Being the Media, and Being the Publicist

Kamala Emanuel and I -- aka the Ministry of Culture -- are off on another tour of parts of Europe and the US.  Details about all the gigs can be found at davidrovics.com/tour.

Back in the day (whichever days those are), Indymedia had a slogan:  be the media.  Keep complaining or quit complaining, but there are other things you can do in addition to that, either way.

Recently I wrote something on Organizing 101.  Every few years I feel the need to write that essay again, under the new circumstances of a changing world.

As I'm just about to embark on another fairly sizeable concert tour around parts of Europe and the US, I'm feeling inspired to say a few words on the notion of crowdsourced publicity, in the context of the ever-changing reality in terms of how we communicate with one another, what we communicate, and why we do it.

When I'm doing a gig anywhere, there is invariably someone who, often within earshot of the organizer of the gig, will say to me, "publicity for this was really bad, it wasn't well-promoted."

This situation always makes me cringe, of course, on behalf of the usually very diligent gig organizer who tried hard to get the word out.  But there's usually someone who will say something along those lines, whether it's a small crowd or a big one that surrounds us.  There are always people who are disappointed that I'm not packing stadiums -- and that's a lovely sentiment, whether it's anywhere within the realm of reality or not.

In the real world, without the aid of big hits, big record labels and management companies arranging blanket media coverage of a tour to pack those big venues, for the rest of us entirely devoid of those resources, getting a few dozen people into a room at the same time can be very challenging, and whether or not it happens often comes down to how well word of mouth is functioning.

I'll explain what I mean by that.  Word of mouth, or the phenomenon of people telling other people about something, is something that is extremely subject to the vagaries of the communications reality in which we find ourselves.  The more we can all be conscious of that, the better.

That is, for example, if we want to tell our circle of friends and comrades about an artist we've discovered, a new piece of music, a new movie, or whatever else, and our default way of doing that is in the form of public posts on social media platforms, this medium of communication will tend to discourage people from posting about a local event happening in their town, because it may not be relevant to most of their friends on whichever platform.

Posting about a controversial artist publicly can also invite attacks from all sorts of potentially unexpected quarters.  The potential of facing this kind of hostility and trolling also tends to discourage public posts about certain people or issues.

What many of us may or may not realize is in so many cases, even if we are trying to promote a local event through means of public posts on social media platforms, sharing a link to an event listing with a few words of recommendation tends to be the sort of post that no one sees, since this sort of post doesn't seem to satisfy any of the algorithms.

If you're good at public social media posts that get traction, I'm not trying to discourage such things at all!  I'm just saying that there are reasons people are discouraged from promoting local events in various forums they use daily, and reasons why when they do promote local events in those forums, it doesn't work very well.

So, now on social media as it once was with getting a gig listed in the local paper, what really matters is true word of mouth communication, not any of that nonsense, barring the exceptional cases.

What works consistently is talking to folks, in person or in some kind of personal conversation.

Then there's the question of why.  With all the hurdles facing us on the platforms we mainly use to interface with the world these days, why bother trying to figure out how to circumvent the designers and do something like promote a local event?

First of all, I'd like to throw out there the notion that there are powerful forces involved here who really don't want to help anyone promote links or events in the physical world that get people off of their platforms.  That in itself seems like one good reason not to cooperate with their algorithms, if at all possible.

Another is what happens when we spend more time online, and less time out in the world at physical events, like at concerts of touring artists like me?  We get more lonely and depressed -- the verdict is long since in on that.  There's no question, regularly getting out and being with other people in a physical setting, without staring at your phone, is essential to everyone's emotional well-being.

Then, with overtly political artists like me, there is this other thing to mention.

There's probably no way to fully compensate for the phenomenon, but I think it's good to be conscious of it.  That is, when times are more optimistic, when there's a vibrant social movement on the streets daily and that sort of thing, then more people are more apt to do things like tell their friends and comrades that an artist singing songs related to that movement is coming to town and doing a concert.  When there's less of a movement happening, people are less inclined to talk about it.

This is all understandable, emotionally, but it can create a terrible feedback loop, and it's truly counterproductive.

Why?  Because even when a social movement isn't happening like it once was, and even if certain artists may serve to remind you of what may be a pretty sad state of affairs, if the artist is any good at all, and is, say, me and my singing partner, Kamala, then generally we'll be aiming to leave you in an uplifted state by the end of every show.  Whether the team is winning or losing, if the cheerleaders are any good, you should enjoy our performance.

And you'll likely also enjoy seeing other people.

Ah, other people.  When the social movement you may have been part of is in a shrunken state, this has often come along with schisms of all kinds, and now there are people in the scene you've fallen out with, who may be coming to the gig, too.  Safer to stay home, many are thinking.

But therein lies the power of music.  Everyone in the same room, hearing words that are sung -- and therefore words that are going straight to the emotional centers of all the brains in earshot -- relating to the same songs, laughing and tearing up on the same occasions, singing the same words together, this brings people together, and helps everyone recognize what they share in common.

Which is probably the most important reason everyone should find a way to tell their friends and comrades about an artist coming to their town who might cause them to feel such feelings, and be in such community.

My sermon is over.  Hope to see you on the road and in the streets.

America Throws A Tantrum Again

I think I am among many people who feel like we are emerging from a fog, having gotten lost with arguing on social media for years, before finally realizing how this whole phenomenon is so much worse than pointless.

It's just so easy to yell at people you can't see, and to caricature them in your mind.  Just like how many of us often behave when operating a vehicle of some kind.

Which is not to say that I have become a saint -- I haven't.  But it's good to have aspirations, and whatever I was aiming for before, that led me to communicate by essentially shouting at people online, particularly in the earlier stages of corporate social media platforms, was not heading anywhere positive.

As we close in on another election, and the western media seems to have almost nothing else to talk about (never mind the genocide, the famines, or the various wars that aren't happening in Ukraine), it's easy to see online that efforts to communicate by shouting at one another in social media comments, or shouting into the void with shrill social media posts that seek to portray anyone who doesn't see the "obvious" truth as a moron, are still ubiquitous.

I'll talk a little about what people are arguing about in a minute.  First I want to talk about how people are arguing, and what this does to each other.

I'm a father of three children, one of whom is now an adult.  I have personally yet to experience the phenomenon I see happen in other parent-child relationships, that we commonly call a "tantrum." 

I don't want to beleaguer the point with lots of tangential ruminations on parenting philosophy, but to cut to the chase, if you really listen to your children and you're aware of how they're feeling, the relationship never gets to the point where a child feels the need to shout at you, flail around, cry inconsolably, etc.  (I realize we're also just lucky.)

