Something very strange is shifting in the darker corners of the internet. Something serpentine slick and black as ink. While Donald Trump moves farther and farther to the right and much of his cultish base mindlessly follows him into the abyss, the farthest of the far-right appear to be turning against Orange-Man-Fash with a vengeance.
The brazenly Zionist massacre in Iran was certainly the last straw, but this subterranean sea change was a longtime coming. It first seemed to pick up momentum with Trump's ham-fisted attempts to bury his dirty secrets in the Epstein Files, but it actually began with a slew of executive orders granting broad sweeping powers to the federal police state with the less than subtle assistance MAGA's new tech bro overlords in Silicon Valley. The mainstream media barely even registered this spooky true story of unified federal data banks, but the Groypers and Proud Boys sure as fuck did. This was where the wedge was driven, Iran is where the lumber split.
The most blatant signs of this division in progress can be seen on the podcasts of loathsome far-right influencers like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, and a great deal of it does seem to be tinged by an antisemitic revival that Israel practically willed into existence by insisting that you were either with them or Hitler, but upon closer inspection the situation is actually far more complex than that.
This was made fascinatingly clear to me when I witnessed a shocking amount of downright fascist followers of mine on social media come out in droves to support my fire breathing harangues against ICE during its murderous military occupation of Minneapolis. To be 100% clear here, I am talking about confirmed neo-Nazis showing unvarnished sympathy for Renee Good and openly denouncing mass raids on undocumented brown people.
This is huge, or at least it could be. Donald Trump in his second term is quite possibly the closest thing this country has ever come to being run by an openly fascist dictator and the actual fucking fascists are the right wingers suffering from the most vociferous bouts of MAGA buyer's remorse. To paraphrase Courtney Love, they got what they want, and they never want it again. All of this leaves us with a very action-oriented movement with little other option than to embrace the kind of antigovernment extremism that nearly provoked an armed march on Washington during the Clinton years.
A lot of people on the left are going to hate me, but I can work with that. Gore Vidal and Alex Cockburn tried to lead the anti-Clinton left in working with that with little success back in the nineties and I think we could have really used the backup during the Battle of Seattle.
However, I'm not just talking about recently ancient history here. This brand of guerrilla diplomacy is what I do. You may have heard the rumors on antifa chatrooms and they aren't totally false. Nicky Reid is in fact the world's only genderqueer anarchist Nazi-whisperer. My reasons for performing such a bizarre and thankless public service are varied and complicated.
On a purely political level, I am a practitioner of the lost antifascist art of deradicalization, though I prefer to think of what I do as re-radicalization. Whereas deradicalization is the practice of encouraging people with extremist views to adapt to a more moderate stance, I have nothing but contempt for the so-called moderates of Western Civilization who frequently do a better job pushing white supremacy than the Klan with their endless expansions of the police-warfare state. What I do is try to encourage radicals with counterrevolutionary views to adopt legitimately revolutionary ones.
What inspires me to do this is where things get more personal. Some of it, I admit, is merely a hyperfocus. I have a downright neurodivergent fixation with the extremes of society that extends from cannibals and necrophiles to dictators and terrorists. I find Julius Evola to be as fascinating as I find him revolting and I can easily lose myself in a forty-minute conversation about sex magick and Esoteric Hitlerism. Which actually kind of leads me to another reason why I do this which hits even closer to home.
I know a neurodivergent Queer person when I see one and the far-right is depressingly riddled with my people, poorly concealing their Queerness amidst a camouflage of radical theater less likely to get them lynched by their neighbors in flyover country than sodomy or HRT.
And this leads me to my primary reason for weathering barrages of hate speech and risking further alienation from my leftwing allies. When I hear some self-loathing closet queen on the spectrum singing the praises of long-dead despots, I sometimes catch a brief glimpse of myself at a very painful age on that blue screen.
You see, dearest motherfuckers, before Nicky Reid was the heathen genderfuck anarchist you all know and hate to love, she was a very pissed off and mixed up Marxist-Leninist with some tendencies that ran disturbingly close to what some might consider National Bolshevism.
