Cartoon Communists

Why YouTuber Vaush’s threats are no joke

My friend Mystery Grove on Twitter has this great post—the kind you take a screenshot of and keep in your meme folder so you can whip it out at a moment’s notice. It’s a post about communism and the type of people who are communists and why they’re communists.

Here’s the Tweet:

“Reminder: Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.”

I can’t say I disagree with any of that. It becomes obvious quite quickly when you study the history of communism, whether you’re looking at Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; or whether you’re perusing, from a safe distance, the polyamorous fuglies, neckbeards and habitual self-abusers in your university Marxist society.

It’s inescapable: Communism is a biological phenomenon. I’ve got in trouble for saying this before, but it’s true, so I’m going to keep saying it. Communism is a biological phenomenon.

Look at who is a communist and you’ll understand why. The ideology—those hundreds of thousands of millions of words of delirious cant about “historical materialism,” “the Dialectic,” “base” and “superstructure,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” blah blah blah—all of it really is just window dressing to hide the ugliness of the communists themselves. Or if not to hide it, at least to make it less immediately obvious. And then when you realise the truth, well, it’s often too late: you’re dead in a cold ditch somewhere or on your way to the Gulag. So it goes.

Anyway, I was thinking about that Mystery Grove Tweet, and its central message, this morning while I was reporting on YouTuber “Vaush”—real name Anthony Kochinski—and some things he’s been saying about Donald Trump and his supporters, specifically about what needs to be done to them if America is to be saved and the “artifice”—“edifice”?—of democracy is to be maintained.

I can’t say I keep up with Vaush. I see posts and clips of him on Twitter, always making an arse of himself, and sometimes when I venture onto 4Chan, which I do less and less regularly these days now I don’t live in my mother’s basement.

Vaush calls himself a “libertarian socialist.” He’s also a self-confessed “pansexual.” He’s heavily overweight and has a beard to disguise his lack of chin. He famously defended the consumption of child porn with the absurd non sequitur that “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” and also revealed live on stream a folder stuffed to the brim with “loli porn.” That’s pornographic drawings of children if you don’t know—and you really shouldn’t. It’s hard to take Vaush seriously, at least under normal circumstances.

But circumstances are changing, and even the rantings of a fat dork who looks at pornographic drawings of children now have the potential to be something quite serious indeed.

In a recent video, Vaush issued a call to arms against the Trump administration and against ordinary Trump supporters. He describes MAGA voters as a “plague to this country” and suggests that life imprisonment would be “generous” for members of the Trump admin.

What he really wanted to say was that they should be put to death, and he comes within a hair’s breadth of saying that, by invoking, with a very knowing wink, the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II.

Vaush says there must be a process of “de-MAGA-fication” and that this must involve purges at every level of society. It won’t just be members of the Trump administration or Republican politicians who are barred from holding office ever again: Johnny MAGAhat must be punished too.

We’re not told exactly how poor Johnny must suffer for his despicable choice at the ballot box, but we can guess. The language is the familiar language of extermination we hear whenever communists speak about their opponents. MAGA voters, says Vaush, are “a plague to this country,” “a disease,” “criminals.” Voting for Donald Trump makes you “evil.”

Like I said, Vaush is a sad guy, the sort of person who would be incapable of carrying out real violence himself, even if his life depended on it. But he has 500,000 subscribers on Youtube, more than 400 million views, and the things he’s saying are being said by plenty of other people besides him, including other streamers like Hasan Piker, retarded celebrities like Bill Burr, and also the leaders of protest groups and genuine murderous revolutionaries. The atmosphere is febrile. There’s a real chance of widespread left-wing violence in the coming months and years.