Better Late Than Never?

As anyone who's kept up with me that long knows, I've been saying Trump is a fascist since first seeing him speak at the first GOP primary debate in 2015 when I also predicted that he would win the presidential election. America had been craving a fascist for a while, and Trump delivered.

Some theorists on fascism were not so keen on applying the fascist label to Trump. Robert O. Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism, has been among the most vocal in this camp. After Trump's election, Paxton refused to use the fascist label, citing Trump's lack of exercise of fascist power. Apparently, the travel bans, immigrant raids, and labor rights drawdowns by executive order did not factor into his analysis.

Finally, Paxton is coming around to the obvious fact that Trump, known for his rants advocating eugenics, keeping Hitler's speeches by his bedside, and speaking in a language of barely coded racism, is in fact a fascist. Honestly, he might have damaged his reputation less if he were willing to die on the "Trump isn't a fascist" hill. Now we know that Paxton's definition helps you identify fascism five years after the fact. What's the point in that?

On Patriot Front and Protesting in DC

When I went to my first protest in New York City, I was shocked and rather bewildered at the tactics of the NYPD. I had cut my teeth protesting in DC, and couldn't understand why the police aggressively pushed marchers to take the sidewalk, left crossing intersections up to the normal flow of traffic, and ended the march by fanning out for and conducting what were apparently routine arrests. Saturday's march by neo-Fascist men's organization Patriot Front showed the world what everyone who came up in DC protest culture, whether activist or law enforcement, knows which is that aggressively policing protest marches makes no sense.

War Is Dead

Last night, "World War 3" started trending on Twitter in response to a US airstrike near a Baghdad airport that killed the commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani among other top Iranian and Iraqi military officials. I'm not convinced this will start a war. Rather, I think this is a continuation of the global shift away from formal declarations of war and toward discretionary uses of military force to punctuate foreign policy.

The Right Doesn't Like It When You Correctly Identify Racism

I guess feelings don't care about facts either. Since writing a report about the very true presence of VDare and Red Ice TV on Facebook, Guardian tech reporter Julia Carrie Wong has received a bunch of attention from right wing outlets, angrily stating that she correctly identifies racists online.

The Nazis Still Have No Concept of Security Culture

This week has certainly been one for Nazi leaks. First with Richard Spencer ranting about kikes and octoroons, then his right hand man being doxxed by other nazis, now the entirety of the Iron March forums awaiting doxxes. It totally makes sense that Nazis would have zero concept of security culture since their ideology is predicated on caring about nothing but yourself.

Richard Spencer Made Me Look Up What an Octoroon Is

Hoo boy! Apparently, Milo leaked some audio of Richard Spencer's reaction to learning of Heather Heyer's death and the negative media attention it earned him. Let's say he's displeased. Slur-filled transcription under the cut.

New Zine!

After persistent nagging by right-wing trolls, I decided to write a "how to define fascism" zine, so they can stop asking me to define fascism. They'll probably still ask me anyway. You can read the zine here.

Conversation with Gretchen Mullen

I have been having a stimulating conversation with Gretchen Mullen of Skeptic Review about neo-fascism and anti-fascism. We're currently on the fifth round of letters (my last one was a two-parter). Check out our exchange here!

Anti-Anti-Antifa

There was a lot of hubbub over a recent report put out by the Regional Organized Crime Information Center (RICOC) documenting the battles between antifa and what the report refers to as "anti-antifa." Public reaction to this report seemed to be overwhelmingly negative, particularly the bibliography and the decision to refer to antifa's antagonists as "anti-antifa".

While there are throughout minor errors of fact, I felt like the report overall was...not terrible? Within the context of being a primer for law enforcement officials, the report does a pretty decent job of summarizing the antagonism between the antifascist left and the far right.

Oh Look, the Daily Stormer's Defending a Pedophile

Or I guess paedophile, since he's from the UK.

Dick Spencer for President?

Stormfront seems to think so.

