The worst came after dark, of course. Swarms of Proud Boys roamed the streets, looking for the anti-fascists, who were much more likely to actually be from D.C., and who didn’t want violent mobs terrorizing their home. The police often tried to stand between the groups, sometimes whole-heartedly and sometime half-heartedly, but regardless it didn’t always work.

Fights broke out, and dozens of people, such as myself, were maced and pepper sprayed by the roving [neo]fascists, who are never really interested in a fair fight but rather in doing as much violence as possible. There’s probably a lesson there.

Four churches were attacked that night. They were vandalized, and one had a Black Lives Matter flag ripped off. It’s hard to miss the symbolism of white men marching through the streets burning that flag, which is exactly what they did. And when they couldn’t find “Antifa” or BLM flags, the Proud Boys found a Black man unaffiliated with any of the counter-protests. They cornered him and harassed him, and then when they began to assault him he pulled out his knife and stabbed one of them.

This is the very, very real violence perpetrated by [neo]fascists in this country. And it’s just one example out of hundreds. Across the United States these men are rallying, waving Nazi flags, assaulting, shooting, and hitting people with their cars. None of this is hypothetical.

[…]

So no, I do not place the idealized virtue of universal free speech ahead of preventing all-out fascism and the violence that entails. I do not think anyone should be able to espouse [neofascism] without consequence, let alone be able to profit from it.

I’m sure you’ve heard about the paradox of tolerance recently, but if you haven’t the 101 is that if we tolerate those who would, if they could, enact all-out [neo]fascism and squash all of us who object, we could soon find that our tolerance of [neofascists] has opened the door to a deeply intolerant society. This too is not simply theoretical, we know that the [neo]fascists who rallied in D.C., the Proud Boys and the even more overt Neo-Nazis, would readily dismantle any semblance of a liberal society and of a left if they could, and we should not allow that world to come into existence.

Just as the violence of the far-right is real, so too is the alliance of capital and [neo]fascism. More specifically, we are currently witnessing how, from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg to the owners of Substack, several billionaires and other assorted tech capitalists want to allow and enable the right.

Musk is no doubt the clearest, with his constant promotion of once fringe fascist influencers. Every day he interacts with them and every day he makes Twitter more of an engine for the promotion of their ideas. I turned to Substack partially to escape him and his embrace of the far-right, and now I find the owners here being explicit about their hospitality to [neofascist] ideas, propagandists, and profits.

[…]

So, whatever I do next, it will be guided by a desire to meaningfully combat this [neo]fascist surge in our country, both online and in three dimensions. It will be guided by a desire to be a little freer and more independent from the whims of this platform’s owners, and from the owners of other platforms. When I’m ready and that plan is hatched, you’ll be the first to know. But in the meantime, I hope we can agree that we are not dealing with hypotheticals. We are dealing with men profiting from and enabling very real violence.

And I trust many within the lower classes to defend against that violence, Joshua. It is important to remember that defense against neofascism within bourgeois society is merely a temporary solution, because neofascism is a symptom of bourgeois society and we can’t abolish one without the other. That said, I also recognize the historic inevitability of lower‐class individuals resisting neofascism directly as our options are limited (for now), so I don’t blame others for treating the symptoms.