The Fascist Backlash of Doom™

Having spent the last decade or so accusing every non-woke person of being a fascist, or worse, and after having spent much of that time trying to get people with such heinous views as “sex is binary and cannot be changed” fired from their jobs and removed from public forums, it seems that some people are getting a bit tetchy at finding their previous tactics are no longer working. At least in the US. They’re finding that those NaziFascistScumHateMonsters are no longer behaving themselves and more and more of those deplorables are having the audacity to actually post stuff on the internet, and without suffering the Holy Wrath of The Righteous Woke.

It is, it is said, some kind of backlash.

But it isn’t just the Dictatorial Woke who are getting a bit antsy. James Lindsay, for example, has been warning us of the rise of the “woke right” for a while now. I get what he’s saying, but I think this is one of his few mis-steps because it’s a muddled and confusing terminology that doesn’t properly apply.

In an interesting, but not entirely persuasive article, River Page writing for The Free Press argues that “The Online Right is Building a Monster”.

So, is society falling apart and being over-taken by fascists? Are we seeing some kind of horrific extreme backlash in response to the years of abuse at the hands of the woke, an abuse ably supported by practically every media outlet, our governments, and almost every institution you might care to mention?

Page makes the statement that

For those of you who are offline, it is important you understand how bad things have gotten on 𝕏. Since Trump’s win in November, the extreme right has completely taken over the platform . . .

In the days since the article was written I’ve tried my best, but unfortunately I have been unable to read all of 𝕏.

So I’ll have to take a stroll down Anecdote Avenue. In my 𝕏 feed I have not noticed an appreciable increase in views I would consider to be “extreme right”. I am, however, seeing fewer counter-arguments¹ against (what I suppose might be classed as) right wing views and there’s a general air of excitement at the changes that Trump & Co are bringing about.

But out-and-out “extreme” right? No, I don’t think so.

And herein lies the perennial problem. What, exactly, is meant by “extreme” right? These days I’m not sure. In the past it was fairly clear - you could usually spot them a mile off as they goosestepped their way through their sordid, miserable lives.

Indeed, what, even, is meant by a ‘right-wing’ view these days?

Many would, for example, classify concerns regarding insecure borders and uncontrolled immigration as being a ‘right-wing’ viewpoint, but not so very long ago, back in 2005, Barak Obama had this to say

“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.”

My goodness, the guy was practically Adolf Hitler, and no-one noticed!

What has happened since then, of course, is that there has been a perception shift. Views that were once (not very long ago) considered perfectly reasonable and centrist, or even ‘left-wing’, have become associated with the deplorable and despicable “far right”. We’ve all heard people make statements such as

I didn’t leave the left, the left left me

Some of Trump’s recent appointees to positions of considerable power and influence are refugees from what used to be thought of as ‘the left’.

I think two things have happened. There’s been a perception shift in what is termed ‘left’ and ‘right’ and there has also been a shift in the perception of acceptability.

Not so long ago we could draw a diagram such as this to represent the way things stood

It’s faintly biological in appearance, but it represents the fact that most people (and could one echo the Great Orange Triple Hitler™ himself by calling them “very fine people”?) were in the blob in the middle. People in this centre blob didn’t, by and large, hate people who were the other side of the perception line (but still within the centre blob).

Over the last decade, and maybe longer, things have shifted so that the diagram now is more akin to this

The perception line has shifted, but so too has the size of the crazy blobs (in perception terms). Being anywhere on the (perceived) ‘right’ these days is sufficient to get you labelled as some low-IQ bigot who is on the wrong side of history. Seemingly all of a sudden you became a figure of scorn, some vile fascist hate-monster, for holding exactly the same views you did only yesterday. This has been the standard ‘woke’ view for at least a decade now. It’s the view that was essentially promoted by the media and most institutions.

But this has changed, at least in the US, since November. What changed was that people felt more relaxed about speaking their mind. They felt much freer to express their concerns without losing their jobs or being kicked off the platform, or being scolded by a gaggle of blue-haired weirdos.

In an earlier piece I said this was like Trump had, effectively, given them ‘permission’ to speak again. That’s not quite the right way of stating it, but you get my meaning here.

