The Center Must Not Hold
A few years back it became fashionable for clever people who read clever books to quote a poem from 1919 called “The Second Coming”.
They bemoaned that “the centre cannot hold”, because it’s being torn apart by its extremities.
Bullshit.
The center cannot hold because it stands for nothing. It’s the definition of moral relativism.
Its meaning derives solely from staying equidistant to warring factions, through cleverness, from cowardice.
The center doesn’t mean shit because centrists don’t stand for shit.
We’ve now seen what America’s elites do when they’re confronted by brutes and bullies: cower, cave and commit to being even more craven.
When Karl fucking Rove is taking to the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal to decry fascist rhetoric, you need to ask what the fuck Ezra fucking Klein is doing in the New York Times saying, out of pure ignorance, out of unchecked privilege, that Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way.
Tell me you don’t think you will suffer under fascism without telling me you don’t think you will suffer. We can hear you loud and clear.
War may be the extension of politics, but politics cannot become the extension of war. Fascists – though they may be blessed by every goddamn hollowed out symbol of middle class propriety – do not care for discourse, they care for power.
A 30 year-old, funded by billionaires, debating 18 year-olds for CLICKS on YOUTUBE DOT COM is not doing discourse, he’s doing propaganda; and propaganda is a weapon of war.
Sanctimony is not piety.
Norms are not morals.
Silence is collaboration.
I had the audacity to post to Microsoft’s LinkedIn DOT COM the following:
To date this post has reached 330 members, “primarily senior-level professionals (24.8%) and founders/executives from large companies (25.2% from 10,001+ employee companies) in the San Francisco Bay Area (24.2%), working in software development and tech industries.” Two percent responded.
Clever people like to tell themselves they're being rational when really they’re just scared.
Put the last 9 months of fascist governance – from the pardoning of insurrectionists to recent war crimes, from the formation of a secret police to outright extortion – into the statistical model of your choice and you will not find an outcome wherein compliance produces security.
The reason why many if not most of my elite cohorts are afraid is they were never taught how to fight.
They never learned how to defend themselves from a bully because they never had to. (Thank God.)
They have had the privilege of being protected by a teacher, a parent, a cop. (As it should be.)
What to do, then, when the cop is the bully?
Ask a Black person. Ask a queer person. Ask a feminist. Ask an immigrant. Ask an inmate. Ask a disabled person. Ask a homeless person.
Do what they need you to do, and you will be safe, and secure, and free.
Do not, whatever you do, ask a god damned member of America’s elite in the year of our lord 2025 how to protect yourself, your children, your loved ones, or your 401 fucking K from the disaster, the catastrophe, that is fascism.
Unless they are a historian, they do not know.
No one asked me, but I will tell you.
Every billionaire is a policy failure.
Every billionaire is a threat to democracy.
There is no going back.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here…
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here...
The only way forward is away from fascism. With every step. The only way forward is to EMBRACE the enemies of the fascist state.
They are human. They are humanity. They are the embodiment of our founding charter, that all humans are created equal.
And, yes, I translated “men” to “humans” because I am writing to you, and you are reading this, through goddamned electrons. We are in 2025 not 1776. Pretending otherwise is not conservative, it’s madness.
We progress because we are free. We are free because we progress.