As I listened to and empathized with my children and noted things like their lack of desire or need to throw tantrums or ever really be disagreeable, I also noted what a tremendous and negative and lasting impact it could have on them on occasions where I showed signs of annoyance, impatience, or disapproval.  

It's very easy to see how dramatically different our relationships would be if I or their other parents were frequently acting towards them or saying things to them that communicated those kinds of messages.

It's more amplified and intense with children, but adults have all the same range of emotions as the kids do.  We also are fully capable of shutting down or throwing tantrums or becoming very defensive, etc., when faced with negative behavior coming from others.

Certainly from my experience as a parent, and my experience as a musician communicating with audiences, is you're not communicating with anyone if you're shouting, or being overbearing, or trying to tell people what they should be thinking or feeling.  Rather, you often communicate best by telling good stories and letting people come to their own conclusions.

Studies in how people learn in educational environments that I've read about, naturally enough, reinforce the efficacy of this approach, and the failure of the more "listen to me, teacher knows best," punitive-oriented approaches at running a classroom.

You don't have to spend much time on Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, etc., to see evidence of a whole lot of people -- and most definitely a whole lot of bots and who knows what else -- who seem to believe that shouting into the void their "obvious truths" and condemning those who disagree are still very popular pastimes.

And what are these "obvious truths" that everybody shouting online thinks are so clear?  These "obvious truths" that may make those who reject them simultaneously anti-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, Putin-lovers and selfish, among other things?

The dominant one lately relates to the impending election.  On one side are those for whom it is abundantly evident that a vote for either ruling party is a vote for genocide, since both parties clearly support the genocide of the Palestinians currently underway.  On the other are people who are against the genocide, but say it's abundantly obvious that if you care about Palestinians you should vote for Kamala, because Trump will be worse.

Everyone knows that under either ruling party, the leadership of the US is going to continue to facilitate Israel's atrocities.  But according to one camp, a vote for Kamala is a vote for genocide.  According to the other, a vote for Kamala is a vote for the lesser evil, who will be a less genocidal president than Trump, and voting for a third party candidate is an expression of utopianism, selfishness, a lack of empathy for Palestinians, a lack of understanding of reality, or all of the above, since that candidate stands no chance of winning.

For the sake of argument, let's accept the logic that US society and the world at large are at least somewhat better off when the US is run by Democrats rather than Republicans.  I would guess that 90% of the people reading this probably believe this to be true, whatever your political affiliations or wherever in the world you live.  Given the choice, you liked Obama better than you liked either of the Bushes.

Even if we take that as a given, and even if that may perhaps be more true with this election than it has ever been before, what happens in countries where there is no opposition to the left of the main left-of-center party?  It tends to take the left vote for granted, and in terms of policy, it moves to the right.

And more pressingly, perhaps, where is the world going under US Democratic Party leadership?  The fairly clear answer, from Hiroshima to Hanoi to Jabaliya, with the country still leading the way in carbon emissions worldwide, with the debt growing more out of control with every passing year, with military spending mushrooming year after year after year, is to hell.

No self-respecting leftist thinks the Democratic Party is leading us anywhere else.  The argument that I'm hearing, and in some form participating in, is between those who think that although the Democrats are leading us to hell, we really need to vote for them because the Republicans will lead us there faster.  Others are convinced that because the two-party system is barely more democratic than a dictatorship and it's leading us to global suicide, every election is another opportunity to make that point by rejecting it and supporting a good third party candidate.

Some of us have been doing this for decades -- it didn't just start with the Russian funding coming in.

Of course, being a fan of reality, and history, I know that, contrary to popular mythology, political change in this country tends to be motivated more by bipartisan responses to mass movements and bipartisan responses to largescale external events.  Change doesn't happen so much because it was voted in, in an election where one party had a radically different political agenda than the other.

Nonetheless, for what it's worth, we have this argument every four years, especially, about the electoral system and who to vote for -- and who's a selfish, genocidal moron for not thinking so.  Every four years, most of my friends line up on one side of the argument or the other, though increasing numbers of them seem to be sitting it out, which I tend to think might be a good sign, though it's hard to tell.

I have personally been in the camp that has consistently been calling for supporting a third party movement, ever since I was old enough to vote.  

I spend a lot of time in reasonably functional democracies, and they are all countries where there are multiple parties.  

Growing up in the USA, by contrast, it has long been evident that our country functions more as a one-party state, run by whoever pays the most money to the politicians.  In so many obvious ways, it is a failed state, but over time it only gets worse, like throughout my lifetime, and I'm almost a senior citizen.

In conclusion:  regardless of your position on these vitally important questions, I would encourage you to realize that by acting like you know the "obvious truth," and by behaving that way in arguments on- or off-line, and by denigrating those who hold differing viewpoints, even on such vital issues, you are most likely doing more harm than good.

Even if you convince someone of the rightness of your position by acting like you know everything, in the longer term, you are creating a more toxic environment, and a less conducive one for the kind of inclusive, empathetic, musical, loving social movement we so desperately need.

How Liberalism and Fascism Are Flip Sides of the Same Coin

From top to bottom, Americans can virtue-signal like nobody's business.  But material conditions of most of society in the US indicate a total failure of governance.

One of the comments on my latest essay on Substack, How the Left Shrank, represents a vitally important concept to understand and explore.  So I thought I'd share most of this comment with you, and respond to it at some length.  Here's the comment:

I don’t really disagree with anything you say. However, a huge irony seems to be that ‘the left’ has won. You may well say it’s not the ‘real left’, but the MSM [mainstream media], Hollywood, universities for sure, and seemingly the administrative structures of the federal government are all aligned pretty well under some general leftist/progressive/woke/whatever banner. How does that fit in do you think?

And my possibly long-winded response.

Someone committed to the liberal narrative might talk about how ideas are first ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as self-evident.  They'll say things like overt discrimination against people on the basis of various demographics used to be acceptable, but now it's not, at least in the circles mentioned in the comment, and in much of society at large as well.  Proof of the victory of left thinking.

Meanwhile, though, society is more unequal than it's been since the age of the robber barons, with millions of people in the US living on the streets, tens of millions of Americans without health care, half the country struggling to pay basic expenses, altogether demonstrating essentially the collapse of the welfare state, and the fundamental inability -- or unwillingness -- of state or federal government to pass the kind of legislation that could easily solve these problems.

The radical inequality could also be seen as the dismal failure of the left to create, or even to effectively demand, anymore, a better world.  And of course, US foreign policy continues to be imperialist, under the leadership of either party.  But as far as domestic policies go, are we to understand that the left has both won and it has lost?  We use correct pronouns and we know it's not OK to insult whoever sits at the front of the bus, but more of us collectively, altogether, are living on the streets?  How does that all work?

