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July 19, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
18:32
Redneck Revolt： Weaponising Working Class Identity
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So you may have noticed that there has recently been a weaponization of the identity of the white working class in a movement called Redneck Revolt.
And on their website they use the subheading Putting the Red Back into Redneck.
They say that Redneck Revolt is a national network of community defense projects from a broad spread of political, religious and cultural backgrounds.
They claim to be a pro-worker, anti-racist organization that focuses on class liberation from the oppressive systems which dominate our lives.
In states where it is legal to practice armed community defense, many branches choose to become John Brown gun clubs, training ourselves and our communities in defense of mutual aid.
They claim that their national network members come from a variety of ideological backgrounds.
Libertarians, humanists, anarchists, Republicans, communists and independents.
Given the overtly Marxist overtones of their movement's rhetoric, it's very difficult to believe that libertarians and Republicans are actually satisfied with the group's stated goals.
To begin with, Redneck Revolt claims to stand against capitalism as an economic system that methodically keeps the vast majority of people in the world impoverished while they labor to enrich a small minority of people.
I don't really agree with this hot take, but I'm going to save my defense of capitalism for a future video.
Personally, I just find it very surprising that you can find anti-capitalist Republicans and libertarians.
They also claim to stand against the nation-state and its forces which protect the bosses and the rich.
Police, prisons, courts, artificial borders, and other systems of social control only exist to serve the rich.
The nation-state project came into existence to protect the propertied classes and keep us working people poor and without power.
This is distinctly Marxist rhetoric.
This could have come straight out of the Communist Manifesto.
Again, I find it very difficult to believe that Republicans particularly would be in favour of rhetoric like this and themselves would stand against the concept of the nation-state.
Naturally, Redneck Revolt stands against the ill-defined term white supremacy, saying the white working class has a rich history of rebellion against tyranny and oppression.
The white working class also has a long history of being the foot soldiers of genocide and oppression.
In the periods before the widespread adoption of white supremacist ideals, the white working class openly rebelled and found common cause alongside slaves, natives, and other people being attacked and exploited.
The relative privileges that white people have been afforded since that time have kept us protecting the rich while also allowing our communities to remain impoverished and unstable.
The white working class will only see real political, economic and social stability once we abolish our allegiance to white supremacy.
Their website actually does have a definition for the term white supremacy, and why white folks should be opposed to it.
White supremacy is a system of violence and power that ensures that political, economic, and social power is withheld from people who aren't white.
By this definition, it is clear that the United States is not a white supremacy, given that there are so many people of colour in various positions of power, there are black billionaires, and for the last eight years, the United States had a black president.
Redneck Revolt seems to be absolutely no different to other far-left Marxian ideologies.
They espouse the same talking points, they hold the same definitions, they have the same goals, and they appear to be attempting to galvanise the Trump-voting white working class demographic into the progressive hierarchy of identity politics.
They decided on the term redneck because it had a disparaging, demeaning connotation, primarily among upper-class urban liberals who had gone out of their way to dehumanize the working class and poor people.
Terms like white trash and hillbilly have come to signify the view among the same upper class liberals of poor rural folks.
To us, the term redneck is a term that signifies a pride in our class, as well as a pride in resistance to bosses, politicians, and all those that protect domination and tyranny.
It actually seems that redneck revolt is some kind of left-wing reaction from the rural heartlands of America towards the coastal liberal elites, with whom they probably share much of the same ideological agenda, except they appear to be tired of the classism that these coastal elites perpetuate when they focus excessively on race and gender.
They appear to want to insert their working-class white identity into the progressive narrative without being a part of white supremacy.
They say, at moments that white working people have looked beyond their skin colour and have worked alongside movements of poor and working class people of other races, the power of the ruling elite has become the most threatened.
It is when the white working class has started to view itself in terms of class and not race that liberation has waited just around the corner.
White supremacy is a system that white working people have helped to protect, but it is also a tool against us all.
Allegiance to a politics of white racism has allowed the rich to continue to hold on to power.
As far as I am able to discern, when people say white supremacy as a political system that operates in the West, what they mean is Western liberal democracies.
Capitalist markets, universal suffrage, universal education, freedom of movement, all of the things that we consider to make the West a great place to be, seems to be what they consider white supremacy, which rather ironically makes white supremacy rather tolerant, diverse, and inclusive.
Redneck Revolt are also an above-ground militant formation, which seems to go against the general ethos of preventing violence in the political process in Western democracies.
But of course, they are not interested in participating in the democratic process because they believe in the need for revolution.
They believe in the complete restructuring of society to provide for the survival and liberty of all people.
They say that we believe in the end of predatory exploitation of our communities and the creation of a world where no one is without food, shelter, or water, or any other means of survival.
