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Excellent articulation of what seems to be happening in the ether. There are men (mostly white) radicalizing each other a little more every day. A recent example: as part of the recent talk of "carnage" and crime, summary executions have begun to be a topic among rightwing podcasters like Steven Crowder and Matt Walsh. First they focus on a particular kind of criminal: "men who rape children should be hung in public." Or Trump praising the Chinese for supposedly executing drug dealers, without any real due process. And soon it becomes generalized talk about how there are just disposable lives, like Jordan Neely on the NYC subway, that can and should be eliminated as a public service, so the rest of "us" can live secure and decent lives.

None of these voices are expressly advocating Nazism or a particular political program. But they are fostering a political ethos that pivots on identifying and eliminating polluted, threatening life. To watch Elon Musk––someone I thought of mostly as a clown––begin participating in this mass conversion is pretty terrifying.

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founding

You would know the history better than I would, but I do wonder the extent to which the fixation on organizations and such is a matter of jumping to the last stage. First a culture emerges, "subjective formation" as you put it; it is a *scene* rather than anything formal and structured. You can then at some point actually create the organizations because you've got the base the draw upon for it.

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insightful; thanks again. As part of this formation of the subject, what interests (and repels) me is something even more specific, which is the close identification with violent actors who carry out acts of social hygiene. Even more than bands of thugs like the Proud Boys, individual actors like Rittenhouse and Penny are to me alarming in their use of lethal force. This self-deputization in pursuit of undesirable social elements -- and even more, the collective reaction to it -- is a clear sign that we've passed some awful threshold. For unlike reading BAP or posting pepe memes, there's nothing even faintly transgressive or ironic about calling Penny a hero: even liberals and so-called progressives like Mayor Adams (lol) are doing it.

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May 19, 2023·edited May 20, 2023

nice catch on the homoerotic titillation undertones of the 'frat boys egging each other on' dynamic

men approaching the point of no return in more senses than one

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May 24, 2023Liked by John Ganz

Thanks for this and other essays. They truly capture and explain the processes at play in the slow transformation I see in a cousin of mine, one I used to be very close with but am less so now. It started with occasional memes, and it's gotten progressively darker until he outright rejects democracy as workable with only the thinnest of caveats to that conclusion. The complete demonization or 'otherness' of liberals or progressives is terrifying.

I fear that he is just one of millions of young men who are on this path.

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Really great essay.

To put it another way, fascism relies on implied narratives that are intended to cause erosion and eventual rejection of the social contract as they become less and less encrypted, the aim of toppling the current order more explicit. These grant permission to embrace darker and darker, anti-social impulses, thought patterns and behaviors. The effective propagandist models (sometimes reluctant) thought processes to achieve the erosion and breakdown.

You’ve got on the one end, the true believer fascists cheering this on, but on the other, you’ve got more reluctant “base” veering towards fascism, led by propaganda and social pressures.

Whats scary is it looks really close to these groups converging, and that couldn’t be more dangerous.

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One definitely feels that the (mostly but not exclusively) male insecurities that underpin violent retribution fantasies are going to get worse before they get better. And every goddamn one of them can buy an assault rifle easier than they can buy weed.

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Do you think the Nazis produced and consumed their most vulgar and cartoonish anti-Semitic propaganda with a similar air of detached irony that these young conservatives have towards the groyper memes?

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John, this is another in a long line of great explanations in making sense of the menace of fascism.

In some ways, the early 2020s have parallels to the early 1930s. It's still in the "Springtime for Hitler" phase where there are still loosely organized movements of far-right ideologies, like there were in Europe in the interwar period until the mid-1930s when fascism consolidated into the most successful Hitler/Nazi, Mussolini/Italian and Franco/Spanish variants.

There are still distinctions and differences in the modern American fashoid right. They all just need a Great Man, right now Trump, to glom on to so as to not "dissonance their cognitives." Fascism has amagical coin, with one side being eclecticism and the other being syncretism.

Eclecticism explains the mass appeal of fascism, how existing classes and castes see a unifying entity as both transcending struggles and simultaneously fulfilling contradictory ends (antimodernists who seek a return to old social arrangements; theocrats who seek a religiously ordered life; futurists who want to break from established social orders; the working class who want a bigger boss to break the back of the big boss to deliver an egalitarian prosperity).

