Denialism and disinformation: The 'anti-reality industry'

All of this is "the anti-reality industry," Bryn Nelson explains:

"With the presumptive Republican presidential nominee falsely calling climate change a 'hoax' invented by China, a former tobacco and coal lobbyist brazenly lying to Fox News viewers that last summer’s dense wildfire smoke posed 'no health risk,' and an Alabama court redefining frozen embryos as 'children,' the consequences of indulging decades of antiscientific agitprop are clear. Conservative think tanks and lobbying groups have spent tens of millions to push false messaging and draft restrictive laws around abortion. The false messaging has included lies about its prevalence, basic biology and reality in women’s lives. To energize far-right voters, these groups have attacked transgender health care with the same playbook, yielding more than 400 anti-trans laws in 2024 alone. They’ve demonized vaccines and masks, minimized harms from tobacco and wildfire smoke, and denied the realities of climate change and COVID. In the classroom, where many anti-reality crusaders have long fought against the teaching of evolution, they’ve expanded to banning books about race, sexual orientation and gender identity, while attacking global warming education."

Ah. So now we have a name for it.

"Meredithe McNamara, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, describes denying reality as one of the main 'disinformation playbook' tactics: 'The first move is, if you want to ban some sort of care or advance a toxic policy, then deny that the condition for which care is sought even exists, or make false claims about it,' she told me. Denying the existence of dangerous pregnancies or gender dysphoria, directly parallels the denial of COVID, systemic racism and air pollution."

He refers us to DeSmog's 2020 analysis of the overlap between climate denialism and COVID denialism.

"Francesca Tripodi, a senior researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, says one goal of repeating the myths and disinformation is to activate 'deep stories' that are told so often that they feel true." She's the author of The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy. It explains

"how propagandists further sway the public through an 'IKEA effect' whereby false information can be self-assembled from separate parts. Savvy pundits and politicians appropriate or create keywords and phrases—like 'woke-ism' and 'groomer'—that they tie to false narratives. By widely disseminating the keywords, the storytellers can embed them in search engine results. Researchers have found that the top results for 'abortion pill' commonly spread misinformation and disinformation. In other cases, fossil fuel companies have spent heavily on Google ads that resemble search results."

Source

We Must Face Down the Expanding Anti-Reality Industry: Exposing the antiscience playbook reveals the antiregulatory motives of its deep-pocketed bankrollers, Bryn Nelson, Scientific American, May 24, 2024

2025: Now happening

RFK to lead HHS in 2025?

"A former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services on Sunday declared that President-elect Donald Trump made a 'very dangerous' move by picking conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to fill her old role.

'I think that we’re talking about magnitudes of danger beyond erroneously making legal decisions. This is life or death,' Kathleen Sebelius said in an interview with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart.

* * *

She added that Kennedy’s history of pushing false claims about vaccines is “totally disqualifying for anyone” who seeks the HHS post."

Ben Blanchet, 'This Is Life Or Death': Former HHS Secretary Sounds Alarm On Trump's RFK Jr. Pick: Kathleen Sebelius, who served as HHS secretary under Barack Obama, warned that Kennedy would be an "absolutely terrifying" choice to lead the department, HuffPost, Nov 18, 2024

Something I wrote

"A hostile critic isn't impartial," on Medium

I like that. Disinformation: the D is for deliberate. Misinformation: the mis is because usually a mistake.

— Ira Hyman (@irahyman.bsky.social) Aug 24, 2024 at 1:13 PM

I don’t want to throw shade, but I would like the folks who kept telling us that there’s no evidence pervasive mis- and disinformation have negative impacts to account for the likelihood that prominent spreaders of BS will be running the agencies that protect public health, intelligence, etc.

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— Kate Starbird (@katestarbird.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 8:03 PM

Let’s agree that: “misinformation” probably isn’t the right framing, that online dynamics intersect w/broader media ecosystems, and the actions/beliefs/radicalization of elites is more impactful than misperceptions among everyday people. But that context should be added to every “no effects” paper.

— Kate Starbird (@katestarbird.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 8:09 PM

Resources for reading about fascism

Thomas Zimmer, in Fascism in America? (Part 1), Democracy Americana, May 22, 2024, suggests the essay collection Did It Happen Here? Perspectives of Fascism and America, ed. Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. More resources:

I suggest starting with an episode of the always excellent Know Your Enemy podcast from shortly after January 6 which, to this day, is probably the most precise, most accessible introduction to the fascism debate and the underlying fascism scholarship. John Ganz has written a whole series of thoughtful, nuanced, historically precise reflections on the fascism question for his Unpopular Front newsletter. Both Geoff Eley and Anna Duensing have weighed in with clarifying pieces from a more strictly academic perspective. Finally, from the latest historical scholarship on the American Right that is devoted to exploring the relationship between mainstream conservatism and rightwing extremism, I will mention recent book publications by David Walsh (Taking America Back), John Huntington (Far-Right Vanguard), and Edward Miller (A Conspiratorial Life); the explorations of how rightwing extremism took over the Republican Party in Oregon that Seth Cotlar provides in his Rightlandia newsletter; and, finally, an essay by Rick Perlstein in the New York Times, published shortly after Trump first entered the White House, that in many ways signaled the beginning of a broader reconceptualization of conservatism’s history. All of them represent a growing consensus among scholars that the “fascism” concept can indeed be helpful in making sense of the anti-democratic radicalization that characterizes today’s Right.

LGBTQ: They scapegoat us intentionally, and we have to survive

They're lying about us for their own political advantage

Worldwide, the fascist scapegoating of trans people is intentional and opportunistic.