I want to get into some historical background in order to arrive at an answer to this apparent contradiction that makes sense. 

The basic idea -- and even the practice -- of the welfare state has existed for a long time.  The idea that it can be the state's responsibility to make sure all people living within its borders are afforded certain material rights as well as legal ones.  Not just the right to freedom of speech and assembly, or the right to sit at the counter at the diner and get served, but the right to live somewhere and have access to all the basic necessities for living a decent life, such as housing, food, and education.

In practice, in the US, the welfare state effectively existed for maybe two generations.  It came into being as a consequence of a combination of factors including the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and all the massive sacrifices made by so many Americans in World War 2.  There had to be a peace dividend, and that was a welfare state, upheld by the policies of both ruling parties.

This period in the US -- the 1930's to the early 1970's -- ended a long time ago.  But it's important to mention this period, because domestic policies with regards to taxation of the rich, the building of infrastructure, state involvement with the production of housing, the regulation of the housing market, and so many other aspects of domestic government policies during that period have defined so much of what Americans understand about America.  This long-gone era still defines how so many people frame things in this country.

It's also important to mention this period because -- if you ignore massive elephants in the living room such as ongoing imperialism abroad and institutional racism at home -- the policies of the welfare state may embrace enough of the elements of an authentically left/socialist agenda so that socialism and liberalism could be confused with each other, for a time.

In the US, this period is the exception, not the rule, however.  Let's now talk about the rule, rather than the exception to it.

The rule -- before, after, and to a very significant extent during the exceptional period of the more or less functional welfare state -- has been rule by con artists, from two different factions of con artists, both ruling on behalf of the capitalists who pay for them to get elected.  The capitalists don't elect them directly, however, so it is their responsibility to con us, the people, into voting for one or another of them, and to pretend they represent our interests.

Of course to some extent they have to actually represent our interests, they can't be completely corrupt.  It's a balancing act between giving the people, or at least their base, enough of what they want to keep them appeased, while mainly serving the interests of those who paved their path to power by paying for it, through our broken electoral system, much more resembling an auction than any kind of actual democratic process.

Let's explore a little how this kind of conning tends to work, for both parties, taking the pressing issue of the raging and ever-deepening housing crisis in this country as an example.

There are well over a hundred million renters struggling to get by in this country, and a very large number of them seem to be looking to Trump for solutions.

Trump says we'll solve the problem of skyrocketing housing costs by deporting millions of people without papers, undocumented workers, or as Trump would say, the "illegal immigrants" who are eating your pets.  Get rid of them, and free up all that housing stock for Americans.

Exactly this kind of idea has been tremendously popular in the US in the past, and in many other countries as well.  It has won many politicians elected office in the US, the UK, Israel, Australia, Brazil, India, France, Italy, Germany, and so many other countries, in recent years and going back a century and more.

But let's note here that what these anti-immigrant, racist, fascist, or fascist-leaning politicians are doing is not just attacking immigrants or foreigners -- they are offering a solution to the housing crisis.

This is very important to understand.  Fascists are trying to offer solutions to the very same problems that the other party or parties are trying to solve.  Fascism -- or, as they liked to call it in 1930's Germany, National Socialism -- tries to appeal to the electorate or to the people by offering solutions to the same pressing problems that the socialists are hopefully trying to solve.  The success of the fascists in getting elected, in so many recent and historical cases, is predicated on the failure of whoever was in power before they came along to solve these problems first.

For their part, the Democrats are ruling on behalf of the landlord lobby all over the country -- let's be very clear, that is the situation, as evidenced by one Democrat-controlled legislature after another banning rent control since the end of the era of the post-war social contract.  But although they have no real intention to solve the housing crisis, they try to address at least little bits of it with their own, liberal cons.

The Democratic leadership knows they won't solve the housing crisis, since housing as a form of investment is fundamental to their party ever holding office.  The Democratic "machine" that runs so many American cities is a machine fueled by and put in place through money from developers and banks.  The need for Americans to have a place to live is one of the biggest, most monopolized, and most profitable industries in the world, and the Democratic governors and Democratic legislators serve their masters loyally, while speaking out of the other sides of their mouths to us rabble.

When their words are aimed at their more well-to-do supporters they'll say things like "the housing crisis is basically a huge intractable problem that goes way back.  It's going to take many years to get ahold of the rising prices of everything.  It will require massive investment in building more housing.  Plus we'll need to do things we progressives are loathe to do, such as deregulating the housing market even further in order to have less red tape, fewer concerns about materials, safety, the environment, climate change, etc."  Because, they say, incredibly, it is too much regulation that makes housing too expensive, rather than a different kind of regulation (rent control), as is the obvious reality, if you see how the functional countries do things.

With this kind of talk they aim to calm the minds of the landlords, big and small, and of all those invested in the housing market.  Don't worry, we're not really serious about changing anything.

Then, out of the other side of their mouths, they tell the hard-pressed tenants drowning in ever-rising rents charged by monopoly landlords that at least if you elect us, even if we won't even think about doing something as radical as passing rent control legislation, we will seriously work on starting to create an atmosphere whereby the capitalists might think it's a good idea to build more affordable housing, and -- oh yeah! -- we'll also start a program that will fund all homeless military veterans to get housed.

And we'll start a program aimed at housing some of the most marginalized elements of society, who the more left-leaning Democratic base is understood to care deeply about, such as immigrants, people of color, and abused teenagers who ran away from home and require expensive, state-funded, gender-affirming surgical care.

This is the liberal's version of deporting all the aliens.  Whether we deport the aliens or house the veterans and the pregnant mothers, we totally fail to solve the overall housing crisis, we continue to serve the interests of the capitalists, but we hopefully throw enough crumbs to our bases of support that we get elected again.

And the liberal pushing for housing the veterans can say to their critics from the left calling for housing everyone, what, you don't want to start somewhere?  You don't really care about the traumatized veterans and the other most marginalized among us?  You want to center the interests of less marginalized people instead?  You just want to put forward your utopian, impossible agenda rather than supporting practical initiatives?

There are many arguments to keep the "class reductionist" or "less woke" leftists in line, and the liberals use their rendition of woke reasoning to exactly that effect.

Of course it ends up driving many former supporters of the Democrats into the ranks of the Republicans, especially the elements of the MAGA scene these days who are trying so hard to appeal to the working class, despite the party's long record of serving the interests of big business.  But if we lose some part of our base, they reason, this is the price that must be paid for actually serving the interests of the rich, of the military-industrial establishment, of the banks, the Israel lobby, etc.

