Benjamin T. Awesome
2 min readAug 17, 2017

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I feel like the following two items on your list represent a clear cognitive dissonance about the state of political affairs in America and the West:

White nationalists will never gain control of America. There is a zero percent chance of that happening. There are far too few of them and their ideas are inherently inferior to everyone else’s.

And…

All of this is infinitely less pressing of an issue than the fact that America is a corporatist oligarchy whose ruling elites are killing our ecosystem and have pressed us into a new cold war with Russia. One person died in Charlottesville. The US war machine is slaughtering constantly. You feel this one more because it happened in your backyard, but people are dying everywhere, and if there’s a nuclear war we all will.

I could make the same argument about the oligarchy that you made about white nationalists: there are far too few oligarchs and their ideas are inherently inferior to everyone else’s. The oligarchy drives us to insane wars and threatens the well-being of the entire planet with potential cataclysms such as global warming. These are terrible, terrible ideas, yet oligarchs run the show.

All it takes is realizing white nationalism and the oligarchy are the same thing, to realize the fallacy of arguing “your problem is bad, but my problem is worse.” White nationalism bolsters the oligarchy. The oligarchy enables white nationalism. Other names for this could be the patriarchy, the military industrial complex, homophobia, religious fundamentalism, or capitalism. It is all the same thing, and to try to fragment it into digestible nuggets ignores the holistic evil it represents. You cannot effectively battle the oligarchy without battling white supremacy. You cannot effectively battle white supremacy without battling the oligarchy. The US war machine was born in white supremacy and is still awash in white supremacy. War is an instrument of white supremacy, and white supremacy is an instrument of war.

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Benjamin T. Awesome

Just the facts: Writer. Gamer. Feminist. Educated in Astrophysics. Professional Gambler. Student of Language. Satanist. Anarchist. He/Him.