"This is the key insight of a comprehensive new report by Over Zero, which documents the connection between LGBTQ scapegoating and threats to democracy. The report explains how LGBTQ scapegoating can be used to facilitate authoritarianism, supported by international case studies and informed by expert interviews. (Over Zero has been an essential source of communications research and analysis in our dangerous times; they’ve issued expert guidance on how to de-escalate and build resiliency to political violence; methods for communicating about political violence and countering misinformation; and more.)"

— "Why are autocrats so fixated on trans people?: LGBTQ scapegoating and the authoritarian playbook." Sohini Desai and Justin Florence. May 28, 2024.

Desai and Florence continue:

"Over Zero’s new report builds on Protect Democracy’s The Authoritarian Playbook, which describes seven common tactics deployed by autocrats and offers a framework for distinguishing authoritarian-style approaches from politics as usual. One of those seven tactics is scapegoating vulnerable communities."

And:

"LGBTQ scapegoating often takes shape through the lie that queer and trans people are groomers and pedophiles, intent on abusing children. Returning to Orban for a moment: This tactic helped his rightwing Fidesz party build out immense powers of censorship and media control."

Plus, "scapegoating...goes hand in hand with 'restorative nostalgia.'" Fascists scapegoat certain groups for supposedly corrupting reality and obstructing a return to "imagined, idealized past."

'Culture war' is psychological warfare

Annalee Newitz:

"...we're deep in the midst of a really bloody culture war in the United States. And the more I researched, the more I realized that what we call culture war really is just an extension of something that the military codified as psychological war, long ago. And so a huge thrust of my research and writing in the book is about not just, 'How do you recognize psyops?' or 'How do you understand the history of them?' But also, 'What do you do to survive them, and and how do you protect yourself against the trauma that they cause?'"

— "There's No Way You Can Talk Back to a Gun": On Psychological Warfare. Annalee Newitz, interviewed by Charlie Jane Anders. Happy Dancing. May 28, 2024.

Psyops, they explain, "call on myths, or stories that start long before our own lifetimes. That's part of the reason why psyops can sometimes be mistaken for common sense, and why people get fooled by them. They're like, 'Oh, that sounds like something I heard before as a kid.'"

For example: In the 1930s in the US, J. Edgar Hoover "was working on a really horrific child murder case that actually never was solved, and he decided that it had been associated with homosexual activity. He began to really create a moral panic, without evidence. So his focus in the FBI became rooting out these 'sex criminals,' which was again basically just attempting to surveil, arrest and harass gay people." It led to "the lavender scare, a period during the 1950s when the U.S government started place people under surveillance, interrogating them about their sex lives, and firing them if they were gay. This is a psyop in the sense that no actual war was being declared. No one was being sent to prison, no one was being accused of any crime other than just being gay. This was a way of destroying people's lives without ever openly declaring that those people are criminals." Today, in the 2020s, "it's come back full force with politicians constantly using the term 'groomer' to refer to gay people. This feels to their followers like common sense, because they're calling on this multi-generational story of what it means to be gay in America."

Some sci-fi writers assisted "propaganda efforts during both World War I and World War II, and up into the present. And what they bring to this project is an interest in how you create a story that's really immersive and makes your audience feel like it's real. Science fiction is really good at this because, like pop psychology, it often uses the language of science to bolster realism. Writers will describe faster-than-light ships in great detail, or depict an alien civilization in such concrete ways that you feel like an anthopologist standing there, looking at this alien world."

This is the real cancel culture, and it's coming from conservatives. A&M is utterly gutless to go along with this. statesman-tx.newsmemory.com?publink=091f...

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— John Schwartz (@jswatz.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 5:01 PM

Two political communication strategies: De-silo and counterframe

De-Silo

The Ink spoke to Anat Shenker-Osorio about messaging. Her podcast, Words to Win By, is about political messaging. One approach is "to expand fights for justice so they encompass not just the concerns of one group, but those of the entire community." The Ink writes: "After our discussion about how such a shift had transformed the fight for abortion rights, we asked her about what other issues needed de-siloing. What immediately came to mind was the battle for transgender rights and against renewed hostility from the right toward LBGTQ+ rights overall."

Shenker-Osorio says:

"Marriage equality, by the way, is a perfect example of de-siloing. The story about gay marriage used to be, 'Well, we should feel really sad for these particular people because they don't have this right and here's why Bob and Jerry or Lisa and Cindy deserve this right.'

But success was all about shifting the argument from ensuring that those people can have their thing to marriage equality. Love is love. Love makes a family. That's a universalizing message. I'm a straight lady, married to a man and I also believe that love is love. I also feel that my relationship is made out of love and it's made out of making a family."

She continues:

"...trans folks have absolutely been siloed and that is the right wing’s doing. It's part of the tactic...anytime we exceptionalize an issue, we are left in this very vulnerable place where the only people for whom this issue has saliency are the people who view themselves as directly impacted."

Counterframe

Advice from Bryn Nelson:

"Understanding the tactics used to spread disinformation could help disrupt the storyline, [Francesca] Tripodi told me. Unmasking the motives of snake oil sellers also might reduce some of their clout. Simply fighting their lies with data, however, may be a losing proposition, especially when they insist that they too deal with facts, not feelings, while doing the precise opposite.

