Snitch Jackets Come in All Sizes

~ let's keep it a buck ~

I lied, put your kevlar back on. We’re not talking about snitching, per se. That is not the right term for what we’re gonna discuss. More specifically, we’re going to go out of our way to keep the ‘snitch’ designation out of this dialogue and firmly where it should only show up—in the G code. Much like how everybody can c-walk with a few tutorials on TikTok and nobody’s gait-keeping it (pun intended) from the world at large, I don’t want this conversation to de-fang snitching by removing it from the streets and making it Gen Z slang. What we’re really talking about is informants.

But even that is not entirely what we’re here for, cuz ‘informant’ doesn’t do the role justice. Informant adds academic sheen to ‘snitch.’ What we’re talking about is something far more despicable than informing, that has nothing to do with exposing violent crimes or any kind of criminal intent. By the end of this essay we will hopefully have coined a new word (or phrase) that casts the worst possible light on what this kind of informing this is: the surveillance state enticing you to spy for them on your friends, family, and neighbors.

One of the pillars essential to any fascist government is the informant system it puts into place. It is key to establish a web of he said/she said/they said, a network of everyday citizens enabled to inform on their neighbors to the government. While that may sound straightforward, such systems become so destructive to the social fabric they inhabit that things rot out from the inside pretty quickly. The more internecine, the better. The more ouroboros, the better. It should be a self-cannibalizing system of tunnels that doubles back on itself, that mutates like shitty AI. This, like other bureaucracies designed to half ass it and fail at key structural points, allows for a root corruption that invites the kind of full throated fuckery Donnie Darko & the Klown Kar Kabal thrive off of. It invites the kind of paranoia that suggests if your neighbors are doing it to you, then you should do it to them first. It creates the kind of imagined race to a finish line nobody wants but everybody wants to beat. It creates the kind of everyday lives where your friends, family, and co-workers become possibilities to leverage in the eyes of the Police State watching you.

A QUICK SCRUB OF THE TIMELINE INFO DUMP — In Nazi Germany the secret police were the Gestapo, who pressed German citizens to voluntarily denunciate and expose their neighbors as “enemies of the state.” Later, in East Germany they were called the Stasi, and they maintained one of the most pervasive surveillance organizations in modern history. They employed hundreds of thousands of informants as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, the “unofficial collaborators,” and they leveraged extortion and bribery against over 5 million citizens.

In the Soviet Union mass informant programs enabled Stalin’s purges to the tune of about 700,000 to 1,200,000 executed, with millions more shipped off to the Gulag Archipelago, Russia’s prison camps. (Ring a bell?) Later, the KGB used informants to gather “kompromat”—compromising information—that was used against Russian citizens in a vicious cycle of Spider-man Pointing memes.

In Francoist Spain it was Brigada Político-Social (BPS), in Fascist Italy it was the OVRA (Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo), Mussolini’s secret police. Maoist China had Neighborhood Committees and Red Guards, North Korea had the Bowibu, the Khmer Rouge deployed the Angkar, Saddam Hussein and Assad had the Mukhabarat.

All of them the surveillance arms of governments intent on turning its people against each other for little gain and a whole lot of guilty conscience, academic purges, and ethnic cleansing.

HERE AND NOW — who will it be and how will it go down? The obvious three letter mafias are the FBI and DHS, and both have dark histories regarding blackmail, entrapment, and corrupting peaceful political threats to the state, but—but! It would not at surprise me if some new stillborn deformed mess slopped out of the maw of Donnie Darko’s wet dream to wreak new havoc. Some slithering smoke demon from King Shit of Fuck Mountain, a twist on the ‘ol starve-em-till-they-eat-each-other playbook. The Management are on a nasty streak right now to give a new face to rat behavior.

And it’s already begun. The US Department of Education has deployed a website aimed at collecting information on any DEI programs or initiatives found within our schools. (Not putting the link here. You know what to do.) At face value, it doesn't look like much. Just tell ‘em which school from which district is daring to promote ideas around diversity, equity, and inclusion, that’s all. (Reeeeal tempted to channel another episode of IT’S THE RACISM, STUPID, but I could be here all week.) In Texas, Senate Bill 8 rewards private citizens to sue anybody who aids or abets an abortion with a whopping $10,000 for each successful lawsuit.

This is all “just the tip” fascism. The whole frog in a slowly boiling pot of water technique. The no Vaseline part is coming up. The chute has been greased and Waterworld for rats has been opened up to the public.

So, I exhort you: don’t do it. Don’t be an informant. Don’t invite into your soul and your conscience that kind of cancerous shame. Don’t entertain the idea that informing will buy you any grace from the sock puppets. Don’t allow a moment of dislike for your neighbor to tempt slicking the palms of the goons and ghouls. There is not, has never been, and will never be a decent return from The Management when it comes to betraying your people.

Also, karma is a bitch. You may feel like I’m being hyperbolic about this, or I’m out in front of the grindhouse way too soon, but I disagree. Informing on schools means ratting on teachers, means finking on people, means betraying your family, means slithering on your belly for the worst possible reasons.

The most offensive and repellent part of the whole get down is, this kind of rat behavior is the final boss level of ‘don’t hate the game, hate the player.’ It’s how fascism thrives in the first place. It presents rules to you that absolve you of being a piece of shit cuz hey, them’s the rules. That’s just how it is. The other offense? That I feel like I gotta even address this shit.

So, what’s the word for it? We need something good, people. A term that’s juicy, a word you can chew on, that stings when it’s uttered, that leaves the mouth dry and poisoned when said, that blackens the tongue and cracks teeth when given oxygen. What do you call someone who gives up information about their friends and family to government interlopers?

A kinformant? Filthmonger? A Rat-King-a-ling? A Parseltongue? Whatever the word, it’s gotta hurt. It’s gotta blister. It needs to hold more social shame and discredit than the act it identifies. Well? What you got, readers? I’m all ears…

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