Fascists Among Us

by Jeff Sparrow

  In an extensive analysis of Christchurch coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review suggested that ‘best practice’ for the media included not publishing the shooter’s name, the title or contents of his manifesto, the name of the forum on which he posted his document, or any specific memes he deployed.

  ‘Don’t describe or detail the shooter’s ideology,’ it implored.8

  Along similar lines, journalism academic Denis Muller criticised The Australian for providing Person X with a ‘propaganda victory’ by publishing extracts from his writing.

  ‘It is enough to know,’ Muller argued, ‘that the manifesto suggests the terrorist was radicalised during his travels in Europe and seemed determined to take revenge for atrocities committed there by Islamist terrorists.’9

  But these arguments, while well meaning, are not persuasive. Knowing that Person X was ‘radicalised’ in Europe was manifestly not enough, since it explained very little about his action. Person X was not simply someone taking ‘revenge’ against Islamist terrorists. He was ideologically committed to fascism, a movement that is consistently handed propaganda victories by a mass media unwilling or incapable of understanding it.

  This is perhaps clearest in respect of the United Patriots Front, the organisation that Person X so admired. Elements of the Australian media helped boost the UPF during that organisation’s lifespan — not because they described its ideology, but precisely because they didn’t.

  In 2016, the government youth radio station Triple J featured Blair Cottrell on a panel about ‘patriotism’ (and then, in 2017, invited neo-Nazi Eli Mosley to discuss the Charlottesville protest, in a segment then trolled by alt-righters pretending to be Jewish).10 The next year, Sky News featured Cottrell discoursing on immigration in a one-on-one interview with Adam Giles.11

  When the UPF and the TBC organised a meeting to plan vigilante responses to ‘African gangs’, Channel Seven boasted of being ‘granted exclusive access’.

  ‘[T]hey call themselves patriots,’ the reporter told the camera, ‘and say they have come together to help average Australians deal with what they are calling an immigrant crime crisis … Take a listen to what their leaders tonight had to say.’

  The station then broadcast Blair Cottrell and Kane Miller — without disclosing that the two men opining about crime were themselves criminals.12

  In response to criticism, conservative journalists warned against censorship. But that missed the point. The problem wasn’t that the media had provided too much information about the UPF, but rather that it had failed to provide enough. The glaring absence was an explanation of the UPF’s ideology — one that didn’t resort to euphemisms such as ‘far right’ or ‘nationalist’, but instead discussed fascism and its historical and theoretical relationship with political violence. Had the nature of the UPF been established, journalists, like everyone else, would have been in a better position to discuss media strategies for the coverage of such an organisation.

  If anything, the Christchurch killings have made the need for analysis more important, given the innate duplicity of the online fascist culture to which Person X belonged.13

  Yet, in the wake of the massacre, Radio New Zealand, TVNZ, MediaWorks, Stuff, and The New Zealand Herald signed a statement agreeing not to quote Person X’s document or other statements he made.14

  No one could disagree with the need for sensitivity, given the horrendous suffering produced by the massacre. But many of the editorial decisions made in the wake of the killings were presented not as efforts to lessen the grief of relatives and friends, but as interventions to counter Person X politically.

  Yet Person X did not want a mainstream audience for his manifesto and video. Both were coded specifically for reception by the fascist right on 8chan, Gab, and similar platforms — and, irrespective of the decisions made by the media, both circulated widely in those forums, where bans by the New Zealand state simply gave them more cachet.

  The desire to avoid amplification of his rhetoric (while well intentioned) rested on a profoundly mistaken sense of his project. The power of Person X’s manifesto stemmed from its complex relationship with its online audience rather than the deployment of any particular slogan.

  Like all fascist programs, the document contains racist, populist, and conservative nostrums, stitched together by a commitment to horrific violence. A refusal to discuss Person X’s ideas meant, in practice, a refusal to acknowledge how many of them were widely shared in the mainstream, including by major outlets. You did not need to search the dark web to find examples of Islamophobia; you could encounter anti-immigrant rhetoric on every TV station and in every tabloid, as well as in the statements of major politicians.

  To take merely one example, in August 2018, Andrew Bolt, a popular columnist for the Murdoch press in Australia, published an article in the nation’s biggest-selling tabloids explaining that ‘immigration [was] becoming colonisation’. Beneath a headline warning about ‘The foreign invasion’, he explained that ‘a tidal wave of immigrants [was sweeping] away what’s left of our national identity’.15

  The piece contrasted an implicitly white ‘we’ against Muslims, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indians, and other non-white ethnicities. ‘[W]e should resist this colonising of Australia,’ Bolt said, ‘while there is still an “us” that can.’ It included, in a list of suburbs suffering from ‘invasion’, North Caulfield — and there Bolt complained, ‘41 per cent of residents are Jews … Such colonising will increasingly be our future as we gain a critical mass of born-overseas migrants.’

