The Fascists Have No Clothes
Revealing the How to Fash playbook reduces their power to virtual nothingness
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So, let’s jump right in. Once you know the fascist playbook, it reduces the power of these extremist cult members. They are auditioning to be the new avatar for the Koch-Kremlin-cadre, trying to be more extreme than Trump, who moved the Overton Window so far, he is now their center. They’ve normalized fascism.
Because I am a student of anti-fascist scholars, I can see the fascist signaling from a mile away. None of this is new.
The physical gesticulations of the extremists are pure Mussolini - or as I noted of Ron DeSantis - more like Adenoid Hynkel, the character played by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.
The hand movements, the strong man stare, the verbal repetition of loaded words - all come from a very specific playbook.
My studies of Hannah Arendt make it easy to spot the response techniques - a key tactic is the questioning of motives when the facts are not on the totalitarian’s side. DeSantis utilizes this technique often. When questioned last night about the banning of books, he deflected to attacking the motives of school unions, and by so doing, accomplishes two things…
…he obfuscates the facts by questioning the motive, while also engaging in “othering.” He turns the school unions into the villain, when clearly, his monstrous policies are charged with villainy. That he tossed in a line about “kids having sex” at the end of his response is also a fascist technique - falling into the ‘sexual anxiety’ category of Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works. It also reveals a curious pattern - a bizarre obsession DeSantis has about youth sex - which I will refer out to the Keir Giles 84-second explainer of what the most virulent Russian propagandists have in common.
And let’s look a little closer at the underlying subject matter - the banning of books. What could be more Nazi. As I wrote in my post, 1933 - How Nazi Violence Destroyed Berlin’s Gay Freedom, the first books to burn when Hitler gained power were groundbreaking works on gender fluidity. That DeSantis has chosen to other the gay community is tragically predictable, and a grave threat to our democracy as a whole. This is how it starts, as RadPod’s interview with Nadine Smith indicates. Smith is the executive director of Equality Florida, and in our interview she said:
“Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is checking the boxes for his presidential run in 2024,” said Smith. “He wants to outflank Trump to the right, and part of that is going after critical race theory, corporations, their ‘stop woke’ agenda. It’s a checklist. They passed an abortion ban, they passed the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill. This is about book banning, censorship, and surveillance”.
It’s also straight out of the Russian playbook – mimicking the gay propaganda rules, and Hungary’s ban on depictions of gay people in media aimed at children.
Smith said DeSantis’ pre-scripted bills are multiplying throughout America.
“These bills are cut and paste from rightwing think tanks, so it’s not just Florida,” she said. “These bills are being introduced all across the country. The content of these laws are completely fabricated, and they’re designed to create this sense of outrage, this moral panic.”
In order to stir up the industrial outrage complex, as I refer to it, race and homosexuality are repeatedly weaponized.
“The Koch cadre was happy to weaponize the racist response to America’s first black president… to move their political agenda,” said Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, on an episode of RadPod. Her book documents the massive rightwing machine financed by the businessmen, Charles and David Koch, who died in 2019. “It’s about the cultivation of white Christian tribal identity and the daily provoking of that. They succeed by cultivating non-stop culture war. Attacks on trans people, ‘Don’t Say Gay’, really ugly attacks on any attempt to teach the truth about American history, and the role of race in our society”.
When DeSantis’ former spokesperson Christina Pushaw - a registered foreign agent - tweeted last year that Florida’s anti-gay bill could be “more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill” - she was intentionally trying to tie gay people to ugly predatory stereotypes, which also plays to the QAnon ‘Save the Children’ cult.
“What they sharpen their knives on is who they perceive to be politically the weakest, it's why they went after trans kids,” said Nadine Smith. “With that victory, it emboldened them to come after a larger swath of the population. They’re coming for you right now, too”.
The reason I believe it is so important to see beyond the immediate is because if we can view all of this through a How To Fash lens, we can be better warriors.
All of this is about the pursuit of power. We spend too much time trying to analyze events one by one, and not enough time zooming out to see the bigger picture.
Much of what we are enduring right now is crazymaking and gaslighting - the extremists are using whatever low-hanging fruit they can to keep the spotlight on them to try to mobilize bigots to vote for them, selling a mythic past to swell racist hearts to a patriotic fervor.
Ruth has often warned of the ‘strongwomen’ - the women who adopt the strongmen techniques to gain power. Nikki Haley signaled this language last night when she used the words “strong and proud, not weak and woke.” Huckabee lamely attempted the same.
Once you adopt the How to Fash lens, it all becomes glaringly obvious.
I often ask you to refer to a report I wrote for Byline Supplement, Trump Unmasked: A Guide to Becoming a Demagogue, because I believe it offers a definitive blow-by-blow in how to spot fascist tropes in the speeches of extremists. It offers a way to push past the words, and in so doing, we can all see that the fascists have no clothes.
In it, I wrote:
The tactics Trump employs have a well-documented history. Othering, victimization, conspiracy theories, unreality, anti-intellectualism, division, sexual anxiety, the mythic past are all themes which are familiar from our past, as explained in How Fascism Works - The Politics of Us and Them by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley.
Like other demagogues, Trump uses his words to distort reality.
In order to unmask Trump’s demagoguery, I took his 2024 presidential candidacy speech and laid it out it side-by-side with excerpts from How Fascism Works.
It gave me great comfort to see how it all works, and it has made it so much easier to spot the fascists vying for his old job.
I am hoping that if enough of us become scholars of how fascism works that we expose these cons for who and what they are - enablers of evil - before they gain another ounce of power.
The majority of Americans reject these strongmen and women. We have to stick together. Knowledge is armor against the fascist creep.
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