Two More Fascist Ideas

After having successfully muscled a Muslim travel ban into existence by including North Korea and Venezuela in it, Trump now has his sights set on his big, beautiful wall along the border with Mexico. To accomplish this Trump has floated two ideas I have previously suggested he would eventually use: a national emergency and borderland eminent domain.

It's Like Angela Nagle Read Settlers and Sided with the White People

Angela Nagle pulls at our collective memory of decommunization by invoking Reagan's Berlin Wall speech in the lede of her latest for American Affairs Journal. In keeping with her steady slide into Strasserism, we find her parroting some of Tom Metzger's favorite talking points by positing unchecked immigration as inherently anti-working class (and the reverse position as the True Left).

Does Neo-Nazi Gang Sting Violate Freedom of Speech? [SATIRE]

Chastity McBride said she was just trying to make a point about the natural human drive for dominance. “By selling crystal meth for a white nationalist gang, I was demonstrating the hypocrisy of our national drug laws,” said McBride while filing a toothbrush into a shank to represent the death of innocence.

McBride was one of almost forty neo-Nazis affiliated with the Unforgiven and Aryan Brotherhood gangs swept up in a sting operation on Thursday. But the defendants and advocacy groups argue the arrests were a violation of their civil rights.

Tucker Carlson Is the Paragon of Crocodile Tears

A few weeks ago, my friend, who is actually in Smash Racism DC (I haven't been art of the organization for three years) send me a pastebin doxx of Tucker Carlson and a few other far right personalities, so I probably should have seen this coming. SRDC has really been on fire with the doxxes as of late. Anyway, last night my SRDC comrades engaged in what's known as 'grassroots lobbying' - showing up at a powerful person's doorstep, usually at night, and generally making as much noise as possible.

Now Tucker Carlson is crying. He is afraid for his family even! From USA Today:

“Here’s the problem, I have four children,” he told Fox. “I never thought twice about leaving them home alone, but this is the reaction because this group doesn’t like my TV show.

Now we're supposed to feel bad for Tucker Carlson's family. This same Tucker Carlson who literally advocated the separation of thousands of families at the US border. We're supposed to fear for his children. This is the same Tucker Carlson whose Daily Caller published white nationalist Scott Greer's callous rebuke of justice for black children slain by the police. Go ahead read it.

The fact is, Tucker has used his platform to strike fear into millions of people every night from the comfort of his own studio. His eliminationist politics of racial purity influences policy to bring ICE agents to the doorsteps of thousands. He influences policy to ensure that pigs who shoot children are let off the hook. Tucker can cry all he wants, this is just chickens coming home to roost.

It's Happened

So we've finally done it. We've broken the fourth wall of US politics. Touched the third rail. Antisemitism is back and it looks like 11 dead congregants at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. It looks like defaced temples and vandalized grave stones.

I'm at a loss.

Griffin and Paxton: The Best We Can Do?

The 2016 US presidential election brought into sharp relief the state of fascist studies in the early 21st century. Coming to the fore were British scholars Roger Griffin and Robert O. Paxton. The former's 1991 The Nature of Fascism sets forth a definition of fascism based on ideology. The latter's 2004 The Anatomy of Fascism seeks to jettison ideology, which fascists lie about anyway, and opts for an approach highlighting the actions of fascist movements. Thus, Griffin was able to diagnose Trump as a fascist while Paxton was not. I find both of these definitions of fascism wanting for their own reasons, and I see emerging a new direction built upon their work.

Best Friends for Fascism

Journalist Elizabeth King published a piece in Truthout which very much resembles a piece I wrote for Jewish Currents last year. In it, she makes the case, as I did, that befriending fascists just allows them to have friends in spite of their fascism. Unlike my article, she points to some failed attempts at befriending nazis:

Writer Quinn Norton was briefly hired then let go from a position with The New York Times this year after tweets came to light in which she spoke favorably of a now-notorious American neo-Nazi called “weev” (whose real name is Andrew Auernheimer). Norton had referred to Auernheimer as her “friend.” Auernheimer, who co-runs the Daily Stormer, a website that is massively popular with neo-Nazis, appears on white nationalist podcasts and incessantly calls for genocide against non-white people.

