[Skype login, call, answer]

PUNK [with hammer]: Hello Comrade Trixie

LADY: Hello Bruce.

PUNK: How’s your week been?

LADY: Look, it doesn’t matter. This is a framing device. Just get to the—what do you want?

PUNK: Well that’s not very friendly. But I was just wondering if you uh heard about that Nazi getting punched?

LADY: Oh yeah. I heard.

PUNK: Pretty fucking funny, right?

LADY: Yeah, it’s pretty funny.

PUNK: Well you don’t sound very enthusiastic.

LADY: Well look, babes, you know, it’s a man being attacked in the street. I mean, he was a Nazi, so, whatever, but there’s kind of a limit on how excited I’m gonna get about that.

PUNK: I see. How predictably bourgeois of you.

LADY: Well, is it bourgeois to not smash people’s faces in the street when you disagree with them?

PUNK: Yep. That’s pretty bourgeois.

LADY: Fuck you.

PUNK: Not “people you disagree with,” you idiot—Nazis. People who actually endorse genocide. Are you seriously gonna defend them?

LADY: I’m not gonna defend them. I’m just saying last time I checked people have a right to express their political opinions without being clocked in the side of the fucking head.

PUNK: Well what I want to know is why you liberals are so eager to come to the defense of the poor oppressed Nazis, and so quiet about the systemic violence that threatens marginalized people in this country every goddamn day.

LADY: I’m not quiet about that. I have a whole fucking YouTube channel about it.

PUNK: Oh, wow. Well here, have some brownie points for your heroic YouTube activism.

LADY: I can’t win with people like you, can I?

PUNK: Why are we friends again?

LADY: Don’t interrogate the framing device.

PUNK: [aside] Why am I friends with anyone? Socrates, what is friendship?

PUNK: Alright, so maybe you’re not defending Nazis. But you’re tolerating them. And I’d like to know when you think is the right time take to action. Is it when minorities start being loaded onto trains, or would you prefer to wait very liberally and tolerantly until smoke is rising form the first extermination camp?

LADY: Oh, don’t be so fucking dramatic. Richard Spencer is not gonna be running any extermination camps. He’s part of a despised fringe group with no real power.

PUNK: Donald Trump is not part of a fringe group.

LADY: But he’s not exterminating anyone.

PUNK: Well tell that to the millions of people who are about to lose their health insurance. Tell that to the women who are going to die from their botched back-alley abortions. Tell that to the refugees who are gonna be deported back to their countries where they’re all gonna be fucking killed.

LADY: So what are you suggesting, we start just killing Republicans because you think their policies are dangerous?

PUNK: All that education and no brain. No shithead, I’m saying that we have a goddamn duty to disrupt the rhetoric that misleads people into supporting those policies in the first place.

LADY: Disrupt it by punching people in the face.

PUNK: Why do you keep tearing up over the poor little Nazi with a black eye?

LADY: Do I look like I’m crying to you? I just happen to believe in a little thing you may have forgotten about called democracy, which is—let me finish

PUNK: Oh don’t you start that.

LADY: Let me finish. Politics is based on a norm of reciprocity, which means I treat my opponents the way I expect them to treat me. If I start punching people out to silence their political speech, then how can I reasonably expect them not to do the same to me?

PUNK: You know it’s cute, it’s really genuinely fucking adorable that you actually believe that Nazis are gonna uphold some norm of reciprocity. You know, you feel safe because you’re white and privileged, and you think you can just have a reasonable discussion with these people. Well you’re fucking wrong. They might not kill you as soon as the Jews or the blacks, but when fascist scum take over they will get you eventually, and when they do they’re not gonna give a shit that you tolerated them when you had the upper hand.

LADY [simul.]: That’s not what I think. I don’t think that. Can I talk?

PUNK: No, you need to hear this, so shut up and listen. I’ve seen your videos. You seem to think the rise of white nationalism is a laugh-a-minute romp. But what you need to understand is you’re a cis white man, and you’re privileged enough that all of this is just an intellectual exercise to you. But guess what, to people of color, and to trans people, and to women, and to immigrants and refugees, this is a matter of life and death.

LADY [simul.]: Can I say something?

PUNK: No, shut your mouth. I know your audience is small, but you still have a platform and you have an obligation to use it responsibly. But you know what you are? You’re just a profiteer who’s exploiting social justice for money and attention. You take social justice topics and you reduce them to digestible little bits of infotainment. That’s all you do. But then you have the audacity to tell real activists what to think and what methods they can use.

LADY [simul.]: Oh come on. That’s not what I’m doing.

PUNK: Shut up. You are the culture industry’s effort to subsume and neutralize social justice by making it safe and palatable for mass consumption. And this cross-dressing nonsense is just you riding the wave of public interest in transgender liberation. It’s complete appropriative bullshit and you know it.

LADY [simul.]: Now you’re giving me too much credit. Mass consumption? No, no. If you’d let me talk for one second I’d explain why that’s not fair.

PUNK: Don’t you get it? You don’t get to decide what’s fair. You don’t get to show up every couple weeks with some glib burlesque, then collect your Patreon money and walk away to your champagne and pearls. 