[Daniel] Kreiss said elevating the voices of conservatives who support the science of global warming or gender-affirming care may be another way to scramble politicized narratives with a memorable counter-frame. Emphasizing the public health crisis that can result from bans on evidence-based care, such as endangering women and increasing the risk of suicide among transgender youth, also might provide an effective rebuttal. In particular, Kreiss says, getting people to talk publicly about what they or loved ones lost after being conned by false narratives can help drive home the very real and often very personal costs of all the lies."

We Must Face Down the Expanding Anti-Reality Industry: Exposing the antiscience playbook reveals the antiregulatory motives of its deep-pocketed bankrollers, Bryn Nelson, Scientific American, May 24, 2024

On racism and transphobia

Some trans people and allies, when confronted with a transphobic statement, say something like: They wouldn't dare say that about any other minority group! But the truth is, they do say it about other minority groups.

Saying "that transphobia is less punished, less socially acceptable than other forms of bigotry like racism, homophobia, misogyny, ableism, etc." is "implicitly denying just how common, everyday and officially sanctioned these various forms of oppression are. This denial undermines solidarity and risks pushing trans people who aren’t white and able-bodied out of trans liberation movement spaces." It matters. "We cannot build the solidarity we all need to get free by minimising the suffering of other minorities. Transphobia is linked to racism, to ableism, to misogyny, to homophobia, both in their ideological linkage and in the existence of trans people at the intersections. We cannot afford single-issue activism because 'we do not live single-issue lives.'"
— "The trouble with 'any other minority,'" by Anarchasteminist, Medium Feb 8, 2024

Here's what happens when there is no solidarity: a sense that there is no coherent trans community.

It makes sense: If you have to tell someone to stop being dismissive, ignorant, or insulting about an inherent part of your identity, you may not feel that this person is part of your community, and hence when you argue with them, you aren't even infighting, you're outfighting.

Tweet

Large, diverse alliances don't feel good if there are hierarchies within them about whose concerns are more legitimate or urgent and whose opinions or behavior work against group norms or the allegedly correct goals.

Tweet

We should put in effort to develop respect and practice solidarity

Living authentically in a religiously pluralistic, multi-cultural democracy is hard work, no one is born to it. The habits of mind and heart it requires are not the sort of thing one necessarily learns at home or at school, especially if one grows up in a fairly homogenous subculture like Vance did.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) Jul 27, 2024 at 9:20 AM

The pull of dehumanizing insularity, of looking out mostly for one's "own people" (however that's defined) and keeping a wary eye on "the enemies of my people," is incredibly powerful. This urge to treat difference as a threat is profoundly human, but is corrosive to a sense of shared commitment.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) Jul 27, 2024 at 9:25 AM

One of the people Vance used to follow on Twitter, the pseudo-scientific racist Steve Sailer, has branded this form updated form of racism "race realism." It's akin to the claims to "common sense" that today's reactionaries use when talking about gender.

— Seth Cotlar (@sethcotlar.bsky.social) Jul 27, 2024 at 9:28 AM

If we have abundance right now, how would new computing systems increase it?

Samantha Murphy Kelly writes this for CNN a few days ago ("Elon Musk says AI will take all our jobs," May 23, 2024).

"Elon Musk says artificial intelligence will take all our jobs and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“Probably none of us will have a job,” Musk said about AI at a tech conference on Thursday.

While speaking remotely via webcam at VivaTech 2024 in Paris, Musk described a future where jobs would be “optional.”

“If you want to do a job that’s kinda like a hobby, you can do a job,” Musk said. “But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”

For this scenario to work, he said, there would need to be “universal high income” – not to be confused with universal basic income, although he did not share what that could look like. (UBI refers to the government giving a certain amount of money to everyone regardless of how much they earn.)

“There would be no shortage of goods or services,” he said.

A question within a capitalist framework: If in the future no one will be paid for maintaining the AI and the wealth will be redistributed, what's the incentive for anyone to work to develop the AI today?

A question outside a capitalist framework: If there's "no shortage of goods or services" and hence enough abundance or wealth for everyone to have a universal income to meet all their needs and receive luxuries too, while playing with "AI and the robots" as an unpaid hobby to help distribute the goods and services to others...why do we need to wait for new computers that are technically able to do this distribution? Why don't we begin enjoying that wealth right now?

She is talking about how AI has longterm certainty when they can barley afford the servers they run on and that AI generators are not being sued left, right, and center right now. If had this much delusion, I could be a NYT bestseller right now. 🤣

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— Georgina Kiersten (they/them) (@ingloriousgigi.bsky.social) Jun 21, 2024 at 8:26 AM

If you write for Medium, be aware of how to "hide" a response

Medium has a cool feature to nip disruptive comments in the bud. You can "hide" the response, which is an alternative to outright blocking the person who left it. It brings calm.

Hiding the response means casual readers won't see it and hence won't interact with it. This is useful if you want to tell someone off but you don't want to manage all your readers telling them off.

I often forget how to do this or I forget that the feature exists at all, so I'm documenting it for myself (and all of you) here.

Hide a response

Viewing your story on a desktop, when you click the comment icon, all responses pull up in a sidebar. Each response has a 3-dot menu with the option to "hide" it. This feature only seems to be available when the response is in the sidebar — not when you drill into its URL.

Find a previously hidden response

Pull up all responses in the sidebar, click the 3-dot menu at the top near the X, select "Manage responses"...

...and sort by "hidden" responses.

Why women's sports have had 'sex testing' (look back to the 1930s)

Reading this forthcoming release: The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters.

The book is about how, in the 1930s, international attention was drawn to four trans men athletes. If their existence seems improbable, there's a cognitive bias at play. The reason that sports authorities, and hence journalists, spotted trans men among athletes is that athletics was a major arena where fascists scrutinized femininity. This was a 1930s thing. It was a hallmark of fascism. In general, trans men tended to be private, but fascist spectacle and power play drove them to the surface.