We believe in a future without tyranny and the political and social control of a small segment of society over the rest of us.
We believe in liberty, we believe in equity, we believe in self-determination.
They're obviously some brand of revolutionary Marxists, as, as with other parts, this paragraph could have come straight from the Communist Manifesto.
Naturally, far-left media outlets such as The Guardian, Vice, and Mother Jones have been giving Redneck Revolt a remarkable amount of positive coverage, with Vice magazine even featuring them in a documentary.
It was revealed that the clan is having a clavern today at a separate location, privately they're doing a cross burning, right?
It's 2017, folks are still burning crosses talking about genocide, and they're trying to gain traction in our communities.
Yes, they do look and sound very similar to other hard left political ideologies.
This is fucking class!
Let's escape!
They also interviewed one of the goony beard men of Redneck Revolt, and he explained precisely what Redneck Revolt is about.
Mitch, who asked us not to use a last name, is one of the leaders of the Ashborough chapter.
We are a response to a rise in politically motivated violence and intimidation against vulnerable communities.
But with guns.
Right, yeah, with guns.
That doesn't mean that we're like looking for a fight.
We're just trying to defend ourselves.
Do you feel under threat?
Yeah, of course I do.
A lot of that anger that people feel that lead them to the kind of reactionary violence that we're seeing today is really misdirected and misguided.
It's aimed at immigrants and the LGBTQ community.
It's aimed at people of color.
And what we're trying to say is that those people aren't your enemies.
The folks who are the enemies are political and economic elites who are creating the conditions for the things that you're upset about.
I could probably explain at length that it's the progressive activists and elites who are for open borders and against the nation state that are creating the conditions that workers are complaining about.
And this group agrees precisely with that ideology, but there's no point as they wouldn't listen.
I think this has given us a good handle on what redneck revolts stand for, because they've been perfectly transparent with their motives and desires.
What I find interesting is how this has been received.
Now, we've already seen that it's been very well received by the progressive press.
But one thing that really tickled me is the way that the young Turks received them.
Generally favorably, but not entirely.
In Middle America, there is a new effort to resist the Trump organization or Trump administration, and it's known as the Redneck Revolt.
At least she didn't call it the Trump regime, I suppose.
But yes, they probably are undoubtedly in resistance to Donald Trump, despite the fact that Donald Trump was highly popular with the white working class.
Now, the Redneck Revolt is interesting because they want similar things to what we discuss here on the show, but they're very much in favor of guns and what they consider redneck culture.
It's weird that Anna doesn't have any major criticisms of them being in favor of guns, now that they have the right political ideology.
For her, it was never about guns themselves.
It was always about Republicans.
So they consider themselves an anti-racist, pro-gun, pro-labor organization.
They say, if you haven't noticed, we aren't liberals.
I don't think it would be unfair to categorize Redneck Revolt as a communist organization.
And remember, they are differentiating themselves from the liberals for a reason.
Because liberals get the bullet too.
You know, if you keep going further left, eventually you go left enough to get your guns back.
Is there anyone who wants to contest my characterization of Redneck Revolt as a violent communist revolutionary organization?
So they're very much in favor of guns.
The organization's principles are distinctly left-wing, though.
They're against white supremacy.
They're against capitalism and the nation-state.
And they're in support of the marginalized.
So.
Sorry, a violent intersectional communist revolutionary organization.
Not only do they want to resist Trump, but they also want to fight back against some of the racism and racist rhetoric that we've been experiencing in the U.S. lately.
Look, this goes to the tradition that's in the South that people have forgotten about.
And I've talked about this in previous shows.
Johnny Cash, Woolly Nelson, almost all the old country stars were what we would call progressives today.
I mean, significantly so.
But mainly they were rebels.
So that's why maybe these guys aren't calling themselves liberals.
But in Johnny Cash's album cover, he's sticking the middle finger out to the man.
And he was there at Folsom Prison.
And he's doing this, and he did a concert for prisoners.
And he writes about the downtrodden.
And so what these guys are saying is the same thing.
We're here for the marginalized.
We're here for the real people.
Yeah, but was he for the idea of abolishing the nation state and prisons and police and all of these other things?
Was he against capitalism, private enterprise?
Were they against all of these things as well?
Because they seem to have far more weighty implications, don't they, Cheng?
And they got marginalized by several different factors.
And maybe that's why they're, you know, again, actually not liberals.
See, and this is why I still, after all these years, still quite like Jenk.
Because he's not responding well to them not being liberals.
He's like, well, they're like actually not liberals.
And so they're actually going to take away my stuff if these people ever accrued any kind of political power.
If they got to set the order that we live under, well, the young Turks would get socialized pretty bloody quickly, wouldn't they, Jenk?
Because, and I know the words get a little funny here, liberals, progressives.