The leadership of both parties know they're working for the highest bidder, they know this is an auction, not a democracy, but their jobs depend on maintaining the illusion, of being convincing in their con 24-7.

Whether they're Republicans conning us in the fascist direction, or Democrats conning us in the socialist direction, there are no indications that the Democratic leadership has actually embraced a progressive agenda, and many indications that they have adopted various positions that are convenient for keeping just enough of us within their little tent.

If the Democratic leadership was interested in a real socialist agenda, then they would have voted against all the military budgets and corporate-sponsored "free trade" bills over the past fifty years, rather than voting for them.  If they were interested in real equity in society, rather than just window-dressing, then we would not have more dramatic inequality in this society than at any time since the 19th century.

This situation in the world's richest country -- a gigantic country, with so many hard-working people and tremendous natural resources -- is one that has been engineered by the political servants of their capitalist masters.  And it's a situation that a few good majority votes in Congress and a few signatures of a president's pen could undo.

We could literally have affordable housing for everyone within a few months, if the political will existed.  The housing stock is out there, empty.  The shortage is largely imaginary, or engineered.  They're all pulling a con -- whether it's the ones calling for kicking out the immigrants, or the ones calling for housing the latest most favored marginalized group.

It's nice to treat people with respect and call them "sir" or "ma'am" instead of addressing them with a racial slur.  If a change in attitudes among a lot of people over the past fifty years were an indication of some kind of leftwing victory, then maybe we could imagine we've arrived already.  But obviously if you look around yourself you can see we have not.  

Because what the left has always stood for ever since the concept has existed in the modern age is actual material progress for the 99%.  An actual improvement in the physical conditions in which people live.  By that measure, the Democratic leadership continues to rule on behalf of the rich, it continues to choose to fail to serve the interests of the people, and most certainly it continues to fail to serve the interests of the people of the rest of the world as well, with every new bomb from Biden hitting the ground in Gaza and Lebanon.

How the Left Shrank

I was born in 1967.  When I was a baby, there was an intensely musical antiwar movement so big and so very attractive, that it swept much of society off its feet, demilitarized millions of hearts and minds, and played a serious role in curtailing the imperial interests of the world's biggest empire, for about twenty years afterwards (it was called "Vietnam Syndrome").

When I was a baby, there was a huge and militant Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and they all were against the war, too, and made that very clear in all kinds of ways, including by participating in those huge antiwar marches.  There was the American Indian Movement, Raza Unida, the student movement, the feminist movement, and it was all self-consciously interconnected into a thing that millions of people daily and habitually referred to as "The Movement."

In 1971 some very heroic folks broke into the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania while everyone inside was busy watching an epic fight (Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali).  They stole over a thousand classified documents that revealed some of the practices of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program.

Locally police departments had what were commonly known as Red Squads.  What the FBI dubbed Cointelpro for short was a national-level Red Squad.  The liberated documents revealed a stunning array of really underhanded methods the FBI used to systematically keep the left as disoriented, distracted, and divided as possible.

There's your background.  Apologies to those who already know all that history, but I increasingly meet people who have absolutely no idea any of this stuff ever happened, and it's very necessary history for understanding everything that's happened since then that I'll be mentioning. 

Growing up in the 1980's me and my friends tended to think the left was really small and insignificant in the US, which it certainly was compared to twenty years earlier.  But there were independent book stores, infoshops, indy record labels, cooperatives of various sorts, in cities across the US.  Like other young people in the 80's hanging out at places like that, me and my punk friends all learned about Cointelpro, learned about how cool the Black Panthers and AIM and SDS had been, discovered Utah Phillips and the history of the IWW, and read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

In the 90's I was at least peripherally involved with what we called the radical environmental movement at the time.  Then at the end of the 90's, in a much more intense way, with the much larger and more pervasive global justice movement.  And then the massive, global antiwar movement that rose up immediately following September 11th, 2001.  And I've involved myself in many other movements that have sprung up since then.

With the movement that back in the 60's they called The Movement, intersectionality was fundamentally important. With the global justice movement in the 90's it was the same.  In Europe they were calling it the red-green alliance.  In the US context, where red is blue, it was "Teamsters and turtles."

Since the days of the global justice movement, and especially since the rise of the antiwar movement after 9/11, I have watched as what we might historically have called the left -- that is, the various elements of society who stand for the welfare of the working class, the health of the environment, the rights of women, those seeking to end militarism and imperialism, etc. -- tear itself apart, one chunk of flesh at a time.

Cointelpro has continued since long after the raid on the FBI offices -- of that there is no serious doubt.  And at the same time, we don't necessarily need the FBI's help to arrive at such a divided and conquered state.  Social media algorithms alone could do that for us pretty well, I suspect.  And we probably don't even need either the FBI or the algorithms, with all the other good reasons we have to disagree with each other.

For almost two decades I toured most of the time, mostly in the US, so I got to see the country as it evolved over time, a snapshot every few months of many different parts of the world.  In the past decade or so, much less touring in the US, and far fewer snapshots.  So when I get them, they can be much more of a shock.

It becomes much clearer, when you get the snapshot less often, how fast the left is disintegrating itself, excluding one group after another.  People who would have been organizing, or at least coming to, my shows in a given city now don't, because they don't agree with something they now think I stand for, or because they suspect there will be other people in the room they don't want to see -- former comrades who now think they are fascists, or abusers, or transphobes, or racists, antisemites, or all kinds of other things.

In the 90's I saw the left essentially drive out a Christian group called the Bruderhof.  The Bruderhof have long been very supportive of political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, and sought to build alliances for a while, but they were rebuffed, in many different ways, by leftists who couldn't stomach working with people they perceived as sexist and homophobic.

After September 11th, 2001, there were many people who participated in antiwar movement activities whose general focus was on getting to the bottom of what really happened -- what was the involvement of Saudi Arabia, of Israel, of the CIA, in cultivating Al-Qaeda in the first place?  Were there people inside US intelligence agencies who knew something was about to happen?

This element of the antiwar movement was increasingly over time isolated from the rest of the movement.  Conspiracy theories seemed to get wilder over time.  There are all kinds of explanations for this phenomenon, which can operate simultaneously.  But whatever was determining the development of this phenomenon, that's what happened, and now if I ever see or hear about folks who were in that camp of the antiwar movement, it's because I'm watching them on Fox.

It was once the case, at least by my possibly rose-tinted recollections, that the left tended to be a big enough tent that it included a spectrum of views on free speech as a concept, from free speech "absolutists" to those who engaged in actions like shutting down events and got accused in the press as people who were opposed to free speech, for what they themselves considered to be an opposition to hate speech, or dangerously far right views.