Casting doubt on athletes

I've previously written about why fascists target gender transition. Fascists don't want us to exist because we disrupt their mythic past.

Now I want to elaborate on that. As I wrote for Gender Identity Today about The Other Olympians:

"If we took literally the accusation of Cis Man in Disguise, cis men athletes would be the villains of that tale. But that’s a superficial understanding. The trope isn’t meant to be taken literally (especially as it’s based on something that doesn't happen). And indeed, no one does take it literally."

If we took the trope literally, we'd be casting skepticism on cis men, and the trope wouldn't serve a transphobic function.

The trope becomes transphobic when someone loosens its meaning and becomes willing to impugn the image of every athlete who isn't a cis man: cis women, intersex people, trans people.

A definition of sex isn't really useful

If you try to define sex, you'll run into complexities like:

1. A given physical trait may be objectively measurable yet may convey no objective advantage in a given sport.
2. The trait may be difficult to assess. (Have you had a chromosome test?)
3. It may be rude to ask for the information, and then it may require effort to manage the privacy of what we've learned, as we generally aren't entitled to know others' intimate physical traits.
4. For all the above reasons, information about someone's sex may have been, and may continue to be, socially irrelevant.

That's my list. It could be expanded.

Unfortunately, once someone proposes a strict definition for sex segregation in sports, they'll feel the need to defend their definition. They'll become less open to admitting the complexities of the topic.

But you must regulate sex, or else

Otherwise, you see, the trans man will gobble up all your sports medals when you aren't looking. This sounds like the trope that Jews will take your money. Never mind whether the trans man might have earned that sports medal or the Jew might have earned that Mark. They weren't to be allowed to have it. Transphobia is linked to antisemitism. It always has been.

The panic started the same year that testosterone was chemically isolated. One of the first things we, as a human species, collectively knew about testosterone is that this hormone, and its effects on the body, is something men said that women shouldn't have. Sports officials (not even biologists) demanded nonsense regulations about "sex testing," and this was part of our early 20th-century awareness of who trans people are and what scientists were about to learn about hormones.

As Waters writes, sports official Avery Brundage "didn't consult doctors or other sports officials on the merits of sex testing. He seemed to conceive of the idea himself, perhaps influenced by the agitations of Wilhelm Knoll, and pushed it through without real consideration of the impacts."

Gender regulation spreads to enforce femininity

Here's part of the story Waters tells:

With the end of the Women's World Games, "the IOC was about to become the primary arbiter of women's sports, which meant the all-male committee could do as it pleased." They didn't like butch women, and "now, if they wanted, they had the power to simply ban masculine women from competing."

On August 10–11, 1936, while the Berlin Olympics were still ongoing, the IAAF met in Berlin. Observing that women's sports had inferior "standing" to men's sports within the IOC, they decided that it cost too much to have a separate organization for women's sports. They approved the former women's records under the FSFI, including Czech athlete Zdeněk Koubek's 800-meter sprint, and then ended the FSFI, declaring that there would be no future Women's World Games. Simultaneously, they approved an amendment allowing for a host organization to "arrange for a physical inspection made by a medical expert" should any questions be raised about an athlete's physique, and adding that "the athlete must submit to the inspections as well as the decision taken on account thereof." U.S. sprinter Ted Meredith said this IAAF/IOC rule was "not only ridiculous but nauseous." In his view, sex didn't need to be regulated "at all," as Waters put it.

Brundage continued to say things like "I am fed up to the ears with women as track and field competitors," a sport in which their "charms sink to something less than zero." For him, the validity of women's sports continued to be based on whether he found the athletes sexually attractive. At age 84, after 36 years of advocating for sex testing, it started to occur to him that "apparently technical tests are not the answer" to screen out masculine women, and he shrugged off this insight with a joke: "Maybe the eye of a 25 year old would be better." In any case, he claimed that sex testing had resulted in women athletes being "more feminine now."

Brundage was truly something that way — anyway, you need to read this history.

I received a free advance copy from NetGalley.

About me

Tucker Lieberman is the author of Ten Past Noon, a biography of a New Yorker who lived 1901–1940 and tried to write a world history of eunuchs. I often write about transphobia. Subscribe to get an email when I publish stories on Medium.

Is the U.S. fascist?

A long two-part series by Thomas Zimmer, worth reading.

Mushroom cloud by ParentRap on Pixabay

Part I

Zimmer writes in Fascism in America? (Part 1), Democracy Americana, May 22, 2024:

"I ultimately don’t care all that much about whether or not someone uses the term fascism, the fascism concept, or deploys the fascism analogy. While I am convinced that certain ideas and strands on the Right, and certainly Trumpism itself, are adequately described as a specifically American, specifically twenty-first-century version of fascism, I’ll repeat that my own interpretation is not centered around the fascism concept. I also don’t think that the European interwar period is the most useful analogy for our political moment: The long domestic struggle over egalitarian pluralism and the intense, often violent counter-mobilization that has defined it is often more instructive. ... Whether or not someone uses the label fascism is not the key question. What matters is the analysis underneath: Are we getting the diagnosis right?"

The point is that there are people who apply the fascism label to today's US, as well as people who don't, who don't understand the right-wing. Using or avoiding the word "fascism" doesn't mean you understand the right-wing.

