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Because we are all invited by the media environment to be pundits rather than participants in the democratic process, here are my 10 predictions for the election.

1) There will be an election. There will be, practically speaking, two choices at the top.

(This is my boldest prediction.)
🧵

2) One choice will be an open fascist, at the head of a party that intends to control our bodies and our lives, and is eager to harm and kill in order to do it. This choice will almost certainly be Donald Trump.

3) The other choice will head a party that is all too often capitulant to fascism, because they are a status quo party, and while our status quo includes centuries of significant progress, it is also an historically corporatized and capitalized and supremacist status quo.

This adherence to status quo means that until the status quo is changed, the order of the day will include not only defense of the progress made, but also more empire building, and more money for military and cops, and more bombs to bomb civilians in Gaza and elsewhere, and so on.

The choice for that party now looks likely to be Kamala Harris.

4) Once that choice is made, the openly fascist party will create the most outlandish and bigoted narratives about the status quo choice, presented in the worst possible faith.

All attacks will center exactly where the fascists themselves are weakest. Maybe they’ll create some lurid and slanderous fictional version of Harris’ sexual history, for example. Maybe they’ll say she’s unfit for office and benefitted from unnatural advantages.

5) The media will test out these narratives of false equivalency, utilizing their practiced neutrality on matters of truth and fiction, and when they find a simple recipe that low-information voters like, they will ride it all the way to November.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆

6) A lot of people will ignore the real differences between the choices in order to proclaim the false equivalence that both choices are exactly the same. Some will do this because they’d like to support the worst choice and would rather seem neutral than bad.

Some will decide both choices are exactly the same this for the understandable if distressing reason that the choices do have real serious problems and so they'd rather not participate. (Others will ignore those same real and serious problems with the better choice.)

7) If the openly fascist party succeeds, we are going to see horrible changes to the status quo in this country, and, as usual, already marginalized people will pay the highest costs.

We may truly see the end of democracy, the end of bodily autonomy, mass deportation, a quickly-dropping curtain of theocratic autocracy—particularly if it turns out our corrupted Supreme Court has succeeded in knocking down the final guard rails to full autocracy.

We’ll see the sabotage of safeguards for human health and thriving, and the deliberate demolition of what safeguards have been put in place to combat catastrophic climate change And this will impart upon us a moral imperative to fight them, if we are people of awareness.

8) If the status quo party wins, it will have to overcome attempts by the fascist party to overturn the results in the courts on some absolutely ridiculous grounds that the corrupt extremist far-right majority in the Supreme Court may well rule in favor of.

If our status quo party can overcome the fascists who have seized our highest courts, there is a very strong probability it will have to overcome an armed resistance of white supremacists who would rather see the country burn than share it.

And if they overcome all that, they will almost certainly still defend the great abuses present in our unsustainable status quo, which will, as usual, make marginalized people pay the highest costs. And this will impart upon us a moral imperative to fight them, if we are people of conviction.

9) Our media will create narratives of equivalence for all of this, too.

10) People who would like to avoid awareness and the moral imperatives that attend awareness and conviction will accept and promote those simple narratives of false equivalence.

OK, I tricked you. Those aren’t predictions.

They're witness about what is happening already and existing patterns of behavior, which allows them to masquerade as predictions, because they don't just happen; *they keep happening.*

I think the counter to deliberate ignorance is witness. Witness isn't a debate, nor an argument. It’s simply paying the cost of awareness, observing with the benefit as much information as you can gather, and proclaiming things as you understand them to be.

It's a focus on what *is* that leads to conviction to improve it.

I would observe that fascism feeds best on equivalencies. This leads me to believe that it is fought by creating differentiation.
Witness is one thing I try to do to differentiate myself from fascism.

I could pretend that our status-quo party isn’t in the business of empire and capital and all the violence and entrenched supremacy that comes with it, but I wouldn’t be telling a true story. It wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me.

I could pretend that the other party isn’t a hate group animated by every bigotry, intending to demolish any progress made over the centuries, but I wouldn’t be telling a true story. It wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me.

I could pretend that all of this will be solved by the election, and that nothing is needed but my vote, but I wouldn't be creating differentiators.

Or I could pretend the election doesn’t matter at all, and what I choose to do is immaterial, but I’d face the same problem.

Or I could blame people with scant political representation for being disaffected toward elections, tell them that they their non-participation means they will deserve their suffering ... but blaming marginalized people for their own suffering doesn't differentiate from fascists.

Or I could choose from my relatively unthreatened position to not participate at all, as if non-participation in some way frees me from the moral burdens that attend belonging to this U.S. empire and all its crimes.

Or I could pretend that by voting for the least-bad option, I am similarly exonerated from the same moral responsibility that attends belonging to a militarized empire.

Yes, I could choose to use the election as a tool for self-exoneration, and it wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me from fascists.

Again, what we want here is simple witness. A refusal to accept false equivalencies by creating a real differentiation.

I can endlessly predict who will or will not support the right thing, and why things can't change because of the way things are. I can spend my time shouting at people for not making the same choice as me to establish not change but my own rightness.

I can do this, but it won't differentiate me.

@JuliusGoat This. You nailed it; '#puritarians' (perfect term) do exactly that.

@JuliusGoat
I haven't thought much about that angle, but I believe you are onto something there.

I still have a bit of trouble understanding it entirely, but I can see that there are many who know what a despicable person Trump is, but for some reason, peer pressure maybe, they must vote that way. And as you suggest, they sometimes have to defend that terrible choice.