Syncretism is the mixing of fantasy and reality, myth and lived experience, and emotion and rationality. The contradictions serve as an escape hatch, when the latter forms of reality, experience and rationality intrude upon the former forms. The Tucker Carlson text shows how the process plays out. "This is now how white men fight" (an idealized, mythologized concept of whiteness and masculinity), empathizing with the victim (a conscientiousness resulting from reality, experience and rationality) yet deeming the victim undeserving of empathy and worried more about the optics of the mob reflecting poorly upon himself (the resolution of the two forms).

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A worthy analysis of the vulnerability of human minds to be warped by power seeking. The same vulnerabilities create Marxist hellholes. They are competing brands of the same foul psychic failings.

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Think the "just you wait" impulse here is often expressed through an invocation of the past in regards to Jim Crow and slavery. It's used both defensively, "things were/could be much worse" and for the edgiest of edge lords in an aspirational manner.

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"These types" Narendra Modi got his start with a paramilitary organization led by admirers of Hitler. The leadership of the BJP are all from the RSS, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, who dream of Hindu racial purity.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/modi-s-big-con

I'll admit that Yair Netanyahu can pass for white. Self-hatred is foundational for fascism—the pretentious term is "ressentiment"— and Ashkenazi self-hatred is nothing new. But I doubt Mauricio Garcia the Texas shooter with Nazi tattoos wanted the white man to rule over him.

"We were the first fascists". Marcus Garvey.

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This sounds a lot like what Deleuze and Guattari were trying to articulate in A Thousand Plateau’s on microfascism.

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This makes me think of the Neo-Confederates in the Reagan Administration.

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I have been saying this about sadism for a long time. I first noticed the sadistic aspect of the far right on reddit years ago. Every conversation would always devolve into a violent fantasy, a fantasy of dominance for oneself and pain for the other. At the time, I was so freaked out by this I used to mentally try to calculate in my head ‘how many sadists are there in society?’ because it was so clear that this recurring pleasure of violent fantasy was involved in the kinds of organizing online the right does. Unfortunately, I thought it was a lot lower than it is (I was hoping 5%!) because I didn’t consider that maybe a lot of people are would-be sadists if you can create a kind of internal tension in them where they feel frustrated or anxious and need that release.

I honestly find that pro-Ukraine accounts on Twitter can be sadistic. These seem to be sometimes men who vote Democrat who are enjoying the spectacle of watching ordinary Russian men be *actually killed* in a video, or interrogated and so on. So you can honestly see something disturbing about war, that it may satisfy certain people’s psychology as spectators. I don’t know so much about who is behind the accounts but it is sometimes people far away from the fighting. Are they enjoying the deaths because they enjoy any death if posited as ‘an enemy’ or is it that they blame Putin for what happened to the USA and this is vengeance (on ordinary Russians who have nothing to do with it). I guess I was a little bit relieved to see that one post of a Russian captive undergoing extreme fear or distress, or possibly some kind of withdrawal caused a lot of people to be also distressed and sympathize with him.) So when you can see someone’s face, maybe at least so far, not everyone is going to enjoy the spectacle. I had never considered this about war before. I knew that the keyboard warriors had some kind of inner fear or anger or sense of wounded pride after 9/11 that these extremely stupid wars alleviated (at least for awhile, before the US was bogged down and floundering. I hadn’t really thought that some of them were alleviating their uncomfortable emotions or getting pleasure from the suffering and death they were causing. Maybe I simply couldn’t face what that meant. I thought the torture was a false deterrent and not an interrogation tactic but what is more pleasing to the sadist than torture?

Primo Levi wrote something where he described the Nazis as ‘the torturers’ but unfortunately I cannot find it right now.

I merely mention this because I wonder whether that we’re dealing with a phenomenon that may not have a limit to obviously psychologically disordered people like the far right pundits, who always had sadistic fantasies--or at least I remember this after 9/11 when they would dream of doing horrible things to the liberals who were criticizing them--or the KKK or Nazis or ultra-racists who get enjoyment from killing or terrifying people. Or maybe the people who admire Daniel Penny. You can spread sadism, and you can spread it by creating a sense of threat or something which creates a tension in people. And then you can promise to relieve the tension with violence. So maybe this is the reason why we have this sense that we will have difficulty avoiding mass violence. It’s very easy to get people on the knife’s edge if you can cause a strong enough sense of threat combined with a sense of disorder or actual disorder. (There isn’t more disorder in the form of crime but this doesn’t seem to matter.) This is one of the causes of the sense of momentum, to build that sense of tension, to keep it moving all the time by making people fearful or by showing how you can elicit their reaction.

There must be a way to counter this collectively but I don’t know what it is.

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So very astute as always JG

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