Among Zimmer's reasons for using the word "fascism":

"Donald Trump, let’s start here, has a fascistic way of describing the problem – and offers a fascistic solution. According to Trump and those who support him, the country is in decline. It is threatened by outsiders – immigrants, invaders who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, as Trump has put it. The nation is also threatened by the enemy within: Un-American forces of radical leftism and globalist elites. If Trump is to be believed, in order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make it Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be purged. Trump has repeatedly promised to round up and deport 15 million people – a deportation operation of unprecedented scale, explicitly targeting non-white immigrants, necessitating the creation of a federal deportation force unlike anything that currently exists. “Palingenetic ultranationalism,” the political theorist Roger Griffin has argued, forms a core myth of fascism – “palingenesis” means re-birth or re-creation, a movement or ideology desiring the rebirth of the nation through revolutionary change."

He says it's also important to understand "the permission structure that governs conservative politics: Anything is justified in defense against what they see as a radically 'Un-American,' extremist 'Left' that has supposedly taken over the Democratic Party, the government, and the major institutions that are determining America’s future."

Part II

His follow-up, "The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem," was published two days later.

He's talking about "a specific strand of leftist interpretation." As for leftists who avoid applying the term to the US, they are, Zimmer says, "engaged in a political struggle against what they believe is the real enemy: The (neo-) liberal elites, which they define in very broad and unspecific terms to include basically the entire mainstream of American politics from Center-Left to Center-Right, and particularly the Democratic establishment."

In other words, there are leftists who want to pick their fight with the center, to push it farther left. They are wary of agreeing with the center that the right-wing is the true threat, for then they'd have to work together with the center, and this would dilute their left-wing cause. (Listen to Daniel Bessner’s podcast interview in which he argues "that the fascism narrative signaled a crisis of liberal hegemony.") However, in Zimmer's opinion, this position is "increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right. Their incessant warning that the real danger lies in liberal hysteria has turned into sophistry in defense of a premise that is more and more at odds with empirical evidence."

Recently, at this event (video), the topic came up:

"Why would people of color make common cause with those who openly identified as Nazis and white supremacists? Because, as Steinmetz-Jenkins suggested, they were disillusioned, disaffected – frustrated with a system that wasn’t working for them. That was, in this interpretation, the real problem on which we should be focusing if we are worried about democracy: Not the hysterical “fascism” chimera, but the neoliberal order and those who uphold it. Anything else is just an undue distraction. "

Zimmer says:

"I am on the Left myself, although I have no personal or institutional ties to the American Left, as I only moved over from Germany a little over three years ago... * * * I disagree with the fascism Skeptics that the *real* problem is (neo-) liberalism, and whatever is happening on the Right is just a subordinate issue – a side contradiction, in more Marxist terms. They are both real. Acknowledging how the devastations brought about by neoliberalism have helped create the conditions under which Trumpism can thrive does not mean the radicalization of the Right, the rise of extremist forces within the rightwing coalition, can be wholly subsumed as a side effect"

Later

In October 2024, Zimmer wrote a follow-up.

"There is no consensus definition of fascism – there are different definitions and approaches, plural," and our idea of it "doesn’t easily lend itself to thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes on whether or not something / someone is fascist." Nonetheless:

"It is true that the term “fascism” is overused colloquially and in the public discourse. Quite often, it is uttered as a casual slur. Or it is used strategically to stigmatize something or someone as the ultimate evil. But the fact that the term is also being used in careless ways that don’t hold up analytically must not keep us from acknowledging that it is diagnostically correct to call Donald Trump and his movement fascist. Trump is not “the new Hitler” and he is not “just like Mussolini” – such facile analogies are useless and silly. We are not facing an exact replica of the Ur-fascism that rose to power in Europe’s interwar period. Trumpism is a specifically American, specifically twenty-first century version of fascism."

Given that the election is approaching, "I do want to repeat and emphasize the case for applying the fascism concept to Trump/Trumpism."

Please realize:

"Since the spring, the rhetoric and planning surrounding the racial purge of the nation has ramped up considerably. This is the central promise of Trump’s election campaign: to conduct an unprecedented mass deportation. To do this, Trump and white nationalist purge-planner-in-chief Stephen Miller envision the creation of a deportation force larger than the U.S. military, sweeping the country, rounding up anyone they can get their hands on. This isn’t empty campaign theater either: Russell Vought, the guy who is chiefly responsible for Project 2025’s “180-day Playbook,” has proudly admitted that he has been preparing the executive orders to turn those mass deportation fantasies into reality as quickly as possible."

Early in the year, Trump said he wanted to deport 15 million people, then 20 million … the number keeps escalating. The exact number is not important, but the magnitude is: The estimated number of undocumented people in the country is far lower, and the rightwingers know it. What they are planning is a purge of the nation that will not be confined to undocumented people. Miller has been talking about “denaturalization” for a long time. And rightwing thinkers openly fabulate about the need to go much further. In an infamous essay titled “Conservatism is no longer enough,” published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021, Glen Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic.

— Thomas Zimmer, "Donald Trump, American Fascist: Trumpism is what a specifically American, twenty-first century version of fascism looks like. And in November, fascism is on the ballot. Democracy Americana, Oct 15, 2024

What's a permission structure?

Eric Sentell gives a good explanation in An Injustice! ("How Voters Give Themselves Permission to Vote Irrationally," Oct 22, 2024). If you make a choice contrary to available evidence, you probably have to give yourself some kind of permission. That is, because you aren't properly reasoning, you rationalize. That faux reason is a permission structure. This may include oversimplifying the situation to good vs. evil, so "you just vote for “good” against “evil” and feel fantastic about yourself." Or you say that the man who is threatening to do something obviously bad doesn't actually mean it: he's "blustering" to gain power or attention or engaging in "locker room talk" to add color. Once we're engaged in a permission structure, it's hard to observe what we're really doing with our familiar examples. We may need to look for unfamiliar examples, apply the same logic, and notice where the holes are.