LADY [simul.]: Alright. Let’s not make this about the pearls. The pearls are… I’m keeping the pearls. The pearls are not up for discussion.

PUNK: You seem to think you’re actually helping something when all you’re doing is getting in the way of real activism. You’re as problematic is it gets, motherfucker. You’re dismissive of cultural appropriation, you make jokes about eating disorders. And I notice you’ve got some new outfit every week. That’s real good, claiming to advocate social justice while supporting an exploitative textile industry. You think you’re a good person? Well you’re not. You’re the moral equivalent of a modern slave-owner, and you wash it all down with a little casual transphobia, which you think is so fucking cute…

LADY [simul.]: So you just wanna lecture me all day. If you don’t stop talking I’m gonna punch you in the face.

LADY: [closes laptop] [Pause for music] Jeez. [aside] What a pisser. I think I’ve earned a round of golf.

[Kitchen. Bottle. Ball. Swing. Smash. “Fuck!” Picking up glass]

PUNK: [on laptop screen] You’ve at least got to admit, violence is kind of fun, isn’t it.

LADY: Yeah, I guess it is. You know the only thing that would make it more fun is if somebody got seriously hurt.

PUNK: Well, I’m glad we agree on something. Look, can we give this conversation another shot?

LADY: [moving laptop to kitchen table] Yeah. I guess.

PUNK: So, I appreciate your tolerant attitude toward fascist speech, I really do. Normally your view is the right one, and I see that you’re coming from a good place. But you have to understand that this is not a normal situation. Fascism isn’t just any old political worldview. It’s like a malignant tumor that infects the discourse and destroys every liberal norm.

LADY: Well there’s no need to help it along by destroying liberal norms in the name of opposing it.

PUNK: You still don’t get it. Violence is the only way to stop this. Fascism is inherently irrational, and debate does nothing. Violence is the only language fascists understand. Hitler himself said that the only way his movement could have been stopped was if it were brutally smashed in its infancy.

LADY: Well don’t you think Hitler was overestimating the inevitability of his own success? People like Hitler are always blind to the possibilities of failure. And you give him too much credit. You like to talk about fascism like it’s this hopelessly attractive doctrine, instead of the pretty much shabby and repulsive thing that it is. 

PUNK: What you’re not getting is that it’s designed to be seductive, to be irresistible.

LADY: I think you’ve overstating the case. I don’t feel seduced by fascism. I mean, I guess it would be kind of nice to be actually proud of my race and of my country. And it does get frustrating being a leftist as a white man. Because no matter how well you think you’ve thought through your positions, any woman, trans person or PoC can discredit your opinion in an instant, just by mentioning their own personal experience. So you’re always kind of alienated from your own political worldview, which has to be a patchwork of second-hand testimony from people who are different from you. You always have to be doubting your own intuitions and experiences. Because your privilege makes it all biased and invalid. And it would be nice to be free from that kind of neuroticism and self-doubt, to not have to be always saying, “oh I’m sorry I invaded your space with my masculinity and whiteness. I’ll try to be meeker and quieter from now on.” How great, and how much more authentic, would be to just say, “I am a white man, and my experience is valid!” To just be beautiful, and be proud of being beautiful. To be strong, and be proud of being strong. And to just not give a damn who got offended. Yes! Hail victory! Hail Trump! I am no mere golden man! I am a golden god! [shirtless, green screen, hammer]

PUNK [simul.]: Are you fucking serious right now. Oh my god.

PUNK: Wow, dude. Wow.

LADY: I don’t know how I got the hammer. I thought you had it.

PUNK: Well I’ve got it back. And I’m gonna bash your fashy face in with it if you don’t stop this fucking shit. [raises hammer, “Horror Much Show”]

LADY: Oh calm down. I was just kidding with you.

PUNK: Well, it was a little too convincing.

LADY: Well, you know, your problem is that you won’t even allow yourself to enter the emotional space of the Right. Intellectually, you and I agree on almost everything. The difference is that you’re a leftist with all your heart, and I’m only three-quarters of the way there. I still have this one fascist quadrant of my heart, and it makes me feel occasional right-wing emotions, like, “This is politically correct bullshit.” That’s a feeling that I have, like at least once a week. And I never say it, because I know that it’s wrong. Well, sometimes it really is politically correct bullshit, but most of the time it’s wrong. But it’s still a feeling that I sometimes have, and that is why I can talk to the right, and you can sense that, and it’s why you don’t trust me.

PUNK: Well now I definitely don’t trust you.

LADY: That’s because people like you refuse to have their ideological purity tainted by the subtlety and ambiguity of the world.

PUNK: No, it’s because I refuse to associate with people who sympathize with an ideology that wants me and my friends and family dead.

LADY: I didn’t say I had sympathies, I said I have right-wing feelings. And I don’t have much control over my feelings, but I can control my thoughts, and that’s why public debate is so important. I’ve changed my mind and changed my worldview before, so I know that it’s possible. 

PUNK: You didn’t use to be a fascist, though.

