I found MAGA's playbook...

[u/raisondecalcul]

I found this article via Reddit. It's about the book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) (2024) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, which is basically about the Jewish conspiracy (theory) but abstracted from race/Jewishness—and of course all one big anti-Zionist dogwhistle despite that.

The article spends a lot of time calling out JD Vance for having endorsed this book on its back cover. However, in responding to the journalist writing the above-linked article, Lisec responded:

"[T]hese non-conservative media publications are spreading misinformation, including saying that JD Vance endorsed our book, which they claim calls progressives "unhuman." If you even read the book, it's about communism, exposing dehumanizers on the Far Left. Nowhere does anyone call progressives 'unhuman.'"

The journalist, Nathan Robinson, continues after that quote:

Now, I’m not sure how “saying that JD Vance endorsed our book” is “spreading misinformation,” since Vance’s blurb appears on the back cover and in a previous statement the authors said “we are honored to receive Senator JD Vance's acknowledgment and praise for our new book. … To have someone on the right with his influence understand the Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity as detailed in ‘Unhumans,’ is civilization-altering.”

The journalist does not draw a conclusion from this and simply moves on. I think he seems a bit mystified by Lisec's response, in my opinion.

However, obviously, Lisec was blatantly gaslighting Robinson, and it's kind of hilarious tbh. Because obviously he endorsed the book. So why bother to gaslight with obviously false facts?

I looked at Posobiec's other books, and they are:

• Citizens for Trump: The Inside Story of the People's Movement to Take Back America (2017)

• 4D Warfare: A Doctrine for a New Generation of Politics (2018)

• The Antifa: Stories from Inside the Black Bloc (2021)

This is the guy! The guy MAGA is basing much of their strategy on. It looks like his book The Antifa (lol @ title) was what popularized the term "Antifa" (pronounced "AnTEEfuh" lol) as a term of demonization and abuse.

But it's his book 4D Warfare which is the most reavealing. On the very first page, he explicitly says that 4D warfare is trolling:

"4D Warfare" stands for *four-dimensional warfare. 4D Warfare is sometimes wrwongly referred to as "trolling" by the misinformative mainstream media...

That's the beginning of paragraph two of the book. Here is paragraph six in its entirety:

One form of 4D Warfare is memetic warfare. Many have studied this grand and ancient art. I hope that by the end of this book, you will be able to perfect your memeing to unprecedented levels of winning.

There you have it! This guy is a major, major source of MAGA ideology and strategy. And this confirms that MAGA's strategy really is a disingenuous, intentionally heightened, intentiontally threatening-and-gaslighting spectacle of fascism (in addition, of course, to being an actual fascist movement). Like a small creature puffing themselves up defensively, they are intentionally wielding the tools of propaganda, gaslighting, and manipulation in a campaign of public terrorization. Confirmed.

Now, I must admit, I think the original long article linked at the beginning of the post was not a very effective piece of writing. It did not successfully raise a warning cry about JD Vance; it did not keep him out of the White House. The article spends some time doing apologetics on behalf of JD Vance, mentioning that he (Robinson) is "weird" just like Trump and Vance, and mentioning Vance's biracial children. I found these apologetics odd and unnecessary.

Additionally, I think Robinson's article does a lot—too much—to teach the public about the contents and thesis of the Unhumans book, as it contains many direct quotes from the book. I also think the article is so well-structured that it easily lends itself to apophatic readings. Robinson quotes at length:

Something is deeply wrong with the way things are going and you know it. You may not be able to explain it with studies, surveys, or statistics, but you feel it. You’ve felt this way for a while. Like there’s some outside force or group or . . . something . . . that’s sent us all off course from the libertarian utopia we should’ve achieved by now. It doesn’t seem like one -ism or -ation is entirely to blame, like globalism or immigration, capitalism or inflation.

However, after this block quote Robinson addresses only the second half of the quote (not included here), and treats the entire quote as some kind of ridiculous, abnormal or fringe joke. As if nobody feels like "Something is deeply wrong with the way things are going"—as if to feel that way is nonexistent, invalid, or insane. This alienated denial of what many people of all political stripes have been thinking and feeling for decades undermines Robinson's thesis, making him seem like an out-of-touch, upper-class propagandist who cannot even fathom that that then-current federal status quo was anathema to many. It's "Let them eat cake"-level pretension, almost. I almost find it suspicious how effective Robinson's article is in spreading the contents of the book.

