• On bodily autonomy: her bodily autonomy is already being stripped in the country, and fascism is rising and will continue to rise regardless of who’s in power. The democrats are doing nothing to stop it and never will. Democrats had the executive and both houses of congress in Obama’s term and could have codified abortion rights and LGBTQ civil rights then and there. They refused and Obama even gave up a supreme court seat in active capitulation, after which now Biden is refusing to push to pack the court and denouncing the idea; and they do this because they don’t care about any of us. They work for all the same billionaires and imperialist monsters that the republicans do. They LIKE womens’ rights and LGBTQ rights to be under attack, because then they can drum up exactly the kind of sentiments in you right now to bully you and panic you and manipulate you and brow-beat and shame you to get you to give them a mandate of power while not having to do anything to earn it, and continuing to spiral everything towards and into and through fascism and genocide and nuclear brinksmanship imperialism because “they’ll vote for us anyway — we’re not the republicans”
  .
  When in objective reality, they are the republicans. We’re closer to WW3 than we’ve been in decades. military expansion and proxy wars and coups and mass prisons and police militarization and murder, and repressions of civil rights and free speech and protests, have all continued to get worse under the democrats. Cop City is happening under democrats. Biden not only didn’t close the border camps, but deregulated them and allowed them to be privatized for profit by private contractors. Biden brought in all the worst neo-con warmongers he could find, put a Chevron executive who defended the destruction of the Amazon and poisoning of Indigenous people to head his environmental executive, and continued the legacy of his President Obama whose entire cabinet was hand-picked by Citigroup (and we all remember him bailing out the banks)! And there is an active genocide, the most televized genocide in history, being financed and funded and armed by the US, and the supposed “lesser evil” Biden went around congress twice to give them bombs and guns faster than even congress could do, hoping that Gaza would be finished off before the Elections. But because Trump is open and honest about his wanting to do what the democrats are already currently doing he’s somehow worse for Palestine so we’re shamed into supporting the current genocidaires who are covering up their crimes and lying about their crimes? The current genocidaires who, when protestors shout “no to genocide, stop the genocide” are shouted down and smugly condescended to with “I’m talking! You must want Trump to win!” These people are better and Trump is worse? No, they’re the same and will continue to bring us down the same path if we continue allowing them to.
  .
• On false signaling: Who is telling you you should “falsely signal?” We’re saying the only option is to not give these people a mandate, and do everything we can to visibly starve them of their taken-for-granted margins and punish them for what they’re doing and put our vote toward people with principles and elevate them, with the votes the democrats need, so we are un-ignorable if the democrats ever want power again. If you’re capable, join a socialist organization like the PSL who is working on the ground to fill in gaps and help people, but at the very least vote for them too and push them up in numbers and visibility, and force the establishment that is and will continue to bring about all of the things you and your loved ones are afraid of unless they are forced not to. And one of the simplest ways to force them to stop this genocidal cruise-control and reorient or break the duopoly is by starving the only face of the duopoly-of-exploiters that requires your working class margin to win. Either they reorient politically, or a huge amount of people who don’t have any illusions about the republicans either are now becoming much more radical and serious, where the PSL will be prepared to bring them on board and tell them why this happens and what is to be done.
  .
• On what 2016 accomplished and being called names by our enemies: You are mistaken, the Clintonite liberals who chided and brow-beat people who were justifiably disgusted with the flagrantly corrupt and imperialist bloodthirst of both candidates and backed Bernie, and saw how even the liberal Bernie was treated, didn’t just then become democrats again. They became COMMUNISTS. Many of them were radicalized by seeing and experiencing their illusions about bourgeois democracy be ripped down and spat on by the ruling class. Many weren’t even really part of the political “left” until this happened, and 2016 caused the left to grow exponentially and caused socialism to grow in astronomical proportions compared to how it had in decades. I saw it, I was in the middle of it. This election is doing the same and more, watching the democrats act so viciously and shamelessly in their bloodshed, corruption and lies, and disregard for life and liberty of the people. None of us ever had illusions about Republicans; they never pandered to the working class. The Democrats are supposed to do that but have failed to even remember how to pretend, and are bringing more and more people to the left. Which is why we need to stay ahead of them to grow socialism, to build the change we need from the ground up, and actually resist fascism, which is not resisted in the ballot box between two corporate-imperialist-genocidaire parties which are converging together into fascism which is growing regardless, it’s resisted on all fronts.
  .
  Let them call you whatever they want. Why decide what you’re going to do politically based on what your enemies say? They will call you worse than that. You should take pride in your enemies calling you such petty names knowing they are throwing ideological tantrums. The more you antagonize the system and its status quo, the more the system and their supporters will demonize you. Why do you think communist was made a dirty word in the US through a century of active red scare propaganda and COINTELPRO operations? It wasn’t because they were telling any kind of truth, it was because they were scared of people liking us, and of joining us. Of divesting from their system and building our own. There is zero reason to let the people who hate you and want you to be compliant dictate your politics. Instead do what is intelligent and incisive to jam a crowbar into the contradictions of the system, and work for those working class people (who know better than you do and have known for longer the ruling class and their petty-bourgeois college liberals are full of shit and the names they throw mean nothing) so we can all with our collective weight pry the contradiction apart.

And remember that the more absurd the demonization gets and the more active work we do to show their lies and hypocrisy, the more their demonization of us becomes their undoing. Like now conservative reactionaries are calling everyone to the left of Thatcher a communist. This didn’t make communism scarier to the working class — it made it so now people are less instinctually terrified of the idea, or think “that doesn’t sound right” and read some Marx and realize he had a very prescient analysis of what we can all see around us. There are more communists now than there were in the 80s, and we’re growing. You can help in being a part of that, or let our enemies and their liberal minions shame and cow you into submission and compliance based on fears that they’ve implanted on you that are only telling half the story, and in doing so helping those fears come true.