I’ve seen a lot of whining about how we shouldn’t throw milkshakes at fascists, and I can understand their reluctance. I’ll leave it to Greta Christina to explain why it’s necessary and reasonable.

You might think leftists need to stop painting conservatives as heartless bigots and stop painting the Republican Party as the Evil Empire. You might think punching Nazis or throwing milkshakes at fascists is unacceptable violence. You might think the word “fascist” is leftist hyperbole.

How bad do things have to get before you’ll change your mind?

Fascism typically turns the heat up a little at a time. “First they came for the socialists,” and all that. Each new horror is just a little bit worse than the last, normalizing the ones that came before it and numbing people to ones that are coming. It’s easy to see in retrospect that strong action should have been taken earlier — but when it’s happening, it’s easy to convince yourself that it isn’t really that bad. Especially if you’re not one of the main targets. Yet.

So how bad does it have to get? We already have concentration camps. We already have a sharp rise in violence against people of color, trans people, immigrants or people perceived to be immigrants. We already have an executive leader blatantly ignoring the Constitution and saying the law doesn’t apply to him. We already have the executive branch, the judiciary branch, and half the legislative branch corrupted and useless as a check on power. We already have serious rollbacks on women’s bodily autonomy. We already have white supremacist culture permeating police departments and widespread in the military. We already have historians who study fascism saying that yes, fascism is on the rise in the United States.

It doesn’t bode well for the future when people are aghast that we might respond to a betrayal of the rule of law or outright murder with hurled dairy products, but here we are, cowering in terror behind our so-called principles, afraid to trigger change for the better because there’s too much change for the worse going on.

Last week on Facebook I saw that Greta recommended this book, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World, so I ordered it and read it. It’s good! The author is an organizer who has taught activists living under various fascist regimes how to resist, and it’s definitely not a handbook for terrorists. It explains how to undermine tyrants with little non-violent actions that diminish and weaken them — it’s also realistic about how difficult the process is, and how there are multiple potential points of failure. You won’t make any progress if you refuse to start, though, and over and over again, it emphasizes how important it is to find ways to laugh at the ruling regime.

I just discovered the Atlas of Prejudice, which maps the world according to various prejudices. Here’s Trump’s vision of Europe:

I think, maybe, that it is over-optimistically detailed. A more appropriate map would be a single blurry blob labeled “other”.

“Death of Spartacus,” drawn by H. Vogel. 19th-century illustration depicting the death of Spartacus, a gladiator who led a slave rebellion in Rome during the 1st century B.C.

Steve Bannon has always wallowed in the slime. He was in charge of that muckraking online tabloid, Breitbart. He was an advisor to Donald Trump. He was a co-founder of Cambridge Analytica, that data analysis firm that scraped the scum off the Facebook barrel to skew elections. He was an investment banker, the lowest of the low.

He seemed to have reached the bottom. He could go no lower. So to meet that challenge, he teamed up with the reactionary Catholics behind an organization called the Dignitatis Humanitas Institute — you can tell it’s a con by all the pretentious Latin. The motto is also a giveaway: Defending the Judaeo-Christian Foundations of Western Civilisation through the recognition that Man is made in the Image and Likeness of God. Bite me, Bannon.

This Judaeo-Christian nonsense is always a dead give-away that you’re dealing with frauds. They also have a Declaration that is full of arrogant pieties and annoyingly capitalized words. The deeper a guy is in the cesspit, the harder he strains to elevate himself by calling on God as his bestest buddy.

A. whereas the true nature of Man is that he is not an animal, but a human being made in the image and likeness of God, his creator,

B. whereas it is precisely the imago Dei that Man acknowledges within himself with such profound awe and respect to call human life sacred; and to which the moral sense testifies certain properties as being inalienable; indelible in every single human life from conception until natural death,

C. whereas these properties have come to be known in the modern, secular state as ‘fundamental human rights’,

D. whereas the most complete expression of human dignity is therefore to be found only in recognising Man’s true anthropological and existential nature, and that this recognition lies at the foundation of all that the world calls civilisation,

E. whereas in recognising Man’s rights as intrinsic to his being, and not the product of legal charters is essential to sustaining liberty in a free society, work done to promote such a view of human dignity thereby promotes the foundation of all human rights,

F. whereas it is impossible to deny the source of Man’s transcendent dignity, and at the same time maintain that such dignity exists, yet the school of humanism tried to do just this, and with its inevitable failure, Man has been left in the precarious state of having no inherent rights other than those which the social community deigns to confer on him,

G. whereas belief that the State is the source of our human rights might be called inauthentic human dignity,

H. whereas that which is most sacred about Man is beyond human description because it comes from God – image and likeness – who is himself ineffable, and that international charters can only leave Man diminished by the attempt to literalise the ineffable,

I. whereas these insights are needed to maintain the balance between the rights of the individual and the power of the State, and that therefore recognition of Man’s dignity affects society’s ability to organise itself in a virtuous way politically, so that this balance never crosses the tipping point,

J. whereas the proper relationship between the individual and the State is that the latter exists to serve the former, not vice versa,

K. whereas it is the recognition of the dignity of Man that is most lacking in our society, not rights, and that this imbalance must be redressed,

L. whereas the mutuality of the parallel concepts of human rights and human dignity, and their interdependence, is definitively institutionalised in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”,

Noble sentiments that rest entirely on the fiction of the Christian god. Too bad they’re paid for by a crude thug.

Anyway, Bannon was planning on buying up a medieval monastery in Italy — further attempts at desperately buying up some class, which he has always lacked — calling it a “gladiator school for culture warriors”. Oy, it sounds like Spartacus, only not the good movie by Stanley Kubrick, but the cheesy Starz series with oiled muscular bodies, naked slave girls, slow motion gore, and everyone yelling and making an “O” face. The whole thing reeks of over-compensation.

Alas, Bannon’s dream is not to be. Italy is evicting Steve Bannon. O Ignominy! The only thing left is for Bannon to strip, oil up, and fall upon his sword.