The Skinny: Climate of Fear and Indifference
Climate of Fear and Indifference: April 16th – 19th, 2025
Jewish American Left Says “Not In Our Name”
Because a significant portion of the regime’s fascist efforts to crush dissent revolves around their fact-free declaration that opposing a US-backed genocide in Gaza, being conducted by Israel, is actually antisemitism (and also a foreign policy matter that is beyond regulation due to presidential powers over foreign affairs), the ruling class establishment that supported that genocide even when it belonged to Biden has a vested interest in presenting Jewish Americans as a unified bloc standing in opposition to anti-genocide protestors in support of Israel and the Zionist agenda. After all, the narrative that all of this monstrous bullshit is being done to protect Jewish people falls apart very quickly once you realize that vast numbers of American Jews are actively against all this fascist, genocidal bullshit; so that latter fact has to be kept from the American public, lest they become wise to the reality that this is all just a propaganda op to justify arms sales, genocide, and fascist repression of folks ideological opposed to the regime.
The truth however, is quite different from the picture you’re allowed to see on television; Jewish Americans are actually massively overrepresented in the anti-genocide protest movement, and a vibrant, growing collage of Jewish left organizations are risking the personal safety of their members to vigorously oppose a fascist regime and say, quite directly, that not only are the regime’s actions putting Jewish people in danger, they will not allow genocide, deportations, and fascist repression to be conducted “in their name.”
For more about this hidden, but not secret story, let’s turn to this deep dive by Shane Burley into the rise of Jewish left resistance in America to settler colonial occupation, genocide, and the fascist Trump regime’s attempts to deport student protestors under the guise of combatting antisemitism:
Jewish Organizations Are Fighting Back Against Khalil Deportation
“This year, all over the U.S., Jews are holding emergency Passover Seders calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil and an end to the criminalization of all those calling for an end to the Israeli government’s genocide of the Palestinian people,” JVP said as it announced the action. This seder is part of a long tradition of using Jewish rituals as a protest tactic, uniting the prophetic spiritual tradition of Judaism with the practical strategies of physical resistance and blockade. This action, offered with relatively short notice and promising to mobilize huge numbers of Jews and allies, is the result of the relationships that have been built across Jewish organizations as they try to confront the repression coming in Trump’s second term.
“We’re building a new coalition right now. Because not all of us have been in the same space together,” Lily Greenberg Call, a member of the New York City chapter of the Jewish anti-Occupation group IfNotNow, called into a megaphone on March 20. “But it is more important than ever now to reach for each other and unite for our communities and our neighbors who are under attack,” she told the thousand people who had flooded the streets of lower Manhattan, the historic home of the U.S. Jewish left. “People in this city have been abducted, separated from their families, thrown in detention camps, and threatened with deportation.”
Frankly, I don’t really have a lot to add here because speaking for Jewish Americans who oppose fascism being conducted in their name really isn’t my lane. Burley’s extensive documentation of how Jewish resistance groups are banding together all across the country is however informative, and enlightening given a media environment where even critics of the Trump regime who still support genocidal Zionist objectives in Gaza are unprepared to report on that resistance. The obvious reality here is that no matter what the ADL says, a fascist regime stacked to the brim with antisemite nazis, doesn’t give a flying fuck about combatting antisemitism, and fully intends to use the mere existence of Jewish people and antisemitism in our society, as the spear point for their transformation of America into an over fascist dictatorship – and that’s a story, you just won’t hear on the Six O’clock News.
A Christian Nationalist Purge Is Coming
While I’m certain Amanda Marcotte and I have different ideas about how to actually fight fascism, I agree strongly with her argument that Marco Rubio’s cable asking State Department employees to use a snitch line to report each other for “anti-Christian bias” is both an indicator of the regime’s theocratic intentions, and an ominous portent of the next moral panic the Trumpenreich will use to purge its enemies and continue installing a fascist dictatorship.
Marco Rubio’s hunt for “anti-Christian bias” is creeping theocracy
“Unsurprisingly, a deeper read of the cable shows that “anti-Christian bias” is the cover story propped up to justify Rubio’s actual assault on freedom of religion at State. He’s giving Christian nationalists at the agency a tool to harass and even purge people who don’t share their far-right beliefs. The definitions of “anti-Christian bias” throughout add up to outrage that conservative Christians are expected to treat people who believe differently with fairness and decency.
For instance, the memo asks for reports of “mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia,” specifically during Joe Biden’s administration. It doesn’t take a doctorate in bureaucratese to interpret this. Rubio is seeking stories where conservative Christians were told to mind their own business after objecting to a colleague putting up a Pride flag, a Black Lives Matter sign or perhaps a religious knickknack from a non-Christian faith. This might be more comprehensible if, say, any Christians had being told they couldn’t wear a cross or have a picture of Jesus on their desk. Instead, what Rubio is suggesting is that Christians have a prevent other people from having the freedom to express views and positions they dislike — and that it amounts to “bias” if they can’t control what others do or say.
