We're only saying the time is short,
And there is work to do.

Joan Baez, “To Bobby”

The months following the killing of Charlie Kirk have been defined by a flurry of conflict between the squabbling factions of the fraying Trump coalition. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. If you listened to powerful White House officials like JD Vance, the high-profile shooting should have been the perfect opportunity to finally crush the enemies of the conservative movement once and for all. According to these officials, the shooting proved the inherent depravity and evil festering within the soul of those left of the American center. Those loyal to the administration hoped to capitalize on their ever-increasing grip over the media apparatus to rally the nation against the left. A massive “Christian revival” was held as a strange simulacrum of a pious funeral. Trump used this televised occasion to once again articulate his open hatred for his enemies. Republican legislators across the country have attempted to rename plazas and streets after Charlie Kirk. His widow, Erika Kirk, has been on a never-ending press junket: appearing dozens of times across news shows and podcasts. When Vance was asked whether the trial of Tyler Robinson should be televised, Vance said, “That strikes me as a good idea.”

In short, the conservatives attempted to use the tools at their disposal to dominate the attention of the American people so that their will (absolute power and personal enrichment) may be done. This was a strategy that proved crucial to Republican triumphs in the recent past. Liberals and Democratic Party apparatchiks have spent much of the time since Trump’s election wringing their hands over the dominance the right holds over the so-called “information ecosystem.” Far right, right-wing, and right-adjacent shows have consistently topped the list of most-listened to podcasts. Conservative influencers populate every social media platform. Not all this content is well produced nor hosted by particularly charismatic individuals. In fact, most of it is objectively terrible and thoroughly irrelevant. But for what the conservatives lack in quality, they make up for in quantity. Or, put another way, the quantity of their output itself becomes a powerful quality. There is nowhere you can go, on the internet at least, where the conservatives won’t push their content upon you. They throw thousands of pounds of shit at the wall to ensure a hundredth of it sticks. 

Further, these personalities hardly contain themselves to the political. Ben Shapiro and his ilk helped build their audience by “critiquing” mainstream Hollywood movies for their “woke content.” Many conservative “influencers” return to the well of criticizing Hollywood whenever their view counts run dry. The streamer Asmongold represents the extensive recent historical intersection between such “anti-Woke criticism” and video games. Gamergate long proved itself to be a massively influential radicalizing event for confused and reactionary young men to discover their inner raging anti-feminist. Joe Rogan has positioned himself as the kingpin of a new stand-up comedy ecosystem, firmly under the ideological thumb of reactionary politics. Aspiring comics from around the world now travel to his Austin club to supplicate at his feet. Candace Owens has spent the past years cultivating an audience of Conservative women through a bizarre but captivating combination of unhinged conspiracy theories and celebrity gossip. Reactionary Evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons have built up an extensive network of content creators that call for a return to “traditional values” defined, of course, as bog-standard “anti-woke” politics. These “influencers” tell you how to cook, clean, and submit to your husband so that you might be right with God. Outlets like Barstool spent the 2024 election cycle decrying the intrusion of “woke politics” into sports, while ignoring, facilitating, and promoting the crippling gambling addictions that have come to be the true product of modern American sport. If there is a hobby you enjoy outside of politics, there is a conservative media sphere, backed by billionaire funding, constantly attempting to draw you further into its maw. 

Some might argue that all this doesn’t matter. That what is to be done is to “touch grass.” That those seeking to build a Communist movement must “go outside.” That union drives, protests, and in-person organizing represent the past, present, and future of our success. While by no means denying the absolute necessity of such activism, it is clear that such a plan is nowhere near sufficient. For those that disagree, I tell you, simply look around. Most Americans now get their news from social media. There have always been few who have paid attention to politics, and for the most part, those few have long ago made up their minds. The task before the Communists is the same as it has always been. To wake the slumbering masses, to drive them to become active political subjects engaged in a struggle for power. To make those who don’t pay attention become aware of the power held within their numbers. And then to wield that power to conquer the state and enact a proletarian government. Well, the slumbering masses have been soothed to sleep by the internet. That’s where they are. Julius Martov made his name by, in part, advocating for Communist pamphlets to be published in simple words, printed in Yiddish (the language of the population he was attempting to organize). To ignore the internet would be to simply cede the ground of mass politics, to ignore a central organizing space, and to refuse to speak the language of the proletariat. 

Others might make the correct point that the internet is a wholly owned subsidiary of capital. The game is simply too unfair, they cry. The algorithms and site rules are blatantly rigged in favor of conservative voices. The billionaire oligarchs who own Twitter, Meta, Google, or the rising AI firms are actively fighting to prevent such a communist movement from taking root online. The ability of the conservative influencers mentioned above to produce their slop at such a breakneck pace is derived mostly from the limitless flow of funding into their propaganda mills. I deny none of this. But the same holds true for every aspect of our society. Every workplace, every bar, every college is also under the thumb of the capitalists. This was never a fair fight, and there is no escape from them. To have any hope of victory is to accept the enormity of the odds stacked against us. A great army of money and influence and power stands ready to tear us up and break us down at every turn. To desperately play on the nationalist impulses of the American proletariat, guiding them down the path of imperialism, alienation, and inevitable ruin. We may very well lose in the face of this onslaught. Yet, we must try with all our might. 

