Power Is Not The Point
I said power is neutral - like luck. It doesn't belong to anyone. It's just there, waiting to be picked up, and whoever picks it up gets to write the rules about what's moral and what isn't. Let's sit inside that idea, because I don't think most people actually believe it, even when they say it.
Ask the alt-right kid in the Discord server what he wants, and he'll tell you he wants his power back - that it was taken from him, that reclaiming it is the whole point. Ask the leftist organizer what they want, and they'll tell you they want to dismantle power, redistribute it, break its grip. They think they're saying opposite things. They're not. They're both describing the same object from two different seats at the table. One wants to sit where the other one's sitting. The other wants to burn the table down so no one gets to sit there again. But both of them are orbiting the same center of gravity: who gets to hold it, and what they're allowed to do once they do.
The part that should unsettle people more than it does: if power really is just neutral - a resource, not a value - then the only thing separating "justice" from "domination" is who's currently holding the microphone. And if that's true, then every movement, every ideology, every kid radicalized in a gaming lobby, and every organizer radicalized in a mutual aid group is running the same operating system. Different code, same machine.
I don't actually believe the whole story is that simple, and I think that's the mistake people make when they stop at "power is neutral" and call it a day. Neutral doesn't mean equivalent. A knife is neutral - it can cut bread, or it can cut a person, and the tool doesn't care which. But we still don't pretend a surgeon and an attacker are doing the same thing simply because they're both holding blades. What matters isn't whether power is present, but what it's in service of. And who and what it's willing to cost to get there.
Here's the difference: the alt-right's version of "taking back power" is always, without exception, in service of narrowing who gets to be fully human. It needs someone beneath it to make sense of itself. It cannot describe its own strength without first describing someone else's perceived weakness, and it cannot hold that story together without eventually enforcing it - in a bedroom, in a marriage, in a classroom, in a country. The left's version of "redistributing power," even at its worst, even when it's clumsy or self-righteous or fails on its own terms, is at minimum trying to widen the circle of who gets to be fully human. That's not a small difference. That's the whole difference. It's the difference between a fight that needs a permanent underclass to exist and a fight that's trying to make the underclass stop existing. One is a vacuum. One is collective liberation.
Power being neutral was never the interesting question. What it's aimed at is. We lose the room every time we let "both sides want power" stand in as an answer, because it sounds sophisticated and it costs us nothing to say. It costs us everything to actually look at what each side is building with it.