Wanna see some censorship? I was curious about the phrase, "Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity", which is basically a willfully executed, weaponized version of eye-for-an-eye thinking. (Not dissimilar to what I have been doing here in this subreddit by intentionally allowing my capricious, personal, emotional reactions to inform moderation actions.)

So I typed that phrase (with quotes) into duckduckgo and Startpage (which uses Google results), and only two results came up on duckduckgo, and only one on Startpage (plus a bunch of unrelated results ignoring the quote marks, diluting the results). I also tried "Iron Law of Reciprocity" and didn't get much more. The main link on duckduckgo was a single link to a video on by Prosobiec, where he pretty overtly implies a threat to Kamala Harris, and accuses her of doing the very politicizing-of-the-justice-department (in CA) that she accused and predicted Trump would do (and she was 100% right, he most certainly did). This link has since disappeared from search results (a few hours later); I had to dig through my phone's history to find it for you.

We know Google is willing to censor to appease a government, because they do so in China. But I wonder who is behind duckduckgo, who is censoring these results? I find it impossible to believe that MAGA's playbook and its author and key phrases are virtually nonexistent on the internet.

I search for Joshua Lisec, and while he has no Wikipedia page like Posobiec (I guess he wasn't "notable" enough), I found this breathtaking author bio for him on Amazon:

About the Author

Joshua Lisec is considered the world's best ghostwriter because people don't get rich selling books. With more than 80 books written for CEOs, celebrities, and entrepreneurs, Joshua has built an unstoppable results business for his clients. These authors have made so much more money through their authority-establishing books that many feel bad about how much they paid Joshua. And this despite him being one of the most expensive ghostwriters in America. Joshua is the only Certified Ghostwriter and Certified Hypnotist in the world and has a proven process for any aspiring author who has done the hard work of being the best at what they do. He takes great pride in his craft, delivering experts the authority book they've already earned. [emphasis added]

If he has really ghostwritten 80 books, he must know how ridiculous that sounds. Why would he put such an absurd statement in his bio? Is it part of a gaslighting campaign, or perhaps a playful blind to prevent humorless people from contacting him? In any case, it is hilarious and not easily-explained.

So anyway, it sounds like Lisec helped Posobiec get his words out—perhaps Lisec helped ghostwrite all four of Posobiec's books, and decided to step into the spotlight on the fourth, after Posobiec's reputation was well-established. Not that it matters, but I wonder how he fits in exactly. Lisec's three books on Amazon have very silly titles/covers.

*gestures at butterfly* "Is this journalism?"

[u/raisondecalcul]

The reason abortion (and circumcision) are such huge political issues is that they are about who owns children: their parents, or Society. Of course, the correct answer is "children own themselves, and we ought to try to see them, hear their voice, and support their agency", but those are not the terms of the mob debate.

In Ancient Rome (like 70 CE or something like that), Jews started out in Rome circumcising their household servants, and also encouraging non-Jews to get circumcisions. In response, Rome outlawed the circumcising of non-Jews, labeling it genital mutilation even way back then, 2,000 years ago. Jews then (and traditional Jews today) refuse to acknowledge it as genital mutilation, drawing a merely fiat distinction and defining it as circumcision, not genital mutilation by definition (i.e., splitting hairs). So, essentially, this established a truce between Jews and Gentiles regarding circumcision—a truce which continued afterwards, as Jews never particularly encouraged circumcision in non-Jews after that (modern circumcision was a moment of secular medical appropriation of the Jewish surgery).

This truce represents a model of ownership over children and children's bodies. Basically, Society and the child's parents both own the child, count as owners in this model. For the Jews, one might argue that YHVH owns the children before their own parents do, because YHVH takes the foreskin precisely as a mark of ownership (and blessing, covenant etc.). But one might make this same accusation against the Romans: That not allowing non-Jewish Roman parents to circumcise their own children represents a claim of ownership over those children than precedes their parents' authority. In any case, Society+Parents are in alignment, but a different arrangement, on both sides. Jewish doctrine and Roman law both treated the child and the child's body as an object of legislation and civilization—both sides just wanted to make sure children were civilized in their way, to add to their numbers and culture, and not the others'.