So what I think is happening here, what I think is a significant factor in this alleged ‘backlash’, is that for many years people have been effectively suppressed from honestly sharing their views - views which were considered to be perfectly reasonable and non-hateful only a few years ago. Now they feel more able to share those views.

They are being considered to be ‘right-wing’ because of the manipulated distaste that has been allowed to grow for any dissent of items in the Woke Catechism.

This is not the whole story, of course, because just as ‘normal’ people have been emboldened, so too have the real far-right knuckle-draggers. So the ‘backlash’, if it really is a significant thing (stats please?), is part real and part because the perception of what is right vs left has shifted so much.

That would be my hypothesis.

One only needs to compile, in no particular order, a (very) partial list of the things that have been deemed to be ‘hateful’ or ‘racist’ over the last several years to see how these shifts, leading to suppression and abuse, have been operating

° Agreeing with MLK’s “I have a dream” - racist
° Wearing the wrong hairstyle with white skin - racist and cultural appropriation
° Saying that a man cannot become a woman - transphobic and bigoted
° Taking up the ‘space’ of a BIPOC person - white privilege and maybe racist
° Arguing for free speech - you’re doing a fascism
° Wanting voter ID - racist
° Wanting better control of borders and immigration - fascist AND racist
° Not liking rap music - racist
° Arguing against the consequences of ‘gender’ self-ID - transphobic bigot
° Enjoying the countryside and gardening - racist
° Not acknowledging your white guilt and/or white fragility - racist
° Voting Trump - fascist, racist, low-IQ, bigoted, misogynistic, AND domestic terrorist
° Having concerns over Islamic ideology - Islamophobic and racist
° Thinking that ‘multiculturalism’ has failed - racist and xenophobic
° Not seeing capitalism as evil - fascist nutjob
° A lesbian not liking dick - transphobe with a genital fetish
° Wanting some sensible limits on abortion - crazed misogynist, wants women to be slaves

And I’m sure you can all add many, many, more items to that list . . .

We’ve also seen some spectacularly dumb things written in the service of the woke religion. We’ve had articles about how the music to Star Wars is racist, how white people driving cars hurts black people, why schools offering dairy foods in their canteens are racist, how ‘western’ musical notation is racist, how algebra and maths in general is racist, . . .

Now, in general, I’m not really against people being fluent in bonkerish - Lord knows I’ve written stuff in bonkerish before. But this has never really been the problem. The problem has been the consequences for speaking out against the bonkers.

An awful lot of people over the last decade have felt like they’ve had to walk on eggshells to avoid upsetting some fragile loser who will run to their substitute mummy and daddy (in the form of the HR department, or similar) in order to punish the purveyor of hurty words.

There was an expectation that those who used hurty words (or words deemed by the fragile muppetry that is woke to be hurty) would be punished.

Now that people feel much freer to be (allegedly) hurty online, some people are getting upset about it. Because we’ve been conditioned to think of reasonable as ‘hurty and offensive’ in many cases, it now appears that, all of a sudden, it seems there’s just tons and tons of crazy ‘extreme’ right-wing fascist hate-monsters all over the place.

That would be my take on what constitutes a significant portion of the ‘backlash’.

We’ve seen, for example, Steve Bannon, and others, start to use the, erm, Roman salute in public engagements. Some people are freaking out. But in the wake of the whole Musk salute farce isn’t it clear that he’s just taking the piss?

Why? Because he now can.

Because ‘woke’ has started to lose its grip on the levers of power.

Despite my view that a significant portion of the apparent backlash is this “because we now can” attitude, I think it’s probably also true that there has been a rise in genuine nasty extreme far-right postings. But, as it ever was, the way to deal with this is to argue against it. It’s not to impulsively reach for the censor button.

I think it will all settle down. Remember that we’ve had years and years of this woke suppression in effect and only a few weeks where those incarcerated by this system (both metaphorically and literally perhaps?) have been pardoned. People are currently a little giddy at being able to be ‘shitposters’ again.

Let me know what you think. Are we in danger of going too far the other way after years of woke? Might that even be a good thing, or is it yet another step on the road to Orange Autocracy?

1. Is this because many have left to seek bluer skies?