Read more

I'm not a scholar, but I've blogged a little about this topic. For "Books Are Our Superpower," I wrote Is the word ‘fascism’ too extreme? after How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley.

The portrayal of staged events

Here's a cultural element of fascism.

Wikipedia:

"In professional wrestling, kayfabe (/ˈkeɪfeɪb/) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.

Kayfabe, in the United States, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with."

The main thing to understand about abortion ban exceptions do not exist. They are ornamental. They’re like plastic fruit. They are not meant to be used, they’re just there to make the ban look reasonable. bsky.app/profile/jbou...

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— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) May 26, 2024 at 8:49 AM

I have found the concept of “kayfabe” so astonishingly valuable for thinking about USA politics these days (for a while). These “exceptions” are kayfabe as are the sanctimonious enactments of concern by fascist, anti-abortion crowd.

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— 🇵🇸Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer🏳️‍🌈 (@nuclearanthro.bsky.social) May 26, 2024 at 9:52 AM

same goes for divorce ban exemptions for domestic violence conservatives want women trapped in abusive relationships

— ben chambers 🏴 (@benjaminchambers.bsky.social) May 26, 2024 at 9:04 AM

Some people won't have rights if other people get them?

I think it would be good, actually, if APSA didn't provide a platform for fascists to work out in detail and coordinate their plans for destroying democracy piece by piece, but maybe that's just me

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— Kevin Elliott (@kjephd.bsky.social) Sep 6, 2024 at 6:00 PM

'Previously comfortable people'

"Charlottesville, like the rise of Trump, was a moment in time when a lot of previously comfortable people started to contemplate supremacy in a different way, I think. There was something in the way public opinion and authority all the way up to the president seemed not only incapable of meaningfully opposing as obvious a hate group as can be imagined, but almost allergic to the moral implications of what it meant for so many of our fellow citizens to have found common cause with such a group."
A.R. Moxon, interviewed by Parker Molloy (Patreon), May 30, 2024

Trump's former chief of staff

John Kelly says Trump is a fascist. (October 2024)

This is a distraction

HuffPost

Here's "the populist message generally," says Hank Green:

Argentina

"If you recall the history of fascism, you might know that a strong state was often a key facet of the programs implemented in the 1930s and ‘40s. The fascist leadership typically sought to limit the autonomy of capitalists and their corporations, and subordinate them to the state. But the iteration of fascism embodied by Trump and Milei prioritizes the interests of the oligarch class to such a degree that limiting the capacity of the state, both to regulate corporations and to provide services that could instead be privatized for profit, becomes the number one priority. The head of Trump’s transition team has already called him the CEO of the United States Incorporated, and Milei’s actions over the past year make clear that he looks at Argentina in the same way.

Argentinian journalist Diana Cariboni says that if there is one country we should look to for the playbook of Trump’s second term, it’s Argentina. As she writes for openDemocracy, “If there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.”"

— J. P. Hill, Time to prepare: We know a little about what lies ahead. We have to get ready. New Means, Nov 11, 2024

See also

Mass Appeal: How contemporary fascist aesthetics mask, excuse, and normalize violence. Vicky Osterweil, Real Life Mag, June 15, 2017

On the internet as monoculture

From a long read:

"The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

* * *

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.

* * *

The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge and how we communicate. They’re a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies. Crashes, fires and floods may simply be entropy in action, but systemically concentrated and risky infrastructures are choices made manifest — and we can make better ones."

We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024

Something to think about.

Narcomusical 'Emilia Pérez' (artículos en español)

“Emilia Pérez”, una película mexicanísima dirigida por un francés, El Espectador

Emilia Pérez: la película más aclamada en el Festival de Cannes sobre una traficante de drogas trans, Shock

Selena Gomez y el narcomusical “Emilia Pérez” conquistaron a la crítica en el Festival de Cannes, Infobae

Selena Gómez se centra en su participación en 'Emilia ..., LaRepublica.co

Emilia Pérez, con Édgar Ramírez, aclamada por la crítica ..., El Nacional

EMILIA PÉREZ, UN CONMOVEDOR ACTO DE PROTESTA, Desistfilm

Emilia Perez (2024), Filmaffinity

'Emilia Pérez': el narcomusical 'queer' de Jacques Audiard ..., El País

Emilia Perez: Selena Gómez y Zoe Saldaña protagonizan ..., Vogue México

Emilia Pérez: trama, elenco, tráiler y más de la primera ..., MSN

Un aclamado drama musical narco en español. "Emilia ..., Instagram

"Emilia Pérez" película con Édgar Ramírez compite en ..., Puro Vinotinto

Selena Gomez Regresa al Cine con 'Emilia Pérez' en el ..., LaxCali

Selena Gómez conquistó la alfombra roja con el vestido ..., El Tiempo

Edgar Ramírez llega al Festival de Cannes para presentar ..., Correo de Caroní

Y en inglés...

‘Emilia Perez’: Selena Gomez’s Trans Cartel Musical Is the Buzz of Cannes, Daily Beast

Does the fence protect you or exclude you?