I never bought into racism, sexism, or xenophobia but I was very much in love with the notion of a Eurasian world order powerful enough to pulverize the West into sand. I was always much fonder of Tito than Stalin, but I was also quite fond of the anti-western bromides of Russophilic Soviet revivalist Alexander Dugin and the Red Square street theater of Eduard Liminov.
I was angry at most of the right things, at watching the American hegemon thrash one third world culture after another in the name of liberalism so fat jerks in long ties could hock bombs and sell the orphans of the people they obliterated into slavery to Walmart sweatshops, but there was an ugly part of me that was also very angry at myself.
Pissed off at the scared little girl in the boy's body who wasn't strong enough to keep the priests from forcing themselves on her until she vomited on the rectory floor. I wanted to make her disappear beneath that camouflage of Soviet kitsch and Slavic strongmen. This desperate need to disappear was coupled with an equally desperate hunger to belong and that need became insatiable enough for me to look the other way on all the gulags and pogroms and mass graves that lurked just behind all that dripping Eurasian ephemera.
It was actually a few Queer libertarian capitalist pigs on a couple of antiwar message boards that finally set me straight, not by jumping down my throat or forcing their own specific ideology upon me but by pushing me to be consistent with my own core beliefs and by pushing me to recognize that expecting powerful men to save me from other powerful men wasn't anything even resembling a solution to my pain.
They also convinced me to forgive that little girl still bleeding under all that armor. I had to embrace her and recognize that there was nothing she could have done to prevent herself from being preyed upon by vile men with way too much goddamn power but there was plenty I could do to prevent that sick systemic debauchery from continuing.
So now, when I cross paths with other clearly subaltern people adopting views and positions that put them at odds with mainstream society, I have a hard time ignoring the pain behind the rage in their eyes. And when I see those same people realizing that they've been fleeced by another two-bit conman in designer jackboots, I see an opportunity to finally remove the wool from those eyes.
With all that being said, and since sadly much of the left seems to have forgotten how to break bread with the enemy's battered children, I feel compelled to give a few pointers on re-radicalization during an age of festering MAGA remorse.
First off, know your species. Believe it or not there are a lot of different kinds of right-wing whack-jobs out there and even if you can't see a big difference between the Koch Brothers and the Strasser Brothers that doesn't mean that reactionary types don't. Second, keep a sense of humor and a sick one at that. You are going to be called some horrific things and being able to toss it right back with a devilish grin will carry you a long way.
However, you don't score points with ideological weakness either. Stand your ground and the people who aren't totally beyond redemption will respect you for it. Call out bigotry when you see it and call it bigotry even if you're simply saying 'that's some hopped-up, Nazi bullshit' on your way to making a larger point. Call a spade a spade but always keep the lines of communication open. Agree to disagree but keep on disagreeing in a manner that confronts ideas without belittling the people struggling beneath them.
Most importantly, make them recognize who the real enemy is and make them recognize that it isn't you. When push comes to shove, nearly every fascist I confront will concede at some point that who they really despise is the motherfuckers in Washington and on Wall Street. Powerful, Atlantic elites, taxing them blind, sending their jobs overseas, and sending their kids off to die for the whole awful scam. These scions of cosmopolitanism aren't transgender teenagers or undocumented workers. Most of them aren't even Jews. They are old money, country club, secular Protestants like Donald Trump or their shameless, bellycrawling, new money toadies like JD Vance.
They are a class that only exists because big business and big government got together and gave birth to a cartel called the state and they rule over a penniless majority by keeping the poor divided against each other based on a plethora of manufactured differences that include competing schools of despotism like fascism and communism.
This is indeed a scam, a new world order, an international conspiracy to destroy poor white people, but the real conspiracy is that poor white people destroy themselves when they destroy Black, brown, and Queer people. They waste their rage on other victims of the same system that enslaves them and become limp-wristed shock troops for city slicking pedophiles like Donald Trump in the process. We can agree to disagree on a good many things, from my alternative 'lifestyle' to your Biblical values, just so long as we agree that power is the problem and that any ideology that sanctifies it is the real enemy.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Cult of Personality by Living Colour
* Holiday in Cambodia by Dead Kennedys
* Eat the Rich by Motorhead
* White Riot by the Clash
* Asking for It by Hole
* Losing My Religion by REM
* I Spy by Ministry
* Mandinka by Sinéad O'Connor
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