Given that I woke up this morning to some obnoxious rando publicly smearing me as a crypto-fascist (implied) and foreign agent (directly), let's take a quick look at this December 2023 article on In These Times to better understand what people promoting fascism and fascist ideology, while grifting "left," actually look like:
https://inthesetimes.com/article/former-left-right-fascism-capitalism-horseshoe-theory
This lengthy piece by Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Shartlet takes an in-depth look at what selling reactionary, right wing, and even ultimately fascist politics with a thin left-wing veener, actually looks like in practice, and over time; in the process it exposes numerous influencers, podcasters, writers, and social media personalities who are dragging perhaps millions of unsophisticated, disaffected (typically young) left-leaning Americans to the far right. These personalities include, but are not limited to, folks like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, RFK Jr., Naomi Wolf, Jackson Hinkle, Aimee Terese, Anna Khachiyan, and Dasha Nekrasova.
To understand this article, it's important to realize that what the authors are talking about here has virtually nothing to do with "Horseshoe Theory;" the idea (popular with liberals) that you can go so far left that you come out on the right. Although the authors describe this crypto-fascist movement as a sort of process (dubious, in my opinion) they're very clear that this is fundamentally the same thing I call "modern strasserism." These folks are advocating for right wing, if not fascist political ideas, and merely representing them as the one true leftism using cribbed and often corrupted, left-ish economic theory. Frankly, I think the authors are being quite charitable regarding the origin stories of many of these people as in my view, they've always been raging reactionaries able to hide themselves inside a primarily American left that hasn't done the reading, and rarely engages in decolonization. Regardless, this piece provides a clear map for what that looks like in real time, and names many of the folks trying to crowbar the most basic, often flawed illusion of economic leftism, into an objectively fascist worldview.
Finally I'd like to note that unlikely many latecomers to this struggle, I have been battling this movement, and indeed many of these exact same people online, since 2017; precisely the moment I started writing articles explaining why Trump is a fascist and I believed he'd eventually attempt a coup. That battle had significant costs in my life, as many of my friends and readers were not prepared to give up their "problematic faves," had no real idea of what fascism actually is, and were far too attached to their own reactionary upbringing in a proto-fascist society like America, to engage in the decolonization I was undertaking at the time; a process which is what ALLOWED me to see what these crypto-fascists were and what they were selling. I still have scars from this battle, which is why I don't take too kindly to mainline liberals running amateur flak operations on social media, calling *me* a crypto-fascist or accusing me of supporting a billionaire murderbot oil thug like Vladdy Putin.
The simple truth is that leftists and leftism is *always* anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and anti-racist; if they can't check all three boxes, they aren't "the left" and they never were.
*brushes shoulder off*
#Cryptofascism #FakeLeft #Propaganda #Influencers