  Bolt did not call for violence or endorse terrorism. But the arguments in his piece, including the notion of Jewish colonisers, were common talking points among the fascist right.16

  The dismissal of Person X’s writings as ravings that need not or should not be discussed have disguised the disturbing familiarity of much of what he said. It has also done nothing to inoculate social media users against the online fascist presence.

  In June 2019, The New York Times published a fascinating study of a young man called Caleb Cain, a shy college dropout from Appalachia who described himself as having fallen ‘down the alt-right rabbit hole’. Using Cain’s browsing history, it showed how YouTube, in particular, gradually steered him from conventional liberalism to alt-right and fascist content.

  Cain discussed how he was initially attracted by right-wingers advocating free speech and attacking feminism — people making, in other words, arguments you could find on most conservative talk shows. Yet they portrayed themselves as truth-tellers, presenting facts that the humourless social-justice warriors (SJWs) in the mainstream wanted suppressed.

  He became absorbed in the never-ending dramas of the YouTube community, in which his new conservative heroes battled a constant stream of SJW villains. By day, he worked packing boxes at a furniture warehouse — and in the evening, he fell asleep watching videos from his favourite creators.

  As he absorbed more politically extreme material, he felt as if he’d joined an exclusive club, full of forbidden knowledge. ‘I felt like I was chasing uncomfortable truths,’ he said. ‘I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.’17

  In that description — and in his account of how he lost touch with his friends and family — you can faintly see the circumstances in which Person X’s massacre script might exercise its sway. Cain depicted himself as someone increasingly aggrieved by the real world, and craving the power he associated with right-wing authoritarianism. Under different circumstances, such a person might, perhaps, have been induced to make ‘a real life effort’.

  Ardern’s ‘Christchurch Call’ sought to prevent social media from enabling extremist content. But, in anticipation of such measures, many of the platforms had already sought — just as they had after Charlottesville — to purge the more notorious far-rightists employing their services.

  In all probability, each new round o
f deletions from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube did genuine damage to online fascism. Certainly, the UPF’s loss of access to Facebook helped disrupt that organisation, while the post-Charlottesville exclusion of American leaders contributed to the chaos gripping the fascist movement after Unite the Right. The whining of Milo Yiannopoulos about his inability to use social media provided more anecdotal evidence that bans hindered the work of the alt-right.18

  Yet, though Person X supported fascist organisations and ultimately wanted to build one, his strategy did not depend on their growth, nor did it require a high-profile spokesperson. Policing the isolated individuals attracted to lone-wolf terrorism thus posed more of a challenge than responding to prominent groups or ideologues.

  Furthermore, an ecosystem of alternative options has already evolved, more or less explicitly to cater for those banned from Twitter and Facebook. Sites such as Gab might not deliver the same traffic as better-known platforms, but they do serve the same gateway function, introducing the curious browser to a huge array of fascists and white supremacists, in a setting where right-wingers feel no obligation whatsoever to moderate their views.

  It would be naïve, in other words, to expect reforms of the major social media corporations to provide an answer to Christchurch. Such companies run as businesses rather than public utilities. Even if they can be shamed by political outrage, they’re ultimately driven by the pursuit of profit — and the inflammatory accounts of the far right deliver user engagement that can be monetised via advertising.

  For that reason, a thorough ban on fascist or far-right accounts seems unlikely.

  The purges that have taken place have, in fact, been inconsistent and partial. In many cases, they have also targeted progressives, either because the relevant algorithm had somehow failed (as, for instance, when Twitter banned anti-fascist journalist David Neiwert because the book he promoted contained images of Ku Klux Klan hoods on its cover),19 or because, rather than deleting fascists, moderators simply sought to shut down any content they deemed controversial. When, for instance, Facebook deleted some 800 pages and accounts for what it called ‘spam and co-ordinated inauthentic behavior’, The Washington Post noted that the groups affected included liberals as well as conservatives.20

  By its nature, the moderation of social media remains undemocratic and unaccountable. The co-founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, recently explained that Mark Zuckerberg exercised almost total power over the workings of that platform. ‘Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their news feeds … he sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive,’ he said.21

  The dangers of relying on huge corporations to decide what material should or should not circulate should be, in the twenty-first century, entirely obvious.

  It might be more useful, when thinking of strategies to counter online fascism, to draw analogies with what happened when the fascists in America (and Australia) tried to leverage their online popularity into real-world activism between 2015 and 2017.

  The activism that pushed them back confirmed many of the lessons learned in opposition to Oswald Mosley in the 1940s and 1950s: namely, that public protests against fascist marches isolate and demoralise the cadres of the far right and discourage their new recruits. When Andrew Anglin warned his supporters not to attend the second Unite the Right protest, he said, ‘We do not want the image of being a bunch of weird losers who march around like assholes while completely outnumbered and get mocked by the entire planet.’22

  That was, indeed, very often the outcome, especially if the anti-fascist protests were broad-based and lively, and involved the local community. As Kim Kelly pointed out at the time, ‘white nationalists, white supremacists, and other far-right hate groups’ rally numbers are dwindling as the opposition to them grows broader and more militant’.23

  The methodology might provide a basis for tackling fascism in the very different online context.