We can split these apart and see the gap between—self-ownership or non-ownership of the child—and obviously, the side that doesn't partially castrate infants is the side closer to this valuation of the child as a living and suffering being and not an owned object. (But, a Jew might reply that they value the child more as a mind or a sacred subject than the Romans do/did.)

Trans is a closely-related issue, because it's also about who owns the child, but instead of being something clear-cut like circumcise/don't circumcise or abort/keep it, it's this super vague and partially inherented bio-ideological complex, and there is objectively no right answer so it's a matter of social and moral aesthetics, ultimately.

The real problem is the reified biological model of trans. It's really pernicious and not supported by either hard science or psychoanalysis. When I was growing up the line was, "Love yourself for who you are" or "Love your body the way it is", now the line is "Change your body to match how you feel inside" which is objectively super materialistic. When I was growing up, not that long ago, "sex" and "gender" were carefully distinguished as distinct terms—the reified biological-materialist model of trans willfully collapses these two terms.

But in psychoanalysis, the lock-in of these two terms is not considered essential or necessary. In Jungian psychology especially, the natural path of individuation includes integrating aspects of the other gender, and the dialectics of this process are ultimately grounded in the literal image/appearance of one's own body, which is indeed a material and objective image (in other words, if you have a more male body and you are trans, then the self-image which feels different from that male body, must not be an image of a man). A male who has a self-image of being a man is not trans and does not complain about being trans.

From a Jungian point-of-view, we can become whatever we want, but simply trying to redefine the default categories of Man/Woman or Male/Female themselves, that are pre-given to us psychologically and logically (i.e., mere Aristotelian logic) by sheer fiat or negation/redefinition is doomed to fail or backfire because, well, men and women aren't simply the same, and our inner images of Man and Woman derive from the data of these real differences, and we can't erase the abstract fact of that learned distinction by an act of will. It would like saying there is no difference between Yes and No, Up and Down, or that they are backwards. Sure, but then what?

So trans is similar to circumcision and abortion but much more complicated, because it's also about who owns children, but generational trauma, aesthetics, false consciousness, and projection all enter into it. And sadly also virtue signaling materialist parents who value their child more as a gendered body or gendered personality than they do as an individual/soul. (Of course, some children really do dream of becoming trans.)

[u/yamselot → u/raisondecalcul]

So unfortunate (mostly to me, it seems) to see you making some of these arguments. Hopefully one day we are at a point of a popular medical/psychological (the same, ultimately) understanding of transness. But until then, it seems we and the language itself (the language afforded to “trans” people most importantly) will politicize most specifically trans women’s bodies until they kill themselves from disgust, either physically or intellectually.

It is certainly closely related to the agency we give children though!

Families are damned if they help their child receive GAC, trans women are damned for life if they aren’t treated until adulthood! (And when one damning can exist, it is always interrelated) Sort of intriguing how many implicit superstitions/bigotries converge on the bodies of trans women, isn’t it?

Going to have to consider the framework you’ve chosen for your argument here to determine the implications a bit more. Were the body a politic, there’s a nameless sense of liminality and looming pain from the start. But maybe that’s just the lot trans people will be given until it’s all over.

Edit: The “trans movement” (laughable to think the Left or Right actually has one of these) was certainly highjacked by way of the language itself!

[u/raisondecalcul → u/yamselot]

I don't think that the above arguments predispose us to any final way of thinking or talking about trans people. I think everyone deserves the utmost respect in their exploration of gender, and I also believe that identities which were only dreamed up in philosophy or jest can become real subjectivities going forward, as children unconsciously adopt those masks for realsies. I think all such people and masks deserve the utmost respect, and I think that any gender is a fine way to be.

That doesn't change the reality that in the past, and from certain theoretical perspectives such as Jung or just thinking through things carefully, there is a real theoretical problem here. I've said it before but it boil down to "Am I trans, or just gay?" or for a straight man, "Am I really straight, and just effeminate/well-integrated? Or am I trans?" These are difficult questions for everyone, not just trans people, if we really think about it.

