Transcripts / The Left
Host: Ladies and gentlemen, a fascist.
Fascist: My fellow Americans, a war is about to be waged between everything you love and everything you hate. Our very right to exist as a people is under attack. Foreign invaders disguised as immigrants and refugees are being imported to our lands by a cabal of globalist elites. And if we don’t stop it soon, the result will be rape, chaos, and the end of civilization as we know it. I want you to imagine the faces of your wives and children. Picture their pure, white, innocent faces. Now, watch as those same wives are violated, and those same children dashed to pieces under the black boots of the Third World horde. Does that thought fill you with rage? Good. We must be prepared to fight. To fight for our children, and for our nation, and for our history, and for our culture; to fight for the homeland we’ve always known and the people we’ve always loved. Make America Great Again. Hail victory.
[audience applause]
Host: Ladies and gentlemen, a leftist.
Tabby: So… actually, according to Hegel, the for-itself can only be actualized through the in-itself. So the individuation of the subject necessarily demands the transcendence of the dialectical object through the sublimation of negative materiality.
[audience laughing]
Tabby: Oh fuck you, you fucking racists! 🖕😾🖕Death to capitalism, hail Satan! 🤘😾🤘
*hissing*
[audience booing]
♟♕♙
Justine: So, that speech didn’t go too well huh?
Tabby: Well, what do you expect? We have the politicians against us, a media run by giant corporations, and a complacent white middle class that prefers order to justice. Opposition to leftism is hardly surprising.
Justine: So let’s accept that all of that’s true. The game is rigged. Fine. Now how do you respond to that situation? Do you change nothing about your strategy at all and then blame the system when the predictable happens? Or do you try to improve your rhetoric somehow?
Tabby: Look, I don’t really need optics advice from a bougie queer aesthete who puts style over substance, and thinks that shining a pink light on everything can cover up her counterrevolutionary Trotskyite tendencies. I mean are you even a communist?
Justine: No, I’m not a communist.
Tabby: Well why not?
Justine: I like stuff. I like this, and I like this, and I like this. And that’s why I can’t be a communist.
Tabby: Justine, you do realize that Marxism distinguishes between private property and personal property right? You’re allowed to own possessions, you just can’t exploit people by owning the means of production.
Justine: Well, most of my stuff was made by Chinese slaves.
Tabby: Well you should feel bad about that.
Justine: Look I’m just trying to help you out here. Queer eye for the Marxist-Leninist, you know.
Tabby: Actually, I’m an anarcho-syndicalist.
Justine: Right. Do you have any friends who aren’t leftist militants?
Tabby: *hissing*
Justine: That’s what I thought. You know Tabby, people think you’re weird. And they’re afraid of you.
Tabby: Well, fascists are afraid of me.
Justine: Really. Well let’s take a look at your twitter feed. Let's see, we've got guillotines, Soviet memes, “liberals get the bullet too”? Bitch no wonder why everyone thinks you’re some kind of scary terrorist.
Tabby: Okay Jesus, let’s hear your mind-blowing revelations about respectability politics.
Justine: Great. Let’s start by taking a look at these pins and patches. Positives first. The rose is great, love the rose. Fantastic. Now, the hammer and sickle. We're gonna need to get rid of that.
Tabby: I’m just wearing it ironically.
Justine: Now don’t you start with that. It makes me think of bread lines and gulags and it needs to go.
Tabby: Well maybe you’re right. Fine, I’ll get rid of it. See, I can think about optics.
Justine: What’s that in your bag?
Tabby: Oh this?
Justine: Yeah, we’re gonna need to do something about that too.
Tabby: Now hold on, getting rid of the hammer and sickle is one thing, but Marx is a foundational thinker in the history of progressive political–
Justine: I’m not talking about getting rid of Marx, I’m talking about giving him a makeover. I mean just look at the cover of that thing. It's making me depressed just looking at it. Red and gold, what is this foreign shit, like a Chinese or a Soviet flag? It’s un-American. I don’t trust it, I don’t like the cut of its jib.
Tabby: So you want a Marx-Engels Reader wrapped in an American flag?
Justine: Oh, I can do you better than that. Let’s start with a gradient, add a grid, maybe a wave grid. Let’s get some shiny fonts, maybe a bust, a pink bust, with 3D glasses, pink glasses. Maybe some palm trees, aw yeah. Or how about this, lots of brands. More more more. Oh my god, it’s beautiful. Okay one more, one more. A pink field, chick lit. Yassss girl yassss.
Tabby: I just realized that I actually hate you.
[knocking]
Fascist: Hello fellow whites, do you have a moment to talk about the need to secure a homeland for our people and a future for white children?
Tabby: Get the hell out of here before I smash your face you Nazi bitch. Effective, isn’t it?
Justine: Well, I see your point. But this whole Antifa thing. I can’t help but wonder, from a strict PR perspective, if there’s some way you can nooooooooooot do thaaaat.
Tabby: Are you saying we shouldn’t punch Nazis?
Justine: I’m saying if 30,000 people show up to counterprotest Nazis, you won’t have to– But that means getting 30,000 people on your side, which you’re not gonna do by tweeting death threats and communist propaganda, and using words like “dialectic”, and telling everyone to read obscure European philosophers with unpronounceable names and unintelligible ideas, and smashing windows for no reason that anyone can understand or sympathize with, and expecting that people are gonna want to leave their jobs and comfortable lives to join a revolution to establish an economic system primarily associated with starvation and dictatorship.
Tabby: Well that’s an unfair association. Real communism doesn’t lead to starvation and dictatorship.
Justine: Has there ever been real communism?
Tabby: Well, yes. Between 1910 and 1912 in Revolutionary Eastern Cameroon a thriving, though short-lived communist utopia did flourish, until it was smashed by Western imperialism.
