Roughly 14 years and 20+ social media accounts ago, I first encountered "my favorite writer nobody else has ever heard of." Posting under the handle Mobute, it was actually part-time media critic Jeb Lund who ultimately convinced me that there was something to the idea of integrating a social media account, with a website or blog, to more accurately track with the way people under the age of 60 were actually getting their news and analysis content. In a very strange way, everything I've done on NIDC and the social media accounts attached to it, sprung out of enjoying Lund's unique style of writing, and watching how he moved seamlessly from critical essays, to ripping lanyards and nazis on social media, then back again.
Of course, time and the world's richest nazi (except maybe Putin) buying Twitter caused me to lose track of Lund and his work. So imagine my surprise when immediately after the one day general strike against ICE occupation in Minneapolis, a Jeb Lund essay published on Truthdig showed up in my direct message box. Furthermore, imagine my delight when I found that Jeb hadn't lost his fastball, and had indeed drifted much further to the left in the wake of the open and obvious fascist takeover of America; just as I, and almost every other analyst I talk with regularly have.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/just-say-no/
Just Say ‘No’
"We can also say this: Wherever you live in the United States, the Trump administration is going to bring an ethnic cleansing near you, if not directly to you, and they are going to use every term except that one to describe what they are doing. They will not stop until they have ethnically cleansed the United States, and they do not care if you die. The only lesson each new body teaches them is how inconsequential it is to make the next one."
Quite frankly, I didn't just share this essay to go down memory lane. At the end of the day, what Jeb Lund is articulating here is more or less the central thesis of my own writing about the Trump administration's vision for America, the ethnic cleansing project he and Stephen Miller are conducting, and the Gestapo's role in transforming (in so much as that is even necessary) the United States into a fascist dictatorship - the Pork Reich. Yes it is a fascist dictatorship in progress, yes they are openly doing ethnic cleansing in our streets, no they don't care if you live or die so long as the stock market stays profitable for some, no the cavalry isn't coming to save us, and yes we have to rise up together on our own and beat back the forces of fascism or we're all fucking cooked.
In particular, I think Lund's most compelling argument for why we must all fight is that these people, this fascist order, clearly means to kill millions and millions of Americans for billionaire (cultists) whether you fight back or not. The author acknowledges that opposing a fascist regime can be dangerous, it might even get you killed, but then articulates all the ways this regime is at a minimum completely indifferent to the deaths of the American people it ostensibly represents, and at worst seems to be actively trying to kill us. And Lund isn't just waxing poetic about the Gestapo coming to your door some day either.
"They have already told all levels of law enforcement to take the gloves off, and they take care to look the other way when “officers are on scene” and a “shooting transpires” and “it eventuates” that you die. They don’t care if you are detained and some combination of filth, disease, malnourishment, injury, confiscation of your medication or “discipline” makes you die. They don’t care if your insurance rescinds your coverage and you die. They do not care if they eliminate Medicaid and Medicare, and you have to fly home and take care of your mom before she dies. They don’t care if you fly home to see her, and your plane collides with something and you die, and they don’t care if it’s blown apart by the debris from a Nazi’s rocket that was busy exploding over a protected wetland and you die.
They don’t care if you get measles, mumps or rubella and die. Sometime in early summer of 2020 was the last time they cared that anyone got COVID and died. They resented passing COVID relief, themselves defrauded it with lusty abandon, and, come the next pandemic, they will use their own crime as justification for the moral hazard of spending a cent to make sure you don’t die."
I don't want to just quote the whole essay here, he actually goes on for at least two more paragraphs pointing out all the ways the Trump regime is probably going to kill you anyway, even and perhaps especially if you don't lift a finger to oppose fascism. Lund then closes by pointing to Minneapolis as an example for us all about how to say "no" and what resistance looks like.
Naturally of course, even Lund couldn't get such a "radical message" published in a mainstream outlet. So I wanted to share it with you here.
