January 18, 2022
Hey wild ones,
Here’s to this Year of the Tiger!
World leaders and the 1% had a pretty good time of it, but for the rest of us it was a miserable year. Pummeled by record-breaking heat waves, fires, floods and Covid, most of us squirmed in isolation, staring at a future that doesn't compute.
World leaders bungled things on many fronts. COP26 was a colossal missed opportunity. Then the pandemic turned into a nightmare because rich countries refused to share vaccines.
Under their watch, dozens of countries — Yemen, Syria, Myanmar, Lebanon, Afghanistan — descended into hopeless “disposable states.” Meanwhile, Justin shaved his beard, Scott kissed a lump of coal, Boris partied on Downing Street and Joe pottered around with a big smile on his face while Donald hovered ominously in the background. None of them had the stomach to stand up to Xi as he thrust his demented brand of surveillance capitalism on the world.
Through all this, we on the Left rendered ourselves useless under the pathological altruism of wokeness.
What the fuck?
There’s just no more slack in the line. At this point, all it could take is one hiccup — a financial downturn, a new Covid variant, an accidental skirmish in the South China Sea — before total carnage ensues.
But things could also swing the other way.
A billion of us could suddenly realize that we hold the most revolutionary tool ever invented in the palms of our hands. With a surge of righteous agency, we could take the bull by the horns, route around the gatekeepers and start organizing ourselves. We could lead the way to an unprecedented new era of direct democracy — dismantling the hierarchical, top-down power pyramid that has ruled the world for thousands of years, building a grassroots global governance system and calling the shots from below.
We could move our money out of the big banks. Push for true-cost pricing on every last hot dog and HumVee coming to market. Break the GAMAM Big Tech stranglehold. Wipe Exxon-Mobil off the face of the earth. Transform universities into hotbeds of activism again, seeding a generation of leaders who will make sustainable life on earth happen.
Within the many-chambered heart of The Third Force lies a secret so fucking dangerous and beautiful it opens up all possibilities for governing ourselves in the future.
We can be a hundred thousand strong by mid-year, one million the summer after.
Let’s jam every system that stops us from living our dreams.
The Third Force