LADY: No, but this isn’t really about committed fascists. It’s about all the people who are mislead into following fascist ideas because they have no ideological defense against it. Most Trump supporters aren’t brain-dead fascist zombies. They’re ordinary people who’ve been taken in by a specific set of fears and resentments. But what happens is they end up running into people like you, and you confirm everything the right-wing demagogues have told them about the left: you come across violent, angry, irrational, politically correct and humorless, and no one wants to be around a person like that.

PUNK: Oh, well I’m sorry. I guess I and all the other unlikable trash who don’t find the prospect of genocide hilarious will just step out of the way so that you can ride in in your golden underpants and destroy fascism with jokes and memes.

LADY: Look, I know you think I’m frivolous and problematic, but maybe you’d change your mind if you knew how many people I hear from that tell me I’ve made them seriously reexamine their “anti-SJW” beliefs. Maybe the reason it seems to you like people on the “other side” can never be persuaded is that you just suck at talking to them, and you never even make the effort. The problem with leftists is you prefer to cloister yourselves away in Marx-Engels reading groups and radical feminist safe spaces where you argue amongst yourselves about Trotsky and Luxemburg or bell hooks and Judith Butler without ever making any genuine effort to engage with the public who you claim to represent with your calls for violence.

PUNK: Dude you’re literally spewing right-wing talking points right now.

LADY: I’m spewing what the public thinks of you, something you refuse to acknowledge or do anything to change.

PUNK: Man, you just have no idea how fucking privileged you have to be to think that calm rational discourse is even an option in the face of ideologies that deny marginalized people the basic right to exist. If it was you whose life was at stake maybe you’d be singing a different song.

LADY: That line of thinking only seems plausible to you because you’ve already made up your mind that this is going to end in violence. And that’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. You think that advocating violence makes you more radical than me and that it makes you a better ally, but you don’t know that. You don’t know how hate groups are going to react when you attack and humiliate them. You it’s an effective silencing tactic, but what if you’re wrong? Humiliation is the seed of terrorism. And what if instead of being silenced, those fascists you wanna punch decide to retaliate? And what if instead of retaliating against you, they retaliate against the marginalized people you claim to defend? Don’t pretend you know how this is gonna go down when you don’t.

PUNK [simul.]: You’ve made up your mind that it isn’t.

PUNK: You don’t know either. And you can afford to have this delusional hope that the fascists will just be peacefully persuaded because you’re a fucking white male.

LADY: You’re a fucking white male. You think that because you’ve picked up the twisted ravings of some continental philosopher, you’re smart enough to decide who lives and who dies. There are people all over the political spectrum who think that, and they’re called terrorists. When a Christofascist bombs an abortion clinic he thinks he’s ending a genocide against the most marginalized group of all—the sinless lives of the unborn. But you don’t leave any margin of error at all because you think you’ve got it all figured out.

PUNK [simul.]: Yeah I’m a fucking white male but I’m an actual ally unlike you. What kind of sick relativism do you have to believe in for you to think that’s a fair comparison? Fascism is inevitably violent, that’s not an open question. We don’t need to leave room for doubt on this point.

LADY: Your only rebuttal is to keep reminding me that I’m a white male, but I could say the same thing to you, you white male. You’re just a privileged piece of shit who likes to wear a ski mask and spew anti-capitalist slogans because you think it makes you look like a badass, but it just makes you look like a privileged fucking asshole. 

Are you even a real punk? You look like your mom dropped you off at a Green Day concert in 2003. That eyeliner looks like shit, did you get it at Hot Topic? 

You’re just a fucking suburban wannabe white male radical chic piece of shit, you privileged white male cis-privileged white fucking white male white-privileged white male white fucking asshole white male-privileged white cis fucking white male cis fucking

PUNK [simul.]: Well that’s because you are a white male you privileged fucking white male. You’re a cis-privileged appropriator with every conceivable advantage. The increasing hate in this country directed at people because of skin color, class, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, disability, neuro-atypicality and body type means absolutely nothing to you, you thin-privileged, male-privileged, cis-privileged, white-privileged, ablest, neurotypical white male piece of white male shit, you thin cis white male fucking white-male privileged thin cis white male piece of thin cis shit.

LADY: [with club] I’ll bash you you gutterpunk trash. I’ll bash the shit out of you. I’ll bash you good.

PUNK: [with hammer] I’ll bash you first you bourgie fuck. You fucking fascist. Nazi-sympathizing piece of shit.

LADY: [putting clip in gun] I’ll fucking kill you for that. I’ll fucking kill your face off.

PUNK: [doing cool thing with slide] I’ll kill you too you white male shit. 

LADY: [firing gun, shouting]

PUNK: [firing gun, shouting]

[“Take That, Nazi Scum!”]

Who won? Who’s next?

Patron J. Michael Comfort requests that I describe my ideal video game. So we’re talking full virtual reality here. I’m chasing a dog down a long dark hallway. I’m naked, and I’m back in high school, but it’s not really highschool. When I get to the end of the hallway, there are seven fat heiffers and seven emaciated heiffers, and that’s when the Pharoh tells me how I’m going to die.