We call ourselves progressives, and there's some distinctions.
I don't want to get too long into that road, but my point is that you could be against big government and also against big business.
And you could see that there are problems with big government, and that some of those are created by the fact that we're doing crony capitalism, where big business has bought off government, right?
This is Jenk's one true strength.
He's absolutely right.
And it seems to be just an open door in a representative democracy for corporations.
If we don't shut it, then they're going to do this forever.
But the thing is, I think at heart, Jenk is a capitalist.
I think he believes in his own agency.
And I think he wants to be the owner of his own private property.
And so I think there is a subconscious level to which these socialist or communist revolutionaries really worry him.
And so this is a tradition that is very old in the South.
And it's great to see it rise up again.
Yeah, absolutely.
A southern tradition I can get behind.
I love the way that he's really stretching this.
Yeah, this southern tradition of communism is something I can get behind.
Is it, Jank?
You seem to be kind of reticent on the subject.
You seem to be deliberately twisting a certain aspect of what you consider to be southern culture and deforming it to fit what is clearly a continentally inspired ideology.
So I want to leave you with a quote from Dave Strano, who's part of the Redneck Revolt.
He says, the history of the white working class has been a history of being an exploited people.
However, we've been an exploited people that further exploits other exploited people.
While we've been living in tenements and slums for centuries, we've also been used by the rich to attack our neighbors, co-workers, and friends of different colors, religions, and nationalities.
Oh, like the awareness there is lit.
Yes, they have all of the regressive socialist talking points absolutely down.
These people couldn't be more accurate with their terminology.
Okay, I just, I love the awareness there because it's true.
I mean, we allow the most powerful people in the country, the real elite, to distract us with infighting rather than focusing on fighting the system that continues to suppress us, right?
No, you aren't being suppressed at all, Anna.
At fucking all.
You are not oppressed.
Jenk is not oppressed, but Jenk would never say he's oppressed because he knows he's not oppressed.
He is at least intellectually honest when it comes to this.
You are buying into an ideological narrative that is almost entirely bullshit.
There is nowhere in the world more free than Western capitalist white supremacist countries.
And that's not just for white people.
That's for everyone who lives in these societies.
You can't find more free places.
If you thought you could, surely you'd just move there.
I don't know whether you've noticed, Anna, but all of this mass immigration is happening because our countries are such desirable places to live.
And this is because of our political and economic systems that these people like Redneck Revolt and the various other militant intersectional socialist types want to radically change.
Interestingly, to turn them into a much closer approximation of the shitholes the immigrants are trying to flee from.
Max Neely, who is also part of the Redneck Revolt, says, I grew up playing in the woods, floating coolers of beer down a river, shooting off fireworks, just generally raising hell, all that kind of stuff.
Things most people would consider a part of redneck culture.
We're trying to acknowledge the ways we've made mistakes and bought into white supremacy and capitalism, but also give ourselves an environment in which it's okay to celebrate redneck culture.
Do you, boo?
Do you, boo.
I love that they are taking back the pejorative from the progressive coastal elites who've used it in the same way that a slave plantation owner would have used the word nigger.
And you don't have to be from any particular place to be a progressive.
And these guys actually, in a lot of ways, sound more progressive or more liberal than I am, certainly.
Come on, man.
They just said that they weren't liberals and you know they're not liberals.
You know they are effectively communists.
They are.
It's okay to say that.
Hell, I imagine there are going to be a lot of revolutionary types in their ranks, which is why they want the guns.
I imagine a lot of them have a really good knowledge of the Russian Revolution.
And you know that they would put you against the wall as well, Ceng.
Because, you know, I think capitalism's okay.
As much of a regressive as Jenk can be at times, he's still our guy.
It depends on how you do it.
Not crony capitalism and not corporatism, right?
Right.
And I really actually do agree with you on this point.
And it's nice that you have been so consistent on it, Jenk.
But he's right.
Of course, just because you're in the South doesn't mean that you should buy into what they tell you Southerners need to think.
And he's right that it's as old as time itself that if you're in a bad spot, somebody above you will tell you, don't look up, look down.
They'll tell you your problems are down below.
And they'll tell you that the powerless are the ones that cause your problems, not the powerful.
Yeah, but it kind of goes both ways, doesn't it?
Because the communists will tell you, well, look up.
All of your problems come from the people above you.
When really you should probably be looking at yourself, especially in a system like ours.
We actually have the better system.
And we can prove that by any of the metrics.
But I'm going to do that in a later video where I can be more comprehensive about it.
It's meant to distract you so you never solve your actual problems.
Because they're up, they're not down.
I really do wish you'd get out of this mindset, Cen.
Holding you back is you.
If you let other people put this nonsense into your head, you will be forever struggling against people who aren't even aware of your existence.
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