Everything is Nazis

the covid pivot, the information pivot

Adriano Espaillat won reelection in a squeaker, barely holding onto his D+90 Upper Manhattan/West Bronx seat in the House of Representatives:

You’d think the man would feel comfortable in his district. But when protesters at a town hall meeting last week stood up and began to shout at him — “So much money for Ukraine, but what about for Harlem?” — Espaillat scrambled for the cover of an unlikely retort: “This is not January 6!”

Citizen Free Press @CitizenFreePres

“Why are you sending all of my tax money to Ukraine?" Every Democrat and Republican in our country needs to be questioned like this about the open and continued funding of the War in Ukraine.

Confronted with classic bread-not-bombs rhetoric in his way-left district, the dolt grasped at the increasingly desperate and pathetic “January 6” canard. All disagreement and criticism are always insurrection. (And note what the DOJ is currently doing to insurrectionists.) The increasingly easy habit of labeling all criticism from the right as fascism and white nationalism is leaking; local Chicano activists in Harlem demand more social programs, so a member of Congress sees Proud Boys. Our political class is not getting smarter. Of course, it’s literally January 6 for me to say that.

The marginalization of dissent is ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille, as we enter an increasingly obvious moment of confrontation. On alternative media, the discussion of mRNA injections is building to a crescendo, and skeptics are taking scalps:

Project Veritas @Project_Veritas

BREAKING: @pfizer Director Concerned Over Women's Reproductive Heath After COVID-19 Vaccinations "There is something irregular about their menstrual cycles...concerning...The vaccine shouldn't be interfering with that...It has to be affecting something hormonal..." #Pfertility

Meanwhile, go scan the front page at Politico or the New York Times or Google News. In mainstream media, discussion of mRNA injections is fading into silence, aided by a collapse in public interest. The “emergency” is scheduled for obsolescence in May, so let’s not talk about it anymore.

The trend: urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent, completely forgotten. Covid vaccines? Why are you still talking about that ancient thing from all those years ago? Today’s wall posters are about the amazing economy and “the dangers of being a female politician.”

The cultural arrows are pointing in opposite directions: toward accountability, and toward the evasion of accountability. As the “mainstream” discussion pivots to “what is this Covid thing you speak of?”, it becomes urgently necessary for that supposed mainstream to have a ready-made deflection to use against a growing chorus of popular anger. Because they’re stupid and lazy and generally worthless, the chorusmasters of mainstream discourse have settled on Nazis.

Related, on social media, the LOL-worthy heavyhandedness on the volume knob is becoming highly cringe:

Kimberley Johnson 🇺🇦 @AuthorKimberley

@LouiseMensch @DWUhlfelderLaw @PrudenceDeare Just because he's not currently not putting people in ovens doesn't mean his ideology is any different. DeSantis's politics are very much in line with Hitler's.

Tim Wise @timjacobwise

Republicans think condemning Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao is important: dead people who hated democracy. Meanwhile they refuse to condemn Donald Trump or Qanon loons or white nationalism or the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys—all alive, and who hate democracy. We see you.

Ron DeSantis isn’t “currently” putting people in ovens; the Proud Boys are just like 20th-century totalitarian movements that achieved a hundred million deaths. Not supporting Elizabeth Warren is precisely the Holodomor plus the Great Terror plus the Great Leap Forward plus Tuol Sleng. The point of this loose-boweled rhetoric is that it chaffs the air, making a cloud of bullshit that obscures real discussion about things like, I don’t know, mass infertility and excess death from a coercive public health measure. Say for example.

And so we turn to Kris Goldsmith.

The most interesting thing about the contemporary news media is its hollowness. The purpose of a news story is to deliver a brain virus — to establish a narrative position that colors the way you see a topic. So there are slogans and triggers, but if you push your shovel into them to try to dig down and find the substance underneath them….

So here’s the most important political story to appear in Rolling Stone since Sabrina Rubin Erdely earned early retirement:

There’s a growing movement of American Nazis, you see, so military veterans are pulling on their boots to fight for their country again, hunting those Nazis and taking them out. But actually reading the story is, pardon me for a moment, a little like hammering a fucking spike into your brain. Every claim self-refutes; paragraph by paragraph, the story tells you X and Not X, side-by-side, with equal authority.

Start with the foundation of the claim. Goldsmith’s work, Rolling Stone explains, “centers on exposing the inner workings and public wrongdoing of neo-fascist groups through deep-dive intelligence reports that can give prosecutors the evidence they need go after the hatemongers in court.” Try to find a definition of “neo-fascist” in the story, though, and you fail. Fascism, it turns out, is being mean. It’s politics for the TikTok era: fascism is haters! Actual fascists thought they believed in the sacredness and centrality of the state, government as the highest form of human expression; the LARPers tracking fascists in 2023 think it means you didn’t contribute to WinBlue last month.

And so Goldsmith says he’s tracking “these people who would literally kill their fellow Americans to install a fascist dictator,” which would be a pretty dire confrontation. Then, making the claim concrete, Goldsmith gets to this description of the Patriot Front, his primary Nazi nemesis:

I have come to understand them as a unique threat against the people of the United States. While they’re a small group — they may have 200, 220 members at any given time — the thing that makes them so dangerous is the cult like atmosphere.

So the headline is a life-and-death struggle between the rising tide of American fascists who are preparing to kill us all and install their Hitler; the story is 200 people — maybe 220! — “at any given time.” Here, by the way, is a leaked Patriot Front training video, so you can see just how terrifyingly dangerous they are:

The only thing the Patriot Front threatens is the retail availability of your favorite product at Dunkin’ Donuts, but let’s go on.

Standing across the battlefield from this terrifying group, the story reveals, Goldsmith & Co. now total a force of “two dozen volunteers.” Then comes this exchange, deep into the Q&A:

Rolling Stone has turned a cosplayers-on-cosplayers circle jerk into the Battle of the Bulge. Compare THE NAZI HUNTER NEXT DOOR to a living room’s worth of unpaid hobbyists who could really turn into something if someone would just, like, give us some money.

Now, the punchline: The NAZI HUNTER is very much having his big media moment, scoring a series of profiles since the start of the year. Here he is being interviewed by the New York Times (where his wife is an editor) in January, for example, under an intro that says he’s hunting “antigovernment” extremists who are fascist. We all remember how the original fascists were passionately anti-government, of course. Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini — big libertarians, all. Hardly wanted to have any government, so people could just hang loose and roll however they chose.

The tediousness of pumping all this sad-sackery into a big national story is exhausting, as is the news media in general. But we need the distraction of Nazis and insurrections, or we’d risk talking about things that are real.