Jacob Clifton

Burning down the home you just built

The story goes like this: A man is sitting quietly at his local pub with just a few other patrons. One of his fellows just down the bar leans forward politely to order a drink — at which point the bartender suddenly flips out on the guy, telling him to get the f out and never come back. Quite notable for the singular drinker our story’s about.

“Why did you just um, do that?” asks our hero.

“I could see his tattoos. They were covered up before.”

Our hero nods, expectantly.

“They were neo-Nazi symbols. You notice how nice the guy was?”

The man had been notably polite, in fact and after all.

“You get one nice Nazi in your bar, and you let him stay, next day you have two polite Nazis in your bar. And so on, ‘til you find yourself the proud owner of a Nazi bar.” And it always starts like this, he says: with one charismatic scout just looking for a drink.

I asked Aaron, my bartending friend, why it is that there are those kind of men and Aaron essentially replied, “That story is more true than you can be expected to believe.”

I remember when Richard Spencer got punched, I found myself in a row with my favorite couple, who were liberals in the same sense: They were stuck on their own personal Buddhism, and enjoying telling the world that violence is always wrong. I saw a tweet that perfectly replied along the lines of:

Oh, you don’t like when we punch fascists? You’re gonna hate what we used to do with them! (Kill them. We used to kill them.)

Fascism is a highly communicable disease. It spreads through loneliness and resentment. When it takes hold of a people, war will follow. We’ve never told this particular story before — although McCarthy gave us a big sip of what it might taste like — but it’s a very American story nonetheless.

That’s why you have to be on guard. You can’t normalize, you can’t defer, can’t cower. You can’t simply say both sides are crazy and hope to find the middle ground anymore. You can’t stay neutral on a moving train, and you can’t ignore the simple truth that anything but siding with the oppressed is siding with the oppressor. No matter how clean you wish your hands were, centrism isn’t possible in the current circumstance.

What you can do is be watchful, keep your own hands clean, wash them when they get dirty. Punch fascists where you find them, whether figuratively or otherwise.

But what does that look like in actual practice? Today, it’s pretty silly: I’m shutting down my Substack and returning to Patreon, which never did me any harm and which has no discernable Nazi content. Which, unforch, Substack does.

Like X’s advertisers, I don’t want to appear next to fascist or full-on Nazi content. I felt weird enough about it when I was merely rubbing shoulders with the truly evil (Chris Rufo, Bari Weiss) and the truly useless (Matt Yglesias). I gave it serious thought, the idea that I would be getting paid from the same bank account as Chris Rufo. It made me sick but it seemed like the only game in town.

But those Nazis’ early presence has, once again, changed the spirit of the site. They came into the bar, so politely, and the bar didn’t shoo them out no matter how transparent they got, and now they make a great deal of money simply being their natural, evil selves.

My fiancé Jason is one of those Boomer-adjacents who still pictures “Millennials” as college-age or younger, and not 40-year-old parents. Both of us are technically Gen X, but I lean Millennial and he leans hard into Boomer. (He’ll be 60 in a month.)

Jason says “my generation” uses words like fascism and Nazi too liberally, so that they are diluted and copied mean nothing. This rang untrue to me when people started saying it 20 years ago, but certainly moot for the last ten years or so: The Nazis and the fascism are here, in our nation, looking just like us. Looking us in the eye.

As usual, he offers a perspective that is 10% Fox News, 40% old-school Liberal Dem, and 50% stuck in the 1990s. He takes us back to a time where those words were, indeed, just fanciful and not what they’ve become. And he won’t be moved. He had withdrawn from most popular culture long before we met; it’s one of the things I love.

But when all you want to do is talk about politics and fascism and the many dangers of toxic masculinity, it’s a little more than irritating that your main interlocutor won’t admit any of those things exist.

I’m not complaining. I know what I signed up for. But this trait in particular means that my little tantrums — leaving Twitter months ago, utterly losing my faith in Joe Biden, leaving Substack today — don’t register for him as seismically as they do for me.

So what’s that mean for us, for you and myself? Well, I’ve been holding off on leaving Substack until I was sure that Patreon’s “Join for Free” rollout had reached my particular account. It’s not a great time for me to be doing this, financially speaking —Jason and I are both experiencing big employment changes at the moment that have effectively ruled out both Christmas and our planned road trip to see my mothers — but it’s important that I finish this transition.

• I will be making most content public, so it’s completely up to you, and made sure paid subscribers can easily update to a free membership without losing content. (I will most likely copy these Substack newsletters over there, in fact and in time.)

• I will also be creating more content, in a major way, to keep the Patreon hopping. Feel free to comment, here or there, about what you’d like to see.

• (I don’t really watch TV these days but I might do it for you, if you are into that. More Zooey and Ambrose stories and pics are a given. Politics and gender and the jackpot at the end of the world are also likely to rear their heads.)

• A third thing is happening which I cannot talk about yet.

• Something soon on Baldur’s Gate III, the wildly popular new videogame that has me back into gaming after several years away.

• Possibly a video or two? If I’m feeling put together enough for that.

• Thinking about streaming, but I have to figure out what that is first.

My plea is that you will join me on my Patreon today, subscribe at whatever level you’re into and enjoy the archives while I spin up new content. The ultimate point of all this is to connect with you! So let’s do that.

You know I love you. XOXO.