Also defined as “anti-Christian bias” is alleged mistreatment for “opposing official media content due to religious objections.” Under Biden, the State Department flew the Pride flag, validated the passports of trans people, allowed LGBTQ employees to be out at the office, and expected employees to use the correct name and pronouns for trans colleagues. Under this new policy, if State employees objected to these policies, they are now free to punish those who asked them to show professional courtesy to co-workers. This is not an anti-discrimination policy, but a pro-discrimination policy.”
Throughout the rest of the piece, Marcotte does a solid job of debunking the idea that anti-Christian bias is a significant problem in an increasingly Christian Nationalist and openly fundamentalist America, while pointing out that what Rubio is doing is enabling Christian Nationalists working at State to harass and potentially purge anyone opposed to their odious ideology; including other Christians who do not conform to the very narrow definition of believer the Christian Nationalist worldview allows for.
“What’s ironic here is that, because of American demographics, most of the people who risk being targeted by these authoritarian policies are either Christian or grew up Christian. But a large part of the MAGA project is redefining “Christian” only to mean people who share a white nationalist, anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ worldview — and want to use force to bring everyone else in line.”
In other words, it’s just another project to install fascist ideology as the only acceptable way to think and act inside the Trumpenreich-controlled US government. Where I think Marcotte’s analysis shines however, and what I hope readers take away from this story, is the author’s direct connection of this nascent argument for another fascist purge, with its prior two arguments for doing so as we watch them evolve into their horrifying final forms in real time; specifically the regime’s fake wars against “antisemitism” and “gang activity.”
Like most fascist movements, what some call “Trumpism” is actually a giant quilted patchwork of reactionaries, supremacists, and eliminationists who are ideologically aligned under the big picture fascist umbrella, but have, at times wildly different priorities and concerns on the micro level, inside each individual clique. One of the core constituencies in the fascist Trump alliance are Christian Nationalists and the evangelical right; whose loyalty to the regime was rewarded with an anti-trans pogrom and assaults on public education (among other things) the moment Trump was inaugurated. Now, slightly staggered as their two prior fake moral panics become exposed as just bog standard fascism, what better way to right the nazi ship of state than to drum up a third moral panic about anti-Christian bias? This would rally the Christian right around Trump’s banner, while the regime continues its project to purge “enemies” and install a fascist dictatorship, in what it hopes will become a white ethno-state.
Disenfranchising Trans People is Intentional
Well, I guess if I don’t exist, it makes sense that I shouldn’t be able to vote; right? Although it isn’t making even the fringes of the mainstream discourse surrounding the fascist GOP’s election-rigging SAVE Act, the reality is that unless nazis with an eliminationist agenda towards trans people make some sort of exception, the bill will likely disenfranchise every trans person in America who has legally changed their name, and quite possibly most people who are in the process of transition and thus have ID that may be inconsistent with their presentation or other documents:
Federal Voter ID Bill Attacks Trans Voters — and Anyone Else Who Has Changed Their Name
“Much of the news coverage of the SAVE Act has focused almost entirely on the broad category of “married women” — a bloc of 69 million who may not have updated documents. But arguably, such a law is aimed directly at transgender people in addition to affecting married people who change their names. And that’s not to mention the 140 million U.S. citizens who don’t have passports and tens of millions who also don’t have easy access to a birth certificate. Regardless, the fact that trans people are at the center of this story has been easy to sideline: A story published by NPR last week listed eight things to know about this legislation — but didn’t mention the implications for trans people at all.”
At this point can anyone who has been paying attention (a very small group indeed, as far as I can tell) claim to be surprised that trans-eliminationist nazis are trying to pass a law that further erases trans people from public life and social participation, yet most of American society hasn’t even registered that as a potential consequence of this disastrous, anti-democratic bill? After all, when the president of the United States signed an executive order more or less saying that trans people didn’t exist, which historically is a sure sign that a government intends to make that a reality, most Very Serious PeopleTM in our discourse shrugged and pointed to public polling as an excuse to not speak out to defend trans people. So why would this act of erasure and disenfranchisement be any different?
“Benfield is concerned that not naming trans people as a target of this legislation contributes to an insidious process that is ongoing: the erasure of trans people from public life in general.
“It’s going to affect lots of different kinds of people,” she said of the SAVE Act. “But the reason that the erasure of trans people worries me in this conversation is that it’s consistent with strategic erasure from the public sphere that’s already been happening.”
That strategic erasure includes President Donald Trump’s series of executive orders attacking so-called “gender ideology” and both state and national legislation that attempts to criminalize support for trans youth in physical and social transition. There are now only two genders — “male” and “female”— and anyone who falls outside of that could potentially face being pushed out of public life, including schools, sports, restroom facilities, and now voting itself. Even policies like Trump’s executive orders that aren’t immediately enforceable create a chilling effect, pushing trans people into the closet through intimidation.”
