"Summit" to Discuss Strategy For a General Strike Features Same Old Post-Left Grifters

These conspiratorial remoras continually attach themselves to left policy proposals and movements

A three-day-long summit to discuss strategies around effecting a general strike in the US features the same post-left personalities who have appeared in similarly aimless efforts this year.

Much like July’s so-called March for Medicare for All, the summit—hosted by the group Fred Hampton Leftists—is featuring podcasters and social media stars as headliners. They claim that they're going to brainstorm a general strike, a monumental task that actual labor organizers have never managed in the United States.

The lineup doesn’t inspire confidence that this effort will succeed in effecting a mass labor action, but it’s unlikely that’s the actual goal.

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Included in the “stars” headlining the event are Jimmy Dore, the podcast and streaming star who’s seldom met a right-wing conspiracy theory or personality he won’t endorse; Niko House, a Tulsi Gabbard fan with a deep, abiding friendship with white nationalist Jack Posobiec; and anti-vaxxer Fiorella Isabel.

There are other, marginal figures associated with the so-called summit: the Vanguard podcast, far-right militia platformer Comrade Misty; and Twitter personality Jackson Hinkle—who contributed to the push for a general strike by marginalizing nurses, teachers, and Netflix employees from the working class in general in a rant largely copied and pasted from Wikipedia.

Suki Claws 🤶🏼🎄 @sammajammaz

@EoinHiggins_ An event that cares more about bringing on online figures who’ve proven their revisionist, chauvinist politics than anyone actually intimately familiar with actual otg labor organizing. Like what is the justification for this?

It’s not a lineup that inspires much confidence for the event’s ability to make any sort of impact outside of the limited audience these figures appeal to. But actual political change has never been the goal of this specific type of action—it’s all about clicks and attention.

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The same unserious cohort was involved with the March for Medicare for All, an event over the summer that promised to bring attention to the nation’s collapsing healthcare system but instead gained notoriety for giving a platform to anti-vaxxers and neo-Nazis.

To get a good sense of what we can expect from this weekend’s “summit,” you can look at all the work these participants in the March for Medicare for All have done in the interest of universal healthcare since the event, which—from what I can tell—is exactly nothing. This weekend is likely to be more of the same.

Were I the conspiratorial sort I’d wonder at the way grifting remoras like Dore, House, Isabel, Hinkle, etc attach themselves to left policy proposals and movements like the fight for universal healthcare and labor rights, only to discredit those efforts by their involvement. I might muse about how they only join these movements at moments in which they’re in position to start making real change and having an effect on the public, mainstream discourse—and puzzle over that being the time these fringe types get involved. But I’m not that type of person.

aaron @paradoomer

sometimes i think that building a robust leftist mediasphere to counter bourgeois narratives is super important but then i see streamers & editors of socialist magazines redefine what it means to be working class ad nauseam & i go smoke some weed & watch succession or some shit

The online left is splintering into a fragmented collection of personality-driven silos, many of which are tilting right. This weekend’s “summit” is just the latest example of how these figures are using left organizing energy for their own advancement.

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