Thotty Thursday: Abort Fascism part I

Name: Thotty Thursday: Abort Fascism part I — MO Ho Justice
Start: 2022-12-08T22:00:00-0600
End: 2022-12-08T23:00:00-0600

Thursday, December 8, 2022
10:00 PM 11:00 PM

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Abort Fascism: Part 1

The War on Whores and the War on Drugs are proxy wars!

ascists strategically scapegoat sex workers & people who use drugs in order to:

1. Obscure the true scope of their violence

2. Normalize xenophobia + violations of bodily autonomy

3. Deflect blame (onto victims) for the violences produced by capitalism, patriarchy, and white-body supremacy

The “War on Drugs” is the US government’s ongoing drug prohibition campaign.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one,” which became the rallying cry for over half a century of escalating anti-Black + xenophobic:
- Mass incarceration
- Propaganda
- Labor Trafficking
- Imperialism

Drug prohibition policies have existed in the US since 1914, but have escalated in scale and cost ($50-100 Billion/year) since the Nixon era.

The War on Whores is the anti-prostitution mirror to the War on Drugs.

Defining characteristics of the War on Whores include:

- Instigating racialized sex trafficking panic

- Conflating sex work and trafficking

- Enmeshing whorephobia with White supremacist ideology, xenophobia, and transphobia

- Co-opting the language of “abolitionism” while expanding criminalization

The War on Whores and the War on Drugs both weaponize anti-vice scaremongering and moral panic to:

- Expand carceral infrastructure

- Stigmatize and disproportionately criminalize migrant, BIPOC (especially Black, Latine, and Asian), queer, and trans communities

Some examples of the War on Whores’ racist and transphobic legacy:

Page Act (1875-1974) - Prohibited recruitment of workers from “any Oriental country” who were brought to the US not by their own will or for “lewd and immoral purposes“ (i.e. prostitution)

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943) - Used racialized whorephobia against Chinese women to justify the US’s first racially-discriminatory federal immigration ban

The Committee of Fourteen (1904) - Carried out a campaign of anti-Black economic and cultural violence by systematically shutting down Harlem saloons under the guise of “fighting prostitution”

NYS Penal Law § 240.37 aka “Walking While Trans” Ban (1976-2021) - Authorized police to profile, harass, and arrest trans people for “loitering” under the guise of curtailing outdoor sex work

These laws are straight from the fascist playbook of dishonestly framing their victims as dangerous while normalizing violence against them.

Fascists target people who trade sex or use drugs because stigma subjugates these communities into political defenselessness. “Whores” and “junkies” are sneaky shorthand for ALL communities which fascists seek to eradicate.

Until leftists include criminalized workers
in “labor solidarity” and wholly reject
the fascist myth that ANYONE belongs to a disposable underclass, fascists will continue to conceal their persecution of racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities as “anti-(drug/sex) trafficking” – and get away with it.