I have watched as the free speech absolutists have been alienated from the left, and many of those that would once have been considered part of the fabric of the progressive scene now consider themselves to be on the right, or at least libertarian, or, as they often call themselves, "politically homeless."

I watched as those who didn't subscribe to tactics like burning dumpsters or throwing projectiles got denounced as opponents of "diversity of tactics," and I watched as demonstrations shrank precipitously with each new dumpster burnt.

I heard with horror of the end of the Michigan Women's Festival in 2015.  I was at the last London Anarchist Book Fair in 2017, and saw how the organizers were attacked as transphobes for daring to think that the book fair could still be a forum that included different perspectives on many issues, all in one large building, including women who would once have just been called feminists, but we are now told they are TERFs.

I witnessed one person after another get accused and broadly shunned allegedly for being abusers, or sympathetic to one, for questioning the story of someone claiming to be a victim, for not always, unquestioningly "believing her" in every case.

I watched elements of the environmental movement sabotage itself by spreading the notion within its ranks that white people wearing dreadlocks is cultural appropriation, and therefore racist.  An environmental movement where around a third of the participants were white people with dreadlocks was suddenly anti-dreadlock.

I saw people get kicked out of venues because their professed belief in Nordic mythology was judged to be too sympathetic to Adolf Hitler.  This is a widespread thing in Germany, where they excel at this sort of splitting, too.

I watched one after another Marxist or anarchist intellectual join the list of the shunned and denounced, for their attachment to the notion that we exist in the context of a capitalist system.  I was personally kicked out of the Anarchist subreddit for being a "class reductionist."  Those of us involved with Occupy Wall Street in 2011 were told we weren't paying enough attention to things like race and gender, with our obsession with the rich owning everything.

In 2020 I saw as one after another natural living yoga practitioner sort started drifting from a soft left kind of orbit to a more and more conspiratorial orientation, as they were increasingly shunned by those telling them if they were hesitant about the emergency vaccines, they were causing harm, being selfish, and probably supported Trump.

I watched one new group after another attempt to join the movement that was on the streets in 2020, and heard the accusations made about each of them, about how they fell short of what was expected of good allies these days, for insufficiently centering the right people, generally.

By my recollection, the left once included people who believed in voting for the Democrats, those who rejected the whole charade of elections in this corrupt system, and those that campaigned for third party candidates.  Today if you support the Green Party you will be denounced as a stooge of Putin by some fairly prominent people long known as anarchists and socialists.

Opponents of NATO expansionism and all the billions in military aid sent to Ukraine are also denounced as Putin stooges.

As the antiwar movement shrank to nearly nothing, and people coming out of different political traditions tried to organize together, I saw how they were denounced right away, loudly and often, as some kind of closet fascist movement trying to build a mythical "red-brown alliance" in 2022.

In some places, especially Germany, we can see Arabs and Muslims in recent months being driven out of anti-racist rallies against the far right, on the basis that they are presumed to be antisemites, if they're critical of Israel.

In England I have watched the British Labor Party eviscerate itself of all its best people, denouncing them as antisemites, an ongoing process.

And of course throughout all of this I have seen music and culture become more and more isolated from an ever-more cerebral and online left, arriving now at a juncture where across the USA you are extremely unlikely to hear live music at a protest, since now anyone with an acoustic guitar on the left seems to be associated with the perception of a failed antiwar movement that people have heard about existing, a long time ago, on TV.

You can still hear live music at political events, however.  Just go to any Trump rally.

They Call It Democracy

I had been thinking that maybe "The Ballad of Donald and Kamala" was all I was going to have to say about this election cycle, but apparently there's more.

Given the extremely repetitive nature of the public and private discourse in the USA during election season, I thought maybe about eight years ago I had said all I could ever possibly want to say on the subject.  But I guess the problem there is although the dynamic is deeply familiar, the facts on the ground are new.  

It's not 2016.  Her name is Kamala, not Hillary, and certainly not Bernie.  It's not 2004, or 1968, it's 2024.  The backdrop of a genocidal US-sponsored war on an entire people is not in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam, it's in Palestine and Lebanon.

In all the years I've been alive, and certainly in all the years I've lived in Portland, Oregon, I've never seen so little evidence of any kind of political activity.  There are occasional houses with American flags on them, which is the closest thing in the actual city of Portland where you're likely to see signs of any proud Trump supporters.  That's been true around here for quite a while.  What's new is the almost complete absence of yard signs supporting the Democratic ticket.

On my walks around our inner southeast Portland neighborhood, one of the fancy new houses, among the row of them on that block, has a Harris-Walz yard sign.  If I take a longer walk, I'll eventually come to a house that displays one yard sign calling for an end to Israel's war on Palestine.  We live near an infamously liberal liberal arts school, Reed College.  In my regular walks around the neighborhood, I'm the only person wearing an overtly political t-shirt that I ever come across.

Not only that, but I get a lot of mildly dirty looks from people, in reaction to the faded Palestinian flag t-shirt I'm often wearing around town.

My interpretation of the dirty looks isn't necessarily that they buy the Israeli narrative or they're not sympathetic to the Palestinians and Lebanese being killed en masse.  Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, I don't know.  But I suspect the dirty looks are more coming from a rejection of the whole concept of wearing a political t-shirt in the first place, which is seen as a fairly pointless form of virtue-signaling.  I find myself largely agreeing with the sentiment that it is basically a pointless act of virtue-signaling, but I do it anyway.  I've been doing it for a very long time.

Maybe the lack of Harris-Walz yard signs is because people are horrified by the bipartisan Democratic and Republican support for massive amounts of bombs being sent to Israel.  Hard to know what explains the absence of something.

I guess we'll find out if the absence of the yard signs indicates disinterest in voting at all this time around.  I suspect people will still vote.  And around here, they'll mainly vote for the Democrats, for whatever office.  The primaries are all that matter in places like this, and the Israel lobby has been buying up one seat after another, as they do.

Oregon isn't considered a swing state, but I'm getting the impression over time of what it's like to live in one lately.  My Instagram feed in recent weeks is completely dominated by Jill Stein ads.  I love all of them, but that fact notwithstanding, it's easy to see how other people are noticing that something's up here, not just me.  What kind of advertising budget and what algorithms are at play here?

Otherwise, the discourse from the "radicals should hold their noses and vote for Kamala" camp is the usual discourse -- the Republican candidate is obviously worse on most every conceivable policy, so although things will also continue to get worse under the Democratic candidate as well, vote for them, because the inevitable decline will happen more slowly that way.