  In his discussion with The New York Times, Caleb Cain explained how he became disaffected with the alt-right when he encountered progressives who ‘spoke the native language of YouTube’ and used the platform to effectively mock and debunk right-wing ideas.

  Confronting the right remains much more difficult online than in the street, partly because fascists can congregate in all sorts of niches, and partly because the internet makes the sense of a collective real-world protest difficult to achieve. But Cain’s experience suggests that progressives should continue developing new ways of campaigning online, to demonstrate that fascists remain ‘weird losers and assholes’ on the internet as well as off it, and to present alternatives to their hate.

  At the same time, the struggle against fascism — both online and off — will always require determined combat against the bigotry on which fascists depend.

  At the most obvious level, Islamophobia surely played a role in enabling Person X to escape state surveillance, despite his online engagement with the UPF and other fascist groups. For instance, had Person X been a young Muslim man who had, say, left more than 30 comments on a Facebook page belonging to Islamists on which death threats were made against white Australians, had he collected guns, and had he arrived unannounced at opponents’ homes and businesses, one imagines he would have come to the attention of the relevant authorities — particularly after being reported to the police for threatening to kill someone.

  The very ubiquity of anti-Islam sentiment provided, in a sense, cover for Person X. He did not stand out, simply because Islamophobia can be found almost everywhere.

  What would happen if Islamophobia were rendered as taboo as anti-Semitism? With anti-Muslim and other forms of racism rendered as politically toxic as anti-Jewish sentiment, an immediate obstacle would be placed in the way of genuine fascists, who rely on ‘acceptable’ bigotry to make their program of extermination palatable.

  But establishing a taboo on race-baiting would necessitate a confrontation with the various politicians and pundits who, without being fascists themselves, spread the ideas on which fascists rely.

  As we have seen, contemporary racism draws much of its strength from policies that the major parties have supported for decades. Modern Islamophobia emerged from the war on terror, while anti-immigrant prejudice is reinforced by the infrastructure of exclusion that has been constructed in most developed countries.

  In other words, many mainstream parties have now adapted to racist populism, as the 2016 US election showed. It should be remembered that, during the Republican primaries, the most serious challengers to Donald Trump came from his right, with other contenders trying to outdo him with their versions of Islamophobia and nativism. Whatever happens to Trump himself, Trumpism will remain central to the Republican Party for the foreseeable future.

  Yet Trump’s career also illustrates how the bond between mainstream conservatism and an outsider anti-elitism that shelters genuine fascists might be challenged.

  In the wake of Unite the Right, the upsurge in anti-racist and anti-fascist organising blindsided Trump, and broke the links he had forged with the younger racist constituency organised by Bannon through Breitbart. The rift with ‘Sloppy Steve’ damaged the alt-right, but it also damaged Trump, who sunk to his lowest levels of popularity after Charlottesville.24

  Similarly, the outrage following Person X’s murders put renewed pressure on Australian fascists and on the politicians — such as Pauline Hanson’s former associate Fraser Anning — who pandered to them. Prime Minister Scott Morrison was also pushed onto the defensive about the possibility that his party might preference Anning, and about his comments at a cabinet meeting in 2010 in which he allegedly urged his party to exploit Islamophobia for votes.25

  ‘By attacking the right for its tendency towards authoritarianism,’ argues David Renton, ‘it is possible to sever the alliance between politicians of the centre right and the margins.
’26

  The ideas of the far right remain, after all, deeply unpopular, particularly when they are presented openly. Islamophobia might be widely tolerated, but very few normal people find notions of natural hierarchies and redemptive violence at all appealing, and so the mainstream right remains defensive about any association with fascists.

  But in order to open up such rifts, anti-racists need to offer a real alternative, one that extends beyond critiques of the right. They need, more than anything, to offer hope.

  In the first nineteen weeks of 2019, America saw fifteen school shootings in which someone was hurt or killed. These were not political crimes so much as acts of violence by disturbed individuals. Nevertheless, the proliferation of rage murders, particularly among the young, surely reflects a broader dysfunction, a social order deeply out of kilter.

  In 2017, the American Psychological Association noted that climate change was producing widespread ‘feelings of powerlessness, or exhaustion’.27 Many of us feel that sentiment, given the seeming inevitability of environmental catastrophe. In some respects, the more you know, the worse you feel. Scientists and ecologists speak of the profound sadness that overcomes them when they read about the latest extinctions or the newest devastation.

  In response to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the environmental activist Leo Murray tweeted, ‘[A]t times like this I feel a crushing weight of personal failure at how little I have achieved, and dread at the horrors ahead. I’m sorry. I’m trying.’28

  But why try to prevent a catastrophe that many see as inevitable? With no clear path to a solution, conventional environmentalism can seem futile, even pathetic. Rather than seeking to douse the flames, why not fan them — or, better still, become the fire?