Cameron Summers (Broken Hands, May 15, 2024) attributes the following idea to the podcast Trashfuture, and paraphrases it:

"...there is a (metaphorical) fence. On one side of it is the people that the system protects and serves, on the other side of it are those that it simply binds. This isn’t only a matter of policing: this is a matter of any interaction with the bureaucratic systems that underpin society. On the outside you have people who say 'maybe we shouldn’t commit genocide' and on the inside you have the people threatened by calls to not commit genocide. On the outside, you have people who are looking at a future where all of the culture they will have access to are the product of LLMS, and those on the inside have human-made works. On the outside, you have people who want to be inside, and on the inside you have people who worry that the area encircled by the fence only ever seems to get smaller."

The idea, as I understand it, is that a fence may serve some people while hurting others. Thus (it occurs to me) a question we can ask ourselves is: Does this fence, whichever fence be in front of you right now, protect you or exclude you? Who is the fence for?

"In Deleuzoguattarian thought," Summers continues, there is "striated space" which is "law, order, and civilization, [and] within it you find the state apparatus," and then there is "smooth space" which is "chaos, transformation, and wilderness, [and] within it you find the nomad war-machine." Both want to co-opt each other: The former admires the powerful weapons of the latter, and the latter admires the wealth and stability of the former.

Today's equilibrium (post-1970s neoliberalism) is "just sort of run[ning] out of steam. Instead of a violent break, we’re seeing the paint that marks the striations begin to flake off."

Related

Elad Nehorai tells us: "In 1970 he [Philip Slater] had published his most famous book: The Pursuit of Loneliness, in which he warned that if the hippie and counter-cultural movements didn’t realize that the structure and culture of America, they would eventually succumb to the very values they were trying to subvert." In his 1991 book, A Dream Deferred, "he argues that anyone who is against authoritarianism must understand if they want to truly combat it and tear out its roots so that we can bring about the democratic and pluralistic society we dream of." (We've Always Lived Under Authoritarianism: On the vision of a little-known sociologist whose urgent warnings are a guidebook for truly understanding authoritarianism... and its antidote. May 13, 2024)

November 2023: X advertised 'DETRANS' documentary

TechCrunch:

"Thursday on X (Twitter), all users saw the same pinned topic under the 'What’s happening?' sidebar. As part of a 'timeline takeover' — which gives advertisers 'priority access to logged-in users’ first impression of the day' — conservative media nonprofit PragerU is promoting the hashtag '#DETRANS' to advertise its new film about 'the stories of detransitioners.' * * * PragerU said it spent $1 million in total to promote the “DETRANS” documentary, a portion of which went toward its “timeline takeover” on X."
— X runs ‘timeline takeover’ ad promoting anti-trans film, Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch, November 2, 2023

First of all, detransition is an uncommon pathway for people who begin gender transition. As TechCrunch says: "In a 2021 review of 27 studies, with almost 8,000 transgender patients, less than 1% of people who underwent any type of gender-affirmation surgeries expressed regret."

Secondly, people are allowed to regret their choices, and they are allowed to change their mind. This is part of being human. It doesn't mean that being trans/queer is invalid or bad.

I wrote Why transphobia teaches us to be terrified of regret. It's an 8-min read on Medium.

Two books on climate emergency

In the May 9, 2024 NY Review of books, John Washington reviewed:

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
by John Vaillant
Knopf, 414 pp.
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
by Jeff Goodell
Little, Brown, 385 pp.

On the role of a liberal, reasonable columnist

Jonathan Chait's essay, "In Defense of Punching Left: The problem with ‘Solidarity'," appeared in the NY Intelligencer on May 10.

My perception is that perhaps he is describing not so much what it is to be a liberal as what it is to be a columnist.

We might say that to ask anyone to be an activist uncritically riding the wave of collective movement is to expect them to ride a car with no brakes. Chait says this self-awareness is true specifically of liberals, as if liberals were somehow different.

We might say that everyone wants to be reasonable. Chait implies that liberals are the only ones who really try.

To me, this seems to be a viewpoint on what it means to be a liberal, reasonable columnist. It isn't the only possible viewpoint.

For some, the work of a columnist might mean examining the world through principles of liberalism and reason and trying to understand people and things in liberal, reasonable ways.

For others, it might mean asserting: I'm the liberal, reasonable one, and everyone I'm critiquing isn't.

In my view, those are different endeavors.

I also hear them use words like complexity, objectivity, nuance, balance. How this works: The columnist says: Everything those people say is simplistic and biased. It lacks nuance, and the conversation is one-sided because they're the only ones who ever get to talk. Now it's time to listen to me — only me! And so they set themselves up as immune from critique.

This allows them to lack any expertise for what they're saying. Dr. Johnathan Flowers on Bluesky: "As Talia Mae Bettcher notes, this kind of arrogance is why people in philosophy try to opine about trans issues without ever talking to a trans philosopher or a trans person. We're taught to act as though no subject is free from our inquiry, even if our tools aren't up to the task of doing it." (May 15, 2024)

It's kind of what I was saying yesterday about one's perception of flaws in others. *You* are capable of nuance and holding separate ideas in your head at once; *they* are a faceless mob of cardboard cutouts who just parrot what they're told by the perfidious forces of [thing you hate].

— Small Robots (@smolrobots.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 8:14 AM

Another direction

Sometimes it's unproductive to think about our correctness as individuals and may be better to think about the correctness of entire movements over the long term.

Osita Nwanevu in The Guardian today:

"The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. ... They have not always been right; even when right, their prescriptions for the problems they've identified and their means of directing attention to them have not always been prudent. But...it has made a habit of telling the American people, in tones that discomfit, what they need to hear before they are ready to hear it."