The problem with convincing people to vote for the lesser evil in this instance is that the one who represents the greater evil is also the only one talking about how much everything sucks, aside from the third party candidates like Jill Stein.

Even if it's obvious that Trump will be a disaster, like he was before, he's talking about how much worse things are for people than they were several years ago, and Harris is trying to pretend things have been improving and will continue to improve under her administration.

Of course, Trump is blaming "illegal immigrants" for the rise in the cost of everything, which is the far right's explanation for all problems, traditionally.

On the other hand, if you take received wisdom across the acceptable political spectrum for granted that the housing market somehow cannot be regulated, rent cannot be controlled through laws, but only by producing more supply, or by limiting demand, then Trump's arguments about limiting demand by deporting millions of people start to make some kind of warped sense.  No one from the Democrats are offering any solutions aside from increasing supply, which no one trusts the Democrats to actually do.  On the other hand, deporting millions of people in order to suppress demand does seem like something Trump might actually do.

If the Democrats were offering a real solution -- like rent control, regulating the price of houses, and other forms of regulation, like the ones that work so well in so many other countries -- I bet a lot of people would readily jump on that bandwagon.  But this idea of the government having success with organizing the building of millions of houses, with the cost of land unregulated and insanely high, and no serious talk of doing anything about that, it just sounds like a pipe dream to people, because it probably is.

So, deport the aliens, and thus decrease competition for shit jobs, and decrease demand for shit rentals.  It's horrible and cruel, but it's taking action.

I promise there are lots of actual people who think this way.  This is the historic process through which Democrats become Republicans, or socialists become fascists.

You know from the polls back in the day that there are so many people who voted for Bernie Sanders who also voted for Donald Trump.  People don't want to vote for centrists offering more of the same, when what they're experiencing is so stressful and generally bad.  They want someone offering change.

I realize we may be talking about a tiny little percentage of people who don't know which way they're voting, or a tiny percentage of people who may be vacillating between voting or not voting at all, or between voting for one of the two major party candidates, or for a third party candidate.

But to the extent that this little slice of the population may be the deciding factor between a Trump or a Harris presidency, if it's true, as I suspect, that this slice of the population wants a change from the status quo, they won't be voting for Harris.

Harris keeps on talking about helping the middle class.  I'm wondering who these people are, this middle class of which she speaks.  I think she's talking about people who inherited a house or two, or people who bought a house back when that was possible for people to do who weren't rich.

I'm sure she's not talking about the renting half of this nation, or the ones struggling to pay gigantic mortgages, who made the mistake of buying a house sometime after the global financial crisis circa 2008.  Or the people who are struggling to pay for the rising costs of all the commodities that have become so much more valuable, now that the "international community" have imposed sanctions on Russia, causing so much of the world to starve, and the west to tighten their belts, as the saying goes.

One of the two candidates speaks out against that war, at least -- even if they're both all for the other one that's emptying the US of its supply of bunker-busting missiles, and violently ending the lives of thousands of Palestinian children.

Around here, in Portland, and I know it's also true of so many other cities around the country, what most people want a solution for is the insanely rising cost of housing, for both renting and buying.  They also want a solution to the intimately related problem of growing numbers of desperately poor and addicted people living and dying on our sidewalks everywhere you go.  People aren't impressed with throwing more money and social workers at the problem.  They want a real solution, like housing everybody.

But for a lot of folks, if no one eventually houses all these people on the sidewalks, increasing numbers of those who would have voted for housing everyone would next turn around and vote for the new "law and order" DA who promises to crack down with martial solutions to fundamentally economic and social problems.  It seems crazy to me, too, but for a lot of folks, if you can't solve a problem one way, you try another.  If socialism doesn't work, try fascism.

The history of the past century, including very recent history, in many different countries that are experiencing exactly the same trends we are, show that people who don't find solutions to their problems by voting for the left will skip right past the center and vote for the right.  Like it or not, that's how it is.

Others will opt out of the two-party failed state altogether, and vote for a third party, which in the US most people call "throwing away your vote."

And then, every four years with great predictability, all kinds of people who are normally radicals of one sort or another start accusing Jill Stein of being a stooge of Putin, and supporters of her campaign of being closet Republicans.

And of course, Republican money may go into Jill Stein ad spending, just as Democratic Party money has often gone into supporting what Democratic Party leadership considers to be the most fringe Republican candidate in a given race.  And the Israel lobby gives money to both of the major parties, along with the oil lobby, the missile manufacturers, and the banks.  And anyone who complains about the electoral system being rigged is obviously a nutcase, or some kind of Nazi.

There's a lot that can happen in the space of a couple weeks, to sway public opinion one way or another.  Instagram and TikTok can change their algorithms to favor one candidate or another.  They can somewhat less directly do that by changing the algorithm to favor one type of conspiracy theory or political perspective over another.

I've been wrong lots before, and I hope I'm wrong again, but my guess is Trump won't need to steal this election.  My guess is he'll lose the popular vote, but win the electoral vote, as he did once before.  If this happens, it won't be because of Jill Stein getting the anti-genocide vote, or because Black men are sexist.  It will be because people are looking for radical solutions to radical problems, and having been repeatedly failed by what passes for the left over the past 50 years, allegiances are shifting.

Gig Organizing 101

The first time I organized a show for someone, I think five people showed up.

The great Seattle-based songwriter, Jim Page, was coming to the east coast back in the mid-1990's.  I was living in Boston then, and offered to organize a gig.  I was already well into my twenties, but I had never done such a thing before.

Jim was and is fairly well-known in Ireland, with one of Ireland's most revered musicians, Christy Moore, having recorded a number of his songs, one brilliant example of which became a real anthem for anti-nuclear sentiment in Ireland, "Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Russian Roulette."

Boston had (and has) a large population of people who were born and raised in Ireland, and a much larger population of people of Irish descent.  I figured we couldn't count on the latter group, necessarily, but the actual born-and-raised-in-Ireland Irish population might have heard of Jim.  

I got a listing in the Irish emigre newsletter that could then be found at all the many Irish pubs in the Boston area.

Jim was and is known to many on the west coast in certain circles, but to the extent that people in the rest of the country might have heard of him, if it wasn't related to Christy Moore, it would likely be related to imprisoned American Indian Movement activist, Leonard Peltier.

A Leonard Peltier support committee recording had gotten around on the American left pretty extensively, and it had Jim's brilliant "Song for Leonard Peltier" on it.

So along with getting the listing in the Irish paper, I called the phone number of American Indians of New England, and let whoever it was who answered the phone know that Jim was playing at an Irish pub in town.