Despite all this, Norton found it appropriate to maintain a friendship with Auernheimer. “I have been friends with various neo-nazis in my time, yes” Norton tweeted when asked about her relationship with Auernheimer in 2014. “I have never agreed with them, and I’ve been clear on that.”

This latter statement in particular exemplifies a sort of “holier-than-thou” position that fascist-adjacent people sometimes deploy in order to skirt accountability for their relationships. In attempting to show that she, a good person, can be friends with a Nazi and still be good herself, Norton is also attempting to show that she is above the peskiness of partisan biases: the ultimate tolerant liberal.

However, other tweets where Norton used the n-word also recirculated amid the public outcry that accompanied her hiring at the Times, as did a 2013 Medium post where she called Nazi leader John Rabe her “personal patron saint of moral complexity.” Rabe was a leading figure in Nazi Germany, and also helped thousands of Chinese people avoid being killed during the Holocaust. That is, there are at least two Nazis about which Quinn has kind things to say. Still, Norton also claimed on Twitter in February amid all this backlash that on the rare occasions she still speaks to Auernheimer, she brings up “the racism” and attempts to address it with him.

Even if Auernheimer were open to leaving the Nazi movement, and even if Norton were herself a staunch anti-racist, it’s not only a matter of disagreeing “with the racism” when it comes to helping fascists change their ways. Indeed, if Norton had hoped to somehow neutralize Auernheimer’s hate or make the world safer via a friendship with Auernheimer, she failed spectacularly. Auernheimer is still a prominent player in the fascist scene and shows no sign of giving up on the movement any time soon.

This is in no small part because it’s actually quite difficult to deradicalize a neo-Nazi, and the process has to start with a genuine desire or need to change on the part of the fascist.

Feels vindicating.

On Supermen: Fascism and Vigilantism

Been thinking a bit about this snippet of an article I wrote for Public Seminar last summer:

What we see then in the use of “violence” is really a distinction between who gets to lay a claim to legitimate public coercion. The police are expected to use extraordinary measures to prevent any social disruption — from physical altercations to feeding the homeless in a public park. Doing so as a lay citizen, even through the consent of a larger community body, is seen as an ex ante violation of a higher natural law (even if not a violation of the actual law) of the distribution of legitimate physical coercion.

Transgression of this principle provides the basis for most superhero franchises. These characters, by virtue of centering the rationale for their righteous vigilantism, occupy a liminal space between guardian of the peace and social menace. Such a moral system is only sustainable through the artifice of the story’s narrator who ultimately wants readers to see the hero as good and thus constructs conflict resolution to support that. In reality, this moral system is where we locate fascist ideologies.

Fascist ideologies are like superheroism in that they take self-righteousness to be equivalent to general righteousness so long as vigilantism proves successful. More successful is the vigilante whose success accords him a loyal following. Unlike most superhero stories, real-life humans are prone to error without a sufficient social basis to check their hypotheses. This is evident in the proliferation of peer-review in academic literature; executive boards in corporate and non-profit enterprises; and of course the deliberative form of government that has become increasingly the norm since the eighteenth century.

Perhaps there is a little fascist in all of us. That voice that would make everything as it should be if not for societal strictures. That sense of moral indignation that one is prepared to do what society needs but does not want.

This is the locus of fascism. The executive sweeping away the degeneracy without sentiment. Disconnected from society as a true elite he grants no special favors. He perceives the social moral matrix and applies it ruthlessly, transgressing against that same moral matrix to do so.

Nazi in Hiding Disavows Nazis in Public

After a brief honeymoon of solidarity between The Daily Stormer's Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer's wing of the alt-right, it seems that Anglin is once again a negative nancy. Today Anglin published a blog post entitled "Official Daily Stormer Position: Don't Go to 'Unite the Right 2' - We Disavow" which self-explanatory as the title is, the reasoning is revealing.

Anglin give three major reasons: the doxxing is dangerous, the numbers are embarrassing, and the violence is off-putting. Rather than attempting to gather in public, Anglin advocates a retreat to the internet and underground organizing.