group of people, who have names and addresses, took it from us.

Through a heady mix of cold-blooded malice and criminal incompetence they allowed it to be hollowed out from within. They snuck more and more privatization in, siphoning trained personnel away from the public system and forcing working people to either pay for services that should be free or wait endlessly. They failed to fix any of the myriad of problems until it was too late and the system was in free-fall.

During the covid years we were all told that the sacrifices we were making were necessary to ‘slow the spread’ until our healthcare capacity was built up enough to deal with all the extra sick people. But they didn’t build up our healthcare capacity in any meaningful way. They slapped bandaids on some of the most disastrous problems and then kept on keepin’ on. They think that now the worst is over they can go back to letting the whole thing slowly crumble until they can just privatize it once and for all and make their ruling-class friends very, very rich.

They’ve been passing the buck forever, shaking each other’s sweaty hands as they sign the death sentences of working people. And I do mean death sentences. The number of people who die waiting for care in Canada has gone from worrying to unconscionable. Wait times are astronomical. The whole thing is falling apart, as healthcare workers have been saying for years and years to absolutely no effect. And somehow, some way, no one in any of the mainstream political parties appears to have anything resembling a solution.

I simply don’t accept that, and not just because I love my mom. These bumbling lackwits and their treasonous pals shouldn’t be allowed to just fuck everything up for ordinary people forever with absolutely no consequences. The state of our public healthcare system is a ludicrous scandal. We can’t let them spit in our faces as they dismantle our birthright, readying it for sale to the most well-connected bidder. I’m utterly uninterested in their whining excuses and you should be too. Have some dignity, have some self-respect: none of us should ever vote for any party or politician ever again who was involved in any part of this sordid racket. These simpering lackeys for the ultra-rich are at best disgustingly unfit for office; and at worst, they should be in fucking jail.