At the very end of December, the eco-extremist journal Atassa released the cover design for its second volume. I missed it. You probably missed it. Doesn’t even sound like news, right? Sounds like the kind of shit that happens every day as journals futilely try to promote themselves to an already way-oversaturated literary market.

But around January 5 I heard about Atassa and have kept hearing about it. If you click on the link to the cover design it’ll be obvious why:

The thing is a swastika made out of roughly drawn snakes, and of course people got pissed about it: Atassa has been catching thrown shit since its inception for its supposed ties to Mexican nihilist-terrorists ITS, and William Gillis–one of the figureheads of the new anarcho-transhumanism movement–has called for Little Black Cart to cease publication of Atassa, comparing the journal to “neonazis or tankies.”

To write an article on Anarchist News makes sense. It was written several months ago as Gillis was angry that an anarchist publisher had published Atassa, a journal which doesn’t exactly fit with Gillis’ paradoxically leftist version of anarchism. But after Atassa released its cover design for Atassa 2, Gillis took his irritation at its cheekily-denied Nazi imagery to Facebook.

The result: Here’s this guy who thinks the world should be populated by anarchist robots–never mind how the technological apparatus for all that shit could be sustained sans governments–and who thinks that, though “a hundred million years is short term,” he can say “fuck you, I’m a robot” in present tense in the meantime to avoid having to honestly contend with modern biological reality.

And he’s arguing on Facebook with people who think Facebook–and industrial systems in general–shouldn’t exist about whether their magazine cover is PC enough. He begins his tirade (posted to his personal page, so I can’t link it) with the idea that Atassa and Little Black Cart chose this cover to “trigger the moralists,” then proceeds to become his own triggered moralist.

An author associated with Atassa, John Jacobi, said when asked about the incident that “I literally messaged him, you’re doing exactly what the editors want you to do,’” but this did not un-trigger Gillis nor discourage him from providing a ton of publicity for Atassa by ranting about them on Facebook.

It’s like the shitstorms of angry leftist press that propelled Trump to victory. It’s abundantly clear at this point that “bad publicity doesn’t have to be avoided, and doesn’t have to be endured—that it should be embraced, and even stoked.” And so why, oh why, does the left still think that its neo-Christian presumptions of moral purity should take precedent over evidence-based (whoops) public relations strategy?

That is, why do we still see angry leftist press about things like fascist symbolism, things that are clearly done solely to draw angry leftist press attention?

It is not a moral imperative to call out fascist symbolism. Shit, at this point in history, using fascist symbolism doesn’t even mean that someone’s fascist. It just means they’re an astute marketer.