I made a few other promotional efforts as well.  The few people that did show up, other than me and Jim's girlfriend, were from that phone call I made to the American Indian group.

I was crushed at the lack of attendance, and learned a lot from the experience.  I have since gotten much better at organizing events.  I'll readily admit that most of what I've learned about it has come from watching other people do it over many decades of doing gigs for large, medium, and many small audiences myself, but I've also been involved with organizing well-attended events as well, since Jim's gig in the Irish pub in Boston.

I guess the most fundamental thing that I didn't understand back then, but have learned since, is that the fact that this guy, Jim Page, was well-known enough that someone on the other side of the country was fanatical about his music, was all the help I was going to get or should be able to expect, as far as Jim's fame went, in helping me promote this gig.  It was impressive enough that his music had gotten out there, with no help from the corporate gatekeepers of the music industry, to the extent that I had heard of the guy at all.  The rest was up to me.

In the modern era in particular it's becoming more common for me that in some corners of society, people think I'm famous, because they and some of their friends listen to my music, and they assume that probably means if they host a gig in their town, I'll be able to generate an audience through my own publicity efforts.  Sometimes people make what seem like very understandable assumptions, that a guy who has over a million songs streamed in a given year might be able to get a few dozen people coming to a show in a city in which some of those million songs have been streamed recently.

This is not how it works, however.  From here on in I'll get into this in detail -- what works and what doesn't, and why, from my observation.  

In the US, it's commonplace, in my experience, especially in the past decade or more, for audience sizes to be in the low double digits.  Everywhere else, it's commonplace that they are closer to and often well into triple digits.  The reasons for this huge contrast are many.  The size of my following may vary from country to country.  How much free time and disposable income people have to go out to concerts definitely varies from country to country.  The biggest source of variation in these audience numbers, though, is probably down to how many people are involved with promoting the gig, how they're going about doing it, and how deep their local social network is.

For an artist like me, in the top 4% of Spotify's rankings, a million songs streamed a year translates locally in a given city to me maybe having 200 people on Spotify listening to my music regularly.  Of those 200, probably only a handful at most are on my email list.  Possibly a few more are following me on a platform where they might hear about a gig if there's one happening in their area, such as Songkick or Bandsintown.  A few others are following me on social media, but because of the algorithms and other factors, they're very unlikely to see a post on social media about a local gig, but let's say social media posts bring in another three or four people.

This means that the other 190 people in this hypothetical city who are my regular listeners on Spotify will not hear about the gig happening in their town, unless by some other means.

Those other means are the efforts of the local organizer of the gig.  This is true not just for me, but again, for any other indy musician who is not in the top 1% of Spotify artists.

This is why I always recommend to any artists trying to launch their career, asking about how they might go about organizing a concert tour -- and it's the same for authors doing book tours, touring as a public speaker or organizer of a national protest or whatever else -- to consider the fact that unless they are much, much more famous than me -- like at least ten times as well-known, with ten times the following that I have on the various platforms -- there's no way they can self-organize a tour that will be worth doing.  You simply must be working with local people who want to be the local sponsors of your visit to their town.

If you are someone who was thinking about organizing a gig for an artist like me, but now you're feeling discouraged, because you had hoped you could just find a nice local venue, let your friends know about it, and watch the ticket sales grow and the audience materialize for your benefit concert, I would emphatically ask you not to give up, but to reorient.

You should still host the concert, and you should still make it a benefit concert, but you and your local network or organization must understand that you are the primary ones responsible for generating an audience, not the artist visiting from out of town.

I'll go through some of the various means of publicizing an event.  I want to be abundantly clear that my intention here is only to educate, not to shame -- if you are a person or part of an organization who organized an event where very few people showed up, please don't feel bad!

This list is sort of in order, with the most effective tools closer to the top.

Word of mouth

Word of mouth, to be clear, is when you speak to another person in person, on the phone, by video chat, or by text message.  (If by text message, it's only truly word of mouth communication if you receive a response.)

When we're talking about word of mouth communication to promote an event, what this means is not just telling people you know that an event is happening, but telling them why you specifically think they would like to go to the event.

For example, when you tell people X performer is playing a gig, don't assume people will recognize the performer's name.  Tell people something about the performer.

If you're promoting a gig of mine and you're talking to someone who's into history, don't assume they know I'm the guy that wrote "St. Patrick Battalion."  Tell them.  If you have friends who were involved with Occupy Wall Street back in the day, don't assume they know I wrote one of their main theme songs.  Tell them about the song, "Occupy Wall Street (Stay Right Here)."  Know anyone who went on lots of BLM marches in 2020?  Share the song, "Say Their Names" with them.  Know folks opposed to Israel's genocidal war-making?  Tell them about my many songs on the subject.  Folks you know paying too much rent?  Share "Landlord" with them.

Even if they've heard some of my songs, this doesn't mean they know who wrote them, and it most certainly doesn't mean they know that the person who wrote them is playing in their town this month.  In most situations where a person, network, or organization has any kind of local community, most of the people attending most of the shows you organize will not have heard the musician or speaker with whom you are organizing an event.  You'll be introducing your audience to them, and then hopefully they'll all thank you for it!

Make it a benefit

If you make a concert a benefit concert for a group that has local traction, like, perhaps, the one you're trying to build, everybody wins.  The way that works is simple:  twice as many people will come.  So even if you're sharing the proceeds 50/50 with the artist, say, it still will tend to work great for both organizer and artist, or at least it will work just as well as it would have if it had not been advertised as a fundraiser.

Want to make it an extra good fundraiser?  In addition to selling tickets online and at the door, sell raffle tickets and hold a raffle during the course of the event.  It's fun, it's another way to involve local community members and groups, and even to help promote local businesses who donate items or services for your raffle, while you're raising more money for the cause.

Your organization's email list

When Facebook and some other social media platforms began, they intentionally made themselves very useful, in order to wean us all off of our email lists and other means of communication.  The result for our ability to communicate with each other and organize effectively has been nothing short of totally disastrous.  Social media is not our friend, for the most part, but is mostly a useless time-suck and a place for arguing with bots.

Email lists, on the other hand, can still be very effective, if you still have one.  If you don't, you can start one.  I don't think it's at all a stretch to say that any organization that is serious about organizing and serious about growing has an email list.  "Follow us on Instagram" is only a good organizing strategy if people will readily find out on Instagram how to get on your email list.

Substack is free to use, and so far very well-run.  Mailchimp is very expensive, but you control it, not the corporation or their algorithms.  Whatever platform you use for maintaining an email list, you need to have one.

Consider it your main way to get the word out to your network, especially when it comes to local events.  If you're organizing locally and collecting local email addresses, the list you eventually will have will be invaluable -- unlike having a large following on social media, which may or may not result in anyone seeing any of your posts.