I would hope that because it requires sixty votes in the US Senate to pass, the SAVE Act is a dead on arrival bill; but I can’t say I’m all that confident in a Democratic Party that is openly blaming the results of an election they seemingly tried to lose on their (actually nonexistent) support of trans rights, and its ability to protect people like me. Even if the SAVE Act is shot down however, the fact that this attempt at the mass disenfranchisement of trans people in American civic life doesn’t even rate a talking point in this very public debate, strongly implies that when these bills only target trans people the establishment “opposition” to the fascist agenda will continue to shrug, offer empty words of condolence, and simply let it happen; which is pretty much par for the course in the fascist Trump 2.0 era.
To say that living in a society where your rights and even your existence are not so much up for debate, but rather already judged to be either irrelevant, or non-existent is surreal and unnerving would be an understatement of massive proportions. I guess there is one upside here however, because if trans people can no longer vote perhaps I’ll finally be free of liberals who honestly don’t give a rats ass about my life, screaming at me to support a Democratic Party that doesn’t care whether I live or die, while pretending their party is a much better advocate for my right to exist than they actually are.
Weaponizing Jewish People to Crush Dissent is Also Antisemitic
I think at this point you have to be using some kind of motivated reasoning to pretend a Trump regime full of literal nazis who’re kidnapping anti-genocide student protestors legally living and studying in the United States, is doing so to fight “antisemitism.” This government doesn’t care about antisemitism; it cares about its genocidal settler colonial client state in the Middle East, Israel. But the Trump administration, which frequently dabbles in open antisemitism, is happy to use the fight against really existing hatemongering against Jewish people as a cudgel to accomplish its fascist goals; namely allowing Israel to complete its genocide in Gaza, purging student dissidents with experience fighting the regime, and seizing control of higher education as part of a Yarvinite scheme to create a fascist dictatorship under Trump. As many, including some of the students quoted in the article I’m about to share have noted, weaponizing antisemitism to do fascism is in and of itself a form of antisemitism; and it’s certainly not doing anything to help keep Jewish American students safe.
If any of that seemed controversial to you I’d ask that you please consider the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student organizer who was lured in for seizure by the promise of a citizenship interview after being marked out by fascist, pro-genocide doxing groups Canary Mission, and Betar for having the nerve to go on 60 Minutes to talk about the occupation of Gaza and why the fight for Palestinian liberation and the fight against antisemitism “go hand-in-hand.”
‘New Kind of Antisemitism’: Jewish Students Slam Trump’s Detention of Mohsen Mahdawi
“Mahdawi, like Mahmoud Khalil, reportedly wrote to the university asking for help finding a safe location to live, away from ICE. As with Khalil, the university appears to have ignored the repeated pleas. Mahdawi’s requests came after months of anti-free speech groups like Betar USA and Canary Mission targeting him, amid his involvement in the Columbia anti-war and pro-Palestine protests over the last 18 months.
The groups pointed to things like his appearance on CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ – where he discussed not viewing Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in a vacuum – as proof of his villainy. In that same appearance, Mahdawi condemned antisemitism, recounting an instance during a student walkout when he told off a campus non-affiliate saying antisemitic phrases.
“To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi said during the segment. “The fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand-in-hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
And so Mahdawi becomes the latest in a string of students the Trump administration has targeted nationwide in the name of “student safety” and “combating antisemitism” – while Jewish peers of these students express feeling safe and heard around them.”
I think one of the students quoted in this article summed up the situation best when he pointed out that Palestinians shouldn’t have to be model minorities in American society for folks to treat them like human beings and care about their rights, but by all accounts, including those from school faculty and Jewish students who knew him, Mohsen Mahdawi was in fact that person. Indeed at the time of his kidnapping Mahdawi was actively working to bridge whatever rift exists between Palestinian and Jewish students at Columbia and in the surrounding community; so to claim you’re fighting antisemitism by confining and attempting to deport such a person is a particularly crass and odious weaponization of one vulnerable minority to persecute another; which is probably why it appeals so much to a fascist regime full of imperialist Islamophobes and antisemites.
Look as much as the regime (and American society at large) wants to divide us all and put us into little boxes, the reality on the ground is that none of this serves the interests of everyday people in our society, be they Palestinian, Jewish, or neither. Weaponizing Jewish students and the safety of American Jews to install fascism is as one student put it, “the new kind of antisemitism.” Targeting foreign students legally studying in the United States for opposing a genocide the regime wants to profit from, is fascism in action. Using foreign policy as an excuse to expel non-white people is part of a fascist project to establish a white ethno-state in America. Whether Americans want to hear it or not, we all have a vested interest in stopping the persecution of folks like Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mahmoud Khalil; not just because we could be next, but because a failure to do so will be a terrible stain on our common humanity and diminish all that is worth saving about our shared society.