Justine: Right. But what’s the chance of that actually happening on a large scale in the near future? You seem to not even care about what’s actually possible, that’s how deep you are in pure theory. And if anything is anti-Marxist, it’s that. You know sometimes I think you secretly don’t want your ideas to succeed, you actually enjoy being a pariah whose political ideas never gain any traction. Because if you have purely theoretical political beliefs, you’re never accountable for the way things are going.
Tabby: I’m not saying theory is everything, only that there’s no praxis without theory.
Justine: Look, I’m not some kind of political scientist. For all I know you could be correct. I’m just saying, it’s a tough sell and you are not selling it.
Tabby: Well I wouldn’t have to work so hard to “sell” it if we didn’t live in a neoliberal intellectual void, where complacent so-called centrists with corporate backing have shifted the Overton window one inch left of fascism under the heading of “free speech” and “classical liberalism”.
[knocking]
Jackie Jackson: Is someone ready to bring their wares to the free marketplace of ideas?
Tabby: *hissing*
Justine: Hey hey hey! You leave centrists alone.
Jackie Jackson: Thanks Justine!
Justine: Jackie, get out of here. You’re embarrassing me in front of my Antifa friends. I’ll see you at brunch.
Jackie Jackson: Mimosas!
Tabby: What the hell was that? Brunch? You go to brunch with these people?
Justine: Well, it’s more of a boozy afternoon tea.
Tabby: Afternoon tea? Does Jeeves bring round madeleine cookies and fresh-sliced lemon wedges?
Justine: No, but I do have a very nice Windsor china tea set.
Tabby: Unbelievable. You get the bullet too, you get the goddamn bullet too.
Justine: Awww, come on. Me?? What do you want me to do, drink victory gin out of a rusty herring tin like the anti-imperialist revolutionaries in Eastern Cameroon? I mean nothing is ever good enough for you people. I could be munching on a cigar in the South American jungle shooting at capitalists with a black beret and an eye patch, and I still wouldn’t be left wing enough for you.
Tabby: Well why don’t you start by not going to afternoon tea with people who protect fascists, and not complaining about the optics of the people who are risking their lives to keep you safe.
Justine: How is Antifa keeping me safe?
Tabby: You do realize don’t you, that 99% of what Antifa does is not punching Nazis. Most of what we do is behind the scenes organizing, infiltrating fascist groups, doxing them, disrupting their recruitment, and yes we do engage in defensive violence at fascist rallies. And one of these days, if you can bear to tear yourself away from your tea set long enough, you’re gonna be at a counter-protest and the black bloc is gonna save your life, because you don’t look like you can fight and the police certainly aren’t going to save you.
Justine: Well, maybe so. I mean I’m the first to admit, these are not Nazi-punching hands. So, I’m not gonna get in your way. But in the free marketplace of ideas– and like it or not, that’s what we’re in– I can't help but think that what you are matters less than what you seem to be. And black-clad thugs in masks smashing things in the street seems pretty scary.
Tabby: Oh come on. You have to admit, there’s something kind of appealing about a guy in a mask.
Justine: What about a girl in a mask? 😘
Tabby: I think we should just be friends while I figure myself out.
Justine: Well, it was worth a shot. Look, my point is you can’t just win the war in the street. You have to win the war in the heart and the mind.
Tabby: You mean the propaganda war.
Justine: Shhhhh don’t call it propaganda, there could be liberals listening. Look, what the left needs to get, and what the centrists need to get, and what only I and the fascists seem to understand, is that reason doesn’t matter very much.
Tabby: Oh boy. Here we go.
Justine: What is it that centrists hate about social justice warriors? It’s not that they don't have good reasons in support of their arguments, it’s that they’re not cool right? Social justice warriors are not cool.
Tabby: What do you mean, they’re not popular?
Justine: No, no, no, I mean they’re not cool. You can be unpopular and still cool. In fact it can be cool to be unpopular.
Tabby: So what does it mean to be cool?
Justine: Cool is calm, detached, and in control of yourself. And the leading complaint about social justice warriors is that they’re emotional. The social justice warriors who everyone cringes at online are people– who I’m sure are nice people– but who are having a bad moment, and they’re caught on camera in the middle of an outburst. They’re out of control. And that’s the problem, it’s not cool.
Tabby: Look, this detached, ironic, pretend-not-to-give-a-shit posturing that white men mistake for rationality is really just the self-celebration of comfortable, privileged people with nothing at stake. People on the left are never gonna be “cool”, because anger and emotion are rational responses to injustice.
Justine: I thought you’d say that. But what you’re failing to consider is that it’s possible to be both angry and cool. And what do you get when you sprinkle a little anger into a glass of cool?
Tabby: What?
Justine: You get… ice cold. 😎
Tabby: I’m sorry. What?
Justine: And that’s what we on the left need to become, ice cold motherfuckers. ❄️
Tabby: What the hell are you talking about?
Justine: Miles Davis. Incredibly cool. But pretty angry. Did not take shit from white people. But also, ice cold motherfucker.
Tabby: So your plan is to win over centrists by becoming an ice cold motherfucker.
Justine: Precisely. What we need is social justice, drugs, and rock 'n roll.
Tabby: This is ridiculous.
Justine: And I suppose you think this is ridiculous? ♟
Tabby: I think it's stalemate.
Justine: No it’s not, my queen is wide open.
Tabby: No it isn’t.
Justine: Take me. 😳
Tabby: I’m gonna get going now.
Justine: Wait, where are you going?
Tabby: I’m gonna go bash the fash.
Justine: Well… be careful.
Tabby: Sure, enjoy your tea tomorrow.
Justine: What a goddamn lunatic. I’m gonna miss her.