This past weekend I had the pleasure and honor to speak at the Schiller Institute conference Build the New Paradigm, Defeat Green Fascism. The following essay was the speech I gave.
Since the era of industrial revolution the enemy of human progress has been fascism. Where humans have sought to grow, those in the ruling class have sought to contract, or hold back that growth. During the 20th century we recognized this in Hitler’s “right-wing” Nazi party, the so-called “National Socialists.” The dominant narrative of World War 2 leads us to believe that we defeated fascism, but this is simply not the case. Fascism was never defeated, beaten back, yes, but it was never defeated. It was rebranded. The vanguard of fascism now cloaks itself under the guise of socialism once again, and woke, faux progressive politics. The so-called “left wing”: Joe Biden, the Democrats, George Soros and their new reactionary socialist party, is a breeding ground for a new pack of ruthless, egomaniacal, sociopathic ladder climbers—the Democratic Socialists of America. They are the foot soldiers of the Green New Deal, which is a plan for international genocide and mass death via food and energy austerity.
For the past 17 years, I’ve lived in the Hudson Valley, a semi-rural, back-to-the-land Disney World for liberal elites two hours north of New York City. Underlying this supposed utopia are multiple, compounding economic issues. Housing is completely unaffordable, homelessness is rampant, wages are falling. What’s happening in the Hudson Valley is a microcosm of the acute problem facing the entire nation.
The Hudson Valley has historically been home to America’s infamous robber barons and that trend continues today with a heavy presence by Peter Buffett and George Soros, who both have built intellectual fortresses (the NoVo Foundation and Bard College, respectively) within 10 miles of where I live. These oligarchs, like their predecessors, have a vested interest in rolling back the progress of industrial capitalism to a Neo-feudal society. The Hudson Valley is a hotbed of environmental and conservation efforts. Shutting down industry is a favorite pastime of the area’s most beloved Left-wingers, including none other than Pete Seeger who devoted his last decades to shutting down Indian Point Nuclear Energy Center. A plant that provided over a quarter of New York City’s power, which was prematurely decommissioned in 2021.
But it wasn’t always this way. The Hudson Valley used to be an industrial hub. We produced things like bricks, textiles and cement. Industry made up 40% of the economy as recently as the 1970s. Today, it’s down to 5%. Now our economy is dominated by service work, specifically education, healthcare, retail and tourism. We don’t make anything. And most well-to-do liberals and leftists are totally blind to this problem.
The Hudson Valley is an advanced version of the plans our ruling elite have for the rest of the Western world–continuing the slow death of our productive economy and turning us into an army of servants. In a way, I am from the future, trying to warn you. The service economy is a dead end. The only thing it brings is the veneer of progress without any. It’s a simulation. It’s a new gilded age, a speculative bubble, a virtual reality for a totally controlled and servile population.
A “steady-state” aka degrowth economy has been in the works since the 1970’s when the hegemonic think tank, Club of Rome published Limits to Growth. Service sector work goes hand in hand with a degrowth economy. In an economy ruled by scarcity, and a cascading pyramid of servile work, everyone is competing. We all become pets of the ruling class, living in a dog eat dog world. Most of our production has been outsourced to the third world (and China), and most of our service work involves importing these goods, micromanaging every moment from freight docking to consumption, even the post-consumption life cycle of the product. This is not “steady-state” at all, but a controlled demolition guided by entropic pessimism. This is quite literally reactionary— fascism—holding back the progress of humanity.
The financial capitalists that run the world have slowed the industrial machine of the Western World to a steady hum, keeping the forces of production (and human abundance) at bay for half a century. And it’s playing out as a crisis in every sector, housing, food, health, you name it. Degrowth is the ideology that makes us complicit, the ideology that turns us all into servants of capital.
It’s time for Americans to return to our roots of fighting imperialists. The attitude amongst the Left is that the United States is a white settler-colonial state that must be burnt to the ground. But it’s precisely the opposite. As the largest population in the imperialist core, American citizens play the most pivotal role in destroying fascism once and for all. If we can focus on our own growth as a nation, and join China and Russia in developing the rest of the world, specifically Africa, the necrotic arm of imperialism will have no choice but to shrivel up and die.
We don’t want to reduce our footprint, we don’t want to “leave no trace”, we don’t want to “drawdown” to zero. Every human being has the God-given right to leave their mark on this world, to become immortal by their creative contribution to mankind.
Our country is suffering from a plague of pessimism. Americans are fiercely independent and wildly creative. That is our culture. We need a new American government, based on our founding principles:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
A new American government, rebuilt on our founding principles, which nurtured the creative and independent American spirit, would unleash massive potential for the human race.
We are under an occupation by Green Fascists. This occupation differs from the occupation of force, at gunpoint, like we saw in Nazi Germany. Our occupation is one of the mind. Our minds are locked in a prison of pessimism. The American public is told day in and day out that there is no alternative. Or if there is one, if they do not like the status quo, if they are fed up with “capitalism” then the only other option is degrowth. There is no up, only down. We have hit the ceiling. We have hit the so-called “limits to growth”.
But this is not true at all. We have hit the limit to how much we can grow under a “free trade” imperialist economic mode. Humanity has all the tools to break through this green, Malthusian ceiling. Current nuclear energy technology, with fusion right over the horizon, is our golden ticket; the catalyst to transform our energy flux density and human potential.
The only way to beat the Green New Deal Fascists, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum and the neo-fascist Democratic Socialists of America is to fight degrowth. We need to bring back industry, production, good jobs, optimism for the future and meaning to life for the American people.
Parts of this speech were repurposed from the essay Deindustrialization & Fake Economy
