Manufacturing Mass Fascism Hysteria

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f the neoliberal ruling classes expect to keep the American masses worked up into a white-eyed hysteria over “fascism” until November 2020, they’re going to need to get some better Nazis. The current Nazis are just not going to cut it. They are neither scary nor Nazi enough. OK, the militia ones look kind of scary, and that “Based Spartan” guy looks kind of … uh, weird, but most of them just look like regular old rednecks. How hard would it be to get them some brown shirts, or those khaki pants like they wore in Charlottesville, or some other type of Nazi-like uniform?

And some jackboots. People love those jackboots.

Seriously, the Resistance need to get their official narrative optics in order, and they need to do it without delay. Millions of liberals are standing by to be brainwashed into a year-long frenzy of manufactured mass “fascism” hysteria, but they are going to need some halfway convincing Nazis to spastically freak out over. A few hundred bozos in MAGA hats parading around with American flags does not exactly a Sturmabteilung make.

I’m referring, of course, to the latest “fascist invasion” of Portland that took place last Saturday, which, according to the corporate media, and Antifa, and local fascism experts, was supposed to be a veritable bloodbath. Heavily-armed white supremacist terrorists were flying in from around the country to indiscriminately murder as many “Black, Asian, Latino, indigenous, immigrant, Pacific islander, disabled, houseless, and LGBTQ persons” as possible. This white supremacist terrorist kill-fest was going to be revenge for the preventively self-defensive beating of Andy Ngo, “the most dangerous fascist grifter in America,” by Antifa militants earlier this month.

Ngo (who most people had never heard of until Antifa militants beat him senseless), although he poses as a legitimate journalist by writing for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Quillette, and so on, is allegedly a fascist intelligence asset in charge of compiling fascist “kill lists” consisting of the names of assorted well-known Portland anti-fascist figures (who most people had also never heard of until they claimed that Ngo had put them on his “kill list”).

Alexander Reid Ross, for example, an extremely influential “fascism expert,” outreach specialist, and geography teacher, who is hot on the trail of the Putin-Nazi plot to form a syncretic alliance of Assad-loving, Duginist, LaRouchian Nazis led by Max Blumenthal and Vanessa Beeley, or possibly Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson … or something more or less along those lines (see Ross’ seminal paranoid ravings, which the SPLC was forced to retract by Blumenthal’s fascist legal counsel.) Ross reportedly remains in hiding in a safehouse in an undisclosed location somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, presumably protected by the FBI, while he continues his important work.

And then there are the notorious Proud Boys, a gang of self-described “Western chauvinists” who apparently haven’t been laid in years. According to the SPLC (which has designated them an official “hate group”):

There are three degrees of membership within the Proud Boys, and to become a first degree in the “pro-West fraternal organization” a prospective member simply has to declare “I am a western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” To enter the second degree, a Proud Boy has to endure a beating until they can yell out the names of five breakfast cereals (in order to demonstrate “adrenaline control”) and give up masturbation because, in theory, it will leave them more inclined to go out and meet women. Those who enter the third degree have demonstrated their commitment by getting a Proud Boys tattoo. Any man — no matter his race or sexual-orientation — can join the fraternal organization as long as they “recognize that white men are not the problem.”

Such is the caliber of the cast the Resistance are featuring in their “fascism” fantasy. As you can see, it’s not exactly the A-list. If they’re going to stick with the “fascism” hysteria from now until November 2020 (which is really the only option they have left, what with “Russiagate” having blown up in their faces), the least they can do is get some real Nazis, and some semi-respectable Nazi hunters, and cut out this pathetic Portlandia nonsense.

The Resistance owes liberals at least that much, especially after making them look like fools by leading them on for three years with their ridiculous “Russiagate” hysteria. Sure, the “fascism” hysteria is an easier sell, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to sell it. It’s not like they can just abruptly switch from the “Russiagate” narrative to the “fascism” narrative (as if their Russiagate hoax had not just been exposed) and expect liberals to go along with it like the members of some enormous cult.

Or, I don’t know … maybe they can. The New York Times certainly appears to think so. Check out this exchange between executive editor Dean Baquet and an anonymous staffer at an emergency in-house “town hall” meeting convened after The Times changed a page one headline because it didn’t paint Trump as racist enough. (The transcript is Slate’s; emphasis is mine.)

Staffer: I’m wondering what is the overall strategy here for getting us through this administration and the way we cover it … people don’t understand. I think they get confused as to what we’re trying to do.

Baquet: OK. I mean, let me go back a little bit for one second to just repeat what I said in my in my short preamble about coverage. Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.

The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.” And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?

I think that we’ve got to change. I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier: How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of [racist] remarks? How do we cover the world’s reaction to him? How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies? How do we cover America, that’s become so divided by Donald Trump? How do we grapple with all the stuff you all are talking about? How do we write about race in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time? That, to me, is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.

For anyone not entirely fluent in Pulitzer-winning Professional Journalism Speak, that translates roughly as “OK, no more Russia stuff. We’re switching to the fascism and racism stuff, and we’ll be hammering on it until Trump is history.”

Which is fine with me. I don’t like Donald Trump. And Americans are certainly racists … uh, working class Americans, that is. Sorry, white working class Americans, not Black people, or the staff of The New York Times, or the neoliberal ruling classes. Unless they’re disabled, or houseless, or Latino, or indigenous, or LGBTQ (i.e., the white working class Americans, not the ruling classes). In which case, they get a pass on the racism. But the rest of us are all white supremacists, and homophobic anti-Semites, and xenophobic racist transphobes, and … well, basically, a bunch of Nazis.

What? You don’t believe that most white Americans are Hitler-loving, Sieg-heiling Nazis who want to mass murder all the Jews and the Mexicans and re-enslave all the African Americans? How do you think Donald Trump got elected? Somebody stole the presidency from Clinton. If it wasn’t the Russians, it had to be the fascists! I mean, after all, who else is there?

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CJ Hopkins
August 20, 2019
Photo: “Based Spartan” guy/YouTube