Other organizations' email lists

Aside from getting the word out on your own organization's email list, it's crucial to find co-sponsoring groups, and beseech them to announce events that they are co-sponsoring on their email lists.  (In fact, if they don't want to announce the event to their email list, do not consider them a co-sponsor, because they are not!)  Encourage them to announce the event with enthusiasm, using adjectives and graphics, and to communicate to their particular audience about what might interest their particular audience in coming to this gig.

Local media

It's good to get gigs listed in local print media, and especially good if the listings include a photo.  What's much more effective is if they run an article, with a photo, preferably of course on the front page.  Anything short of that is unlikely to generate more than an extra handful of people, but it's certainly still worth pursuing, as is local community radio play, and visits to local community radio stations.  While it's most certainly true that local media is shrinking and disappearing, where it exists, it often is still a great way to communicate with local people, and still generally far more effective than platforms like Facebook or X or whatever else, which are inherently not local.

Physical publicity and announcements, targeted at local events and like-minded spaces

Whether building a group, a network, or publicizing an event, it's essential to communicate with people in your community who are already organized within other networks.  Go to events in your community, hand out flyers, and talk to people.  If you're organizing an event for a "protest singer" like me who has written 50 songs about the Gaza genocide, it's clearly a good idea to go to a local protest and hand out flyers about the upcoming event there, for example.

Physical publicity in the neighborhood of the event

Everyone might be online these days, but that doesn't mean they'll see any announcements about local events online.  Same is true with local media -- because everyone is online these days, they also are likely not paying any attention to any local media at all.  But they are walking down the sidewalk past the telephone poles, and they are going to supermarkets, local parks, and cafes.

Social media

Last and least, social media.  These platforms exist for the purpose of making billionaires richer and keeping us all addicted to our phones.  They are not designed for getting us off of our phones to go to local events in the physical world.  They are designed to prevent people from doing this, in so many ways, actually.

But to the extent that social media is worth using at all, here again, what is at least potentially somewhat effective is targeted messages and targeted posts.  Posting about the gig, with graphics, videos, and great enthusiasm, to locally-oriented groups, and getting those locally-oriented groups to post themselves to their platforms about the gig, is many, many times more effective than just posting to your various platforms and hoping for the best, which will accomplish probably nothing by itself.  Facebook Event pages are worth setting up, if you use them as a tool for getting other people to invite their Facebook Friends to the thing.

If you're hosting an antiwar musician, get local antiwar groups to post about it on their social media accounts.  If there are Facebook or Reddit or other groups that are just about promoting local events in your city of one sort or another, if appropriate, post to them, and get hosts of local groups and local individuals to post about the gig themselves, or to co-sponsor your posts, which is a thing on some platforms like Instagram.

Although social media is problematic and of limited utility compared to other tools, if you're going to use it, it's good to know how it works.  For example, no one will see your posts on Facebook if you post a link.  Facebook's algorithms will basically make that post invisible to anyone who doesn't go to your Facebook account as they would with a website, which most people rarely do.  It won't come up in their feeds.  If, on the other hand, you post a picture of yourself, and in the caption you mention the event you're trying to promote, some people will see that.  (Whether they live anywhere nearby is another question.)

Fending off attacks from the trolls, cancellation campaigners, and bots

Oftentimes, whether you're organizing a concert for me, a speaking engagement for Medea Benjamin, or any number of other events, you will face a barrage of attacks on social media (especially on X and Reddit) from people who will accuse you and the people speaking or singing at your event all kinds of terrible things.  These attacks will often mainly come in the days or even the hours just before an event is scheduled to happen.

From my experience, first of all, if you get flooded with hundreds of comments about how someone like Medea or me is an antisemite, holocaust-denier, or whatever other nonsense, they are probably coming from pro-Israel bot farms, and the people commenting are not actually people.  It's still a lot of work to block and delete all of these accounts, but you can be fairly well certain that this deluge of bile in no way reflects real sentiment that is out there in human form anywhere nearby.

By the same token, regarding the attacks that will inevitably come from self-styled "antifascist" campaigners who will call people like Medea or I Nazi sympathizers, part of the new red-brown coalition, stooges of Putin, etc., etc.:  while far less numerous than the pro-Israel bot farms, the disinformation coming from these cultish followers of Shane Burley and the other founders of Rose City Antifa or their German "Antideutsch" brothers-in-arms also represent a threat that is almost entirely online in nature, even in the places where this line of thinking is most prevalent, such as Portland, Oregon.

I don't want to minimize in any way how devastating it is to be targeted by trolling/cancellation campaigns, whether by self-styled "antifascists" or by Zionist bot farms.

What I can say, though, is that the reason such campaigns have such an impact on the minds of Americans, specifically, is because we pay attention to them, for some reason.  Partly this is because we speak English, and in other countries where English is not the main language, they see this English-language bile on the internet and they pay it no mind.  Partly it's because so many of us are on particularly toxic platforms like X and Reddit, and in most other countries I travel in, these platforms are less popular.

Partly it's because we Americans generally spend too much time online, and not nearly enough outside and in community with real human beings.  There are a lot of reasons for this that I'll leave for another moment.  But if you spend a lot less time online, especially on social media, and just focus mostly on direct, one-on-one, small-group, or in-person communication, you'll do better organizing, you'll be happier, and you'll find that the toxic soup everyone seems to be swimming in online can largely be left there.

The social media attackers are chronically online people who are extremely unlikely to actually come try to disrupt the gig.  They don't live in your town -- that is, if they even exist in human form anywhere.  The ones that are not bots are generally terrible organizers -- and you have to be a good organizer to organize a counter-protest.  But if you just want to sow doubt, division, and fear online, X's algorithms will facilitate that for any troll, no organizing skills required.

In conclusion

Organizing events that bring people together to communicate in person, share music and ideas, sing together, eat and drink together, etc., are all absolutely essential tools in building any network, group, or social movement.  These things must happen, and they must happen often.  There is just no question at all about that.

The question is only how to make them happen in a successful, sustainable way.  Organizers and groups across the US currently have a huge problem with this, for a lot of different reasons.  It is no one's fault that this is the case, aside from the nefarious forces at work that have intentionally led us all astray.  We have just collectively forgotten how to organize effectively, or we're scared to do so, except in little pockets of society here and there, when it comes to the United States.

But we can learn from how things are done in other countries, and sometimes in this one, and we can improve.  Perhaps we can start by sharing essays [or podcasts] like this one with people we know who are trying to organize anything.  There's nowhere to go but up.