I wrote about the protests. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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— Osita Nwanevu (@ositanwanevu.bsky.social) May 13, 2024 at 11:50 AM

The 'indestructible exoneration' we give to supremacists by being 'fair' to them

"In fact, whenever you mention that Trump's "very fine people" defended the Nazis, you'll always get people—even proudly anti-Trump people, good liberals who want to be sure that no matter what we do in this struggle against facism, we always play fair—who rush in to take on the fascist framing uncritically, and let you know that well actually Trump was defending the non-Nazis that marched with the Nazis, not the Nazis themselves. It's a distinction we are meant to find meaningful; a sort of indestructible exoneration offered to supremacists and their allies."
A.R. Moxon, interviewed by Parker Molloy (Patreon), May 30, 2024

Yet another disastrous rollout of a scheme to report who's using a bathroom (this one in Utah)

Utah actually passed this law

Source: Utah Launches "Snitch Line" To Report Trans People In Bathrooms; Memes Flood In: The move is the latest in a series of states that have tried to launch ways to report transgender issues to authorities; such attempts in other states have not been successful. Erin Reed, Erin in the Morning, May 2, 2024

On May 1, "the Utah Public Auditor released a form to report transgender individuals encountered in changing rooms and restrooms to state authorities. The form, titled "Alleged Government Violations of Utah Code 63G Chapter 31: Distinctions Based on Sex," is in response to a law enacted earlier this year. This law bans transgender people from using restrooms that match their gender identity in schools, as well as locker rooms and similar facilities in public buildings across the state."

The law "explicitly prohibits transgender individuals from using restrooms that match their gender identity in schools and also bans them from public changing rooms unless they have amended their birth certificates and undergone gender reassignment surgery." This is a problem in part because whether a person can update their birth certificate is up to the state in which they were born.

Reed says:

"In February, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita released a snitch line to report schools. Instead, it received copies of Godzilla holding a trans flag. In March of 2023, the Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey launched a website for reporting gender affirming care clinics. Within a month, the website was taken down after being flooded with the 'Bee Movie' script. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin launched a tip line to report 'divisive teaching practices.' That tip line received very few legitimate reports, and instead was flooded by “GenZ for Change” activists. The website was taken down quietly a the end of the year."

Context

Source: Mississippi Passes Bill Allowing Cis People To Sue Over Trans Bathroom Usage: The bathroom ban targets transgender people in colleges. It also contains a private right of action that some have said would allow cisgender people to sue over trans bathroom usage. Erin Reed, Erin in the Morning, May 6, 2024

Reed says: "Utah’s ban targets all government buildings, including the airport, with enforcement depending on allegations of behavior that 'causes affront or alarm.'"

Result

Utah Auditor Slams Legislature For Making Him "Bathroom Monitor" After "Snitch Form" Flooded With Meme Complaints: After receiving thousands of meme submissions to a form used to report transgender people in bathrooms, Utah's auditor shared scathing words for the legislature tasking him with the role. Erin Reed, Erin in the Morning, May 7, 2024

"...the Utah Public Auditor released a form allowing cisgender people to report transgender people in bathrooms. This was done in response to a law passed earlier this year banning transgender people from bathrooms and changing rooms in various circumstances. Within a couple of days, the form was flooded with over 4,000 meme submissions..."

Utah State Auditor John Dougall said the law gave his office "a role we did not request. Indeed, no auditor sets out to become a bathroom monitor."

The situation was pretty bad: "The form included a section where people could upload images, among other things, to support their allegations. This led to fears that the form would encourage members of the public to act as vigilante bathroom police, taking pictures of people they thought were transgender in private bathroom spaces."

Public defender Dustin Parmley had told the Senate Business and Labor Committee that it's "impossible to enforce" who belongs in which bathroom if you rely on the public to know "if someone is feminine or masculine enough" to be in a bathroom and if the qualifying facts for "exceptions" have to do with "someone's surgery or birth certificate" as those facts are, of course, "hidden" from the public.

"Already, the option to submit a picture has been removed" from the Utah form, Reed reports.

"Other attempts to create such forms have similarly failed, such as in Virginia, where Governor Glenn Youngkin's tip line was flooded with complaints about Beowulf, or in Missouri, where scripts for the Bee Movie were sent in."

By the way

In Utah, you can request that the court use certain pronouns and titles for you, and you can request a legal change of sex/gender. (forms accessed July 2024)

No more Judy Blume:

This law doesn't just ban books-- it makes it illegal to redistribute them. It demands the destruction of them. And once a low like this passes somewhere more pop up elsewhere. Use the @5calls.org app to call your state reps and demand that they protect our children from book bans.

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— Maggie Tokuda-Hall (@maggietokudahall.bsky.social) Aug 9, 2024 at 10:45 AM

Oh, now look. They are making the gender-neutral bathroom unusable.

They could have deactivated the bathroom in multiple ways. They chose to send a specific message that your gender isn't private; your gender is everyone's business.

A school district in Pennsylvania approved nearly $9,000 ‘to cut windows into the ‘gender-identity’ student bathrooms so passerby can look inside’

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— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) October 3, 2024 at 10:29 AM

It started in North Carolina

Eight years ago North Carolina pushed an anti-trans bathroom bill and it was a national outrage and disgrace, this refrain that Democrats have "moved too far left on trans issues" is witless nonsense, it was a coalition of far-right ideologues and bigoted liberals that did the moving!

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 4:33 PM

Read more

In addition to subscribing to Erin Reed...

Check out

Surviving Transphobia. ed. Laura A. Jacobs. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023.

And my article: How the bathroom verification cards would work