How then should we try? It is clear that the question of attention must be addressed for the communist movement to have any success in rescuing itself from its present state of marginality. Attention, as has been noted by liberal commentators like Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein, has been thoroughly commodified by capital. The internet and social media have expertly chopped up, bought, and sold the American mind. Every second of time and every scrap of attention is fought over in an eternal war for the sake of capital accumulation. The shoe company spends more time thinking about how to get your attention so that you may buy their shoes, than on what materials they could use so as to make better or cheaper shoes. The same holds true for every industry. Advertising has long been one burden of the overproduction inherent in capitalism. Modernity has led to the logics of advertising to be carried to their final conclusion. Every second of attention for every person is now a valuable commodity, perhaps the only commodity that the proletariat may possess to give up to the capitalists, other than their labor. 

The battle plan is then laid before us: to win this war of attention. To seize the attention of the proletariat in every way we can. Here, in-person organizing may be crucial. The construction of so-called “third spaces” that are communist in orientation could prove invaluable. Union organizing, protests, and direct action can be essential tools for the purpose of grabbing attention. In this way, every strike, every mass march, every act of sabotage against the machinery of American imperialism serves a dual purpose. The first is that the day-to-day of capitalist life is disrupted. The second is that everyone looks at us to see what the hell is going on. Here is where the internet proves itself to be indispensable. There must be a massive network of communist “talkers” and personalities that can direct the masses towards correct and useful interpretations of these in-person actions. To understand the class war unfolding before them. To understand the vile and despotic intentions of the Trump administration and their capitalist backers. To understand the feckless and genocidal actions of the Democratic Party. To understand that the only way out of this mess is the victory of the proletariat, and thus, the victory of the communists. 

Let me clarify my point. There must be a deluge of communist content in every corner of the internet. Some of it will be theoretically unsound. Some of it will come from sources that are opportunist or narcissistic in nature. Most of it will be attacked relentlessly from the great cacophony of anti-communist voices already populating these spaces. We must bear this burden and respond with one word: more. There must be more of everything, everywhere. There must be a communist found in every hobby, eager to explain how it connects back to the movement. There must be a communist in every community, onboarding people into the movement. There must be a communist voice in every debate over every subject, always offering ruthless criticism. We must address the whole entirety of modern society: from beauty, to exercise, to video games, and anything else where people congregate. In short, our streams of propaganda are little more than a trickle when they must be a flood. It should be impossible to escape the voices of communists, even when one actively looks to avoid “politics.” We can no longer simply speak amongst ourselves. It matters very little how correct our line is if nobody cares to hear what it is. 

This is not to say that there is no distinction between intelligent critical engagement with the entirety of society and a never-ending pipeline of communist “slop” content. There very much is. Both, however, are essential. Ruthless criticism grounded in theory is always welcome. But we can not continue to stay lost in the swamps of Marxist theory and academic language. We have to produce content that is funny and relatable. We have to produce content that engages the emotions of those who absorb it. We have to make people feel things just as much as we have to make people know things. We have to make them hate the capitalists and the imperialists. We have to make them love the proletariat and find joy and purpose in solidarity. We have to make them feel fearful of the conservatives destroying their lives. And we have to make them feel excitement at the prospect of the world the communists wish to build. These are feelings people can’t avoid, and even more, want to feel. They seek out any source that gives them access to these feelings. There is no reason why that source can’t be the communist movement and its spokespeople. 

This is a task that must be carried out relentlessly, regardless of whether the moment carries revolutionary potential.  It is only by building this propaganda apparatus in peacetime that we may marshal the masses in a moment of political awareness and conflict. The communist movement failed to take advantage of the 2020 BLM uprising because the proletariat did not trust us or care what we had to say. If we seek to influence or lead the possible future political struggles surrounding the 2028/2029 transition of presidential power or any other unforeseeable popular uprisings, we must make our voices heard now. We must earn the proletariat’s trust as their source of community, information, and entertainment. We must win them over now, so they may win the world for us later. Quality matters, but not nearly as much as quantity. It should be understood, in fact, that quantity is often the main quality that matters. We must overwhelm the nervous system of the capitalist media. The only way to do so is through overstimulation, or the production of propaganda on as massive a scale as we can muster. We must do this, or we shall lose. 

If I could offer one critique to such a plan, it is that cultivating online parasocial relationships built on cults of personality can have dangerous consequences. Such a dynamic may lead to the communist movement becoming overburdened with success, as has happened to the conservatives. Their attempt to use the death of Charlie Kirk to their own benefit has fallen utterly flat. The AI song “We are Charlie Kirk” has served to humiliate those loyal to the Kirk legacy. Candace Owens spent weeks making thinly veiled accusations that Erika Kirk and other TPUSA leaders secretly killed Charlie Kirk in collaboration with the Mossad and the French Foreign Legion. Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Steven Bannon have marshalled their white and Christian nationalist followers to attempt to push out the Zionist reactionaries currently dominating U.S. foreign policy. Zionist reactionaries like Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Tim Pool have pushed back just as hard. As a result, the conservative media have been unable to save Trump from his plummeting polling numbers. They are divided and set against one another. Their audiences are demoralized and are unsure of whom to trust. We must be careful that if we follow the strategy laid out above, our “influencers” remain loyal to the communist movement, and not to their own personal brand or status.

Despite this danger, we must try. If the “Deliverists” rallying around Mayor Mamdani wish for his minor reforms to receive credit, then people must pay attention to what he is doing. If those opposed to Mamdani wish for their denunciations of his moderation to be heard, they must ensure they aren’t simply speaking to themselves. We must go to the masses, and we must never shut up. The future of the movement depends on our ability to grab the attention of the proletariat and to direct that attention towards contextualizing their struggles into that of class war. If we ever aim to bring the movement back from the grave, we must prove its existence by observation. The communist movement can only become extant by announcing itself loudly and clearly. We must be unafraid of speaking too boldly or too much. We must make ourselves heard, whether the proletariat intends to seek us out or not.