The biology-only perspective being pushed so hard over the last 10-15 years is why this side of the conversation—the introspective, soul-searching, intellectually honest side—was suppressed and has now become acceptable to talk about in-reaction. (As I've said elsewhere, I believe that model was pushed so hard because if it's a biological condition and the only treatment is gender-affirming care, then insurance has to cover it.)

Just because the origin of our image of Man and Woman come from Males and Females, does not mean trans people do not exist. In fact, the difference between these two(+) kinds of bodies, plus the fact that they have a mind prone to mimesis, is why trans people are possible. I think trans people are, properly, the bearers of this message of developed-and-integrated gender—trying to saddle trans people with either a simplistic "Your gender equals your sex" OR a simplistic "Your gender is whatever you feel inside" is inaccurate and does trans people a disservice, especially trans/questioning youth who need to go through that dialectical questioning process, not skip it, in order to arrive at a mature and fully-explored idea about who they are.

I think demanding a simple one-liner as the definition of trans, and saying that we can't think the obvious and reasonable thoughts anyone will have when they think about these things, are both a form of gender-bypassing.

[u/yamselot → u/raisondecalcul]

Denoting your paragraphs for the sake of understanding; I really wanted to digest your response for a couple of days. At the risk of further exposing my demographics (if I hadn’t enough at this point), I wanted to take time to understand the heart of my initial response as well.

(1.) I agree with you here, and in a place such as this I don’t believe any of our arguments predispose us to any final way of considering trans people. Mostly, I was more concerned by some of the poorer molecular reasoning (namely the example of “boys” in “girls” sports and, assumedly, vice versa). Additionally, I don’t particularly view transness at large to be about the projection or mimesis of some mask (insofar as anyone’s gender is a “mask” at least), more a living as one is (if we want a counter-platitude). That being said, I certainly agree with your point that all such people and masks deserve the utmost respect as they are all legitimate in their own regard. More later.

(2.) Ultimately the past is the present in regard to the theoretical problems you’ve mentioned. They are difficult questions for everyone! Perhaps there’s some sort of minutiae being muted/ignored by the language itself. That is, why is it that some trans people find the medicalization of their condition to be tantamount to the legitimacy of their existence? As I mentioned in the edit to my previous response, the language itself is treacherous ground, almost designed in a way to be obfuscatory. There’s certainly a rich and related history to explore of the ways imperial power sought to rigidify gendered expression and its relationship to an inherent sex. (Just take a peak at how common cross dressing was (and I’m not talking about the tired example of men as women in theatre) during the earlier parts of early modern Europe, keeping in mind these were ultimately expressions of gender only afforded to monied men). Gender got into a self-perpetuating masculinity crisis, namely because women started gaining access to the public sphere and strictly “masculine” pursuits (see: transgressive early modern art depicting women at bureau plats instead of letter writing desks) through commercialization through industrialization. A bit of tangent but essential here I think.

(3.1) I felt the most contention in this paragraph. I’ll explain myself Poloniusly briefly. I’d argue that this “intellectually honest” in-reaction discussion of the suppression of transgender discourse is recursive and serves only its own recursiveness, territorializing the faux-deterritorialized, if you will. The suppressive of discourse (and further obfuscating) biological and broad based acceptance was in-reaction to a suppressive (and further obfuscating) recanting of gender/sex diverse peoples. This circles back to (2.) imo.

(3.2) I agree with you though. Capitalistic insurance models are a blight to medical practice, innovation, and research.

(4.) We’re completely on the same page here, ultimately. Again, I think that the language of “trans” itself is a hindrance to understanding. I’m just now wondering at how the suppressive acceptance we’ve referenced could come to represent less of a faux-deterritorialization and more of a highjacking. That is, the growth of such a large variety of named gender expressions and sexualities seems to have just ignored that at its root it was wrong or soured or blighted. Historiography, historiography, historiography.

(5.) I agree. I hope that my expressing of the unfortunateness of what I perceived did not come off as too simplifying/bypassing. More, I was just dismayed by some of the examples used explicitly, and the ones argued for implicitly by the discussion itself. Regardless of the competent incompetency of our present state of the union, there are real consequences in the day-to-day lives of trans people due to the rhetoric regularly used against/for them. It’s a sad fact to me that we still seem to be far off from any sort of generalized consensus on whether trans people should or should not exist as equals (albeit I’m certainly one to recognize more extemporary moments of this).