Vote for Fascism, or Face Fascism
Today, in the lead up to the State of the Union address, the White House leaked that Biden would announce they’d be building a floating rig in the Mediterranean to provide aide to Palestinians in Gaza. This floating aide platform will take weeks to build, weeks during which more Gazans will starve, during which IDF soldiers will bomb them, murder them while they wait for bread and destroy what scraps of infrastructure remain.
Biden could at any point now or in the past five months have immediately withdrawn military support for Israel, he could get on the phone at any point and tell them that materiel and money transfer will end immediately if the IDF doesn’t turn the water, power, aide, and internet back on, he could at any point simply not have vetoed the Security Council’s demand for a ceasefire, he could at any point condemn the Israeli genocide that is now so visible that world-historical clowns like Thomas Friedman can tell clearly what’s happening.
Instead, in a gesture so insulting as to be worse than nothing, he will build a rig off the coast of Gaza that will no doubt serve as a potential strategic forward base should the conflict escalate. Meanwhile, as susan abulhawa records at Electronic Intifada, Gaza is hell.
This active participation in genocide is probably the most horrific evil perpetrated by the US since the invasion and destabilization of Iraq, which Biden also supported. There is hardly a cruelty perpetrated over the last four decades that Biden hasn't helped along in his illustrious political career, and now as he sundowns he refuses to leave the stage, burdening us with the likelihood of an out and out fascist Trump regime that has already laid out a day-one plan for full dictatorial mobilization.
Trump is scary, but what is scariest about Trump are the people he emboldens and encourages, the fascist movements that bloom fungal in his shadow. And it is increasingly clear that one of those movements is the Democratic Party. Biden has been granted permission by Trump, and he is making good use of it.
Even before October 7th, Biden had participated in the largest removal of health insurance provision in American history with 15 MILLION people losing coverage through the Medicaid "unwinding" through January. His first few years in office were focused almost entirely on normalizing the pandemic, stripping what few protections we had, forcing people back to work, and slowly and surely undermining even the CDC recommendation to stay home with Covid. Millions are dead, millions more permanently disabled, with the numbers growing staggeringly every day.
Childhood poverty in the US, which had been alleviated to its lowest point in decades in 2022, skyrocketed to new heights in 2023 as Biden's team dismantled the COVID child tax credits and medicaid benefits.
Global sea temperatures have leapt far beyond all but the most dire projections-the climate collapse is accelerating, while Biden has overseen the most aggressive expansion of US oil and gas production in decades and decades. The tech bubble around AI seems poised to burst, but until it does Silicon Valley has continued to double down on the equation electricity + hype = shareholder returns, so while the internet and phones stop being useful for anyone but scammers and advertising revenues collapse and take the last vestiges of journalism with them, it takes more and more fossil fuels to do less and less. The economy, we are assured, is strong. Ignore the mass layoffs and look at that sweet S+P 500.
The border regime and wall, one of Biden's key campaign topics, have remained largely unchanged from Trump's brutality. The border has become a concentration camp for refugees, who are held on an empty strip of land between two fences for days or even weeks while waiting for an official interview, many of them only surviving thanks to mutual aid provided by activists on either side of the border. When Biden and the Dems looked to flank Trump from the right on the border, it surprised no one who had been paying attention.
Am I saying there is no difference between the two? No. Trump encourages and emboldens the most horrific members of the polity, and his election would likely be the last the US saw for a long time, perhaps ever. I still don't think he has the military or bureaucratic backing to actually enforce the most delirious of the right's fantasies, even with the 2025 project's deep bench of potential goons and strategies, but I also don't think it matters much. Give it five years.
The Biden Administration has participated in a crime in Gaza beyond reckoning. Joe Biden will go down in history as one of its most evil men, regardless of what happens in November. And he is so committed to this genocide that he would rather pursue it than prevent the institutions of American Government from collapsing. People who refuse to vote for him are accused of favoring international questions over domestic ones, but that is a classic fascist projection: it is Biden who would rather level Gaza then do anything to prevent a second Trump administration.
We are witnessing the great apotheosis of American politics. In response to a near-revolution in 2020, the Democratic Party went full mask-off, and in its pursuit of counter-revolution via genocidal pandemic denial, revealed that the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that the Republicans say it with their chest. The January 5th coup never ended, and the Democrats and the state have proven utterly unwilling to stop it.
The only path I see out of this, at the moment, is the physical collapse of one of these two villains slouching toward apocalypse. Perhaps the market will implode and the people will once again rise up, but seven months isn't a very long time. Until then, here's hoping two old men's moldy rotten hearts give out.