A Nazi Billionaire Eugenicist Crank and His “Legion” of Spawn
I don’t want to spend a lot of time focusing on tabloid-adjacent coverage of what an absolute piece of human dogshit Elon Musk is in his personal life; that weird cracker freak certainly buys more than enough publicity to carve his name into our discourse permanently, whether the rest of us like it or not. In this case however I think a recent story about Musk’s obsession with creating an army of mini-Elon children, pronatalism, and fearmongering about collapsing birthrates in “the West,” as well as details about his attitude toward children in the developing world, goes a long way towards explaining why Apartheid Space Karen is doing the things he’s doing in his official capacity as Trump’s “chainsaw” guy in the US government.
The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers
“Musk has warned that “civilization is going to crumble” if people don’t start having more children, a view popularized as pronatalism in right-wing circles. The pronatalism movement is composed of people concerned about the birthrate and eager to implement policy and cultural solutions to the problem.
Martin Varsavsky, a friend of Musk’s who founded a large chain of in vitro fertilization clinics in the U.S., said he has spoken with Musk about the risks of falling birthrates.
“Without babies there’s no future, every problem becomes secondary to the problem of not having people on the planet,” said Varsavsky. “Elon believes that a country is not the geography, a country is the people.”
Speaking to an audience at an investment conference in Saudi Arabia last year, Musk laid out the urgency of the matter. “I think for most countries, they should view the birthrate as the single biggest problem they need to solve. If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter,” Musk told the crowd over a live video.
When the interviewer joked that Musk was doing his part to address the issue, the billionaire agreed. “Yes. I am. I mean, you know, you’ve got to walk the talk. So, I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.”
Separately, Musk has said he is concerned about what he called Third World countries having higher birthrates than the U.S. and Europe, a person familiar with the conversation said.
One of the most important ways to change these dynamics, he has repeatedly told people close to him, is for educated people to have more children.”
Look, if you want to read the frankly bizarre details about what a domineering, misogynist supervillain freak Musk is to the women he convinces to have his children, I promise not to rat you out; if nothing else it speaks to the core patriarchal, reactionary, delusional sci-fi obsessive values by which the richest man in the world leads his extremely divorced life. Laughing at Herr Musk is so much fun it would be our national sport if we weren’t in the middle of a very real fascist takeover in America.
What interests me however is Musk’s open articulation of the white supremacist, eugenicist, “race war” ideology that seemingly influences his decisions in the rest of his life, and indeed his stewardship of the DOGE department that’s currently disintegrating much of the U.S. federal government. Folks, I’ve had the misfortune of encountering a fairly large number of nazis and assorted other kinds of fascists in my life, and I can say without question that the odious shitlords who obsess over racialized birth rates and raw population demographics are by far the worst human beings, and some of the most dangerous freaks in the larger reactionary right. When a billionaire nazi who grew up under the apartheid system in South Africa starts talking about the dangers to human “civilization” presented by higher birthrates in “the Third World” and the need for “educated people” to have more babies, it doesn’t take a psychic to realize that he’s really talking about a perceived fascist need for white people to literally out breed non-white people as part of some implied racialized struggle for “the future of human civilization.” He can dress his odious ideas up with nonsense about going to Mars. or preserving “civilization” and the human race, but it’s very clear what “civilization” he’s hoping to save and what kinds of humans he’s hoping to “preserve” here; this is bog standard nazi shit.
All of which brings us to Musk’s role as the head of the fascist Department of Government Efficiency and what Elon’s beliefs can tell us about his actions in that role. DOGE hasn’t touched the imperialist military, the police state, or government subsidies for corporations and the fossil fuel industry. Instead under Musk’s leadership DOGE has targeted global health programs, famine reduction efforts, and now has its eyes set on anything that helps America’s poor; who I shouldn’t have to remind you are a segment of society where nonwhite people are overrepresented due to our long history of white supremacist capitalism and theft of generational wealth. While important “thought leaders” in our discourse struggle to figure out what DOGE’s actions have to do with “fraud and waste,” it sure does seem like Musk himself is offering a much simpler, more obvious explanation for his activities with his own lips. Maybe the reason Elon Musk doesn’t mind killing poor, mostly brown people is because he’s a nazi freak who thinks we’re in the middle of a race war to survive the apocalypse? And just maybe, that’s news worth reporting to an American public being gutted by his department’s “efficiency” cuts as we speak.
Gorka Says Opposition to Trafficking Migrants is Abetting “Terrorism”
Well I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing I love more than to be lectured by a British-Hungarian-American nazi about why demanding due process before our government traffics a man legally residing in the United States with his American family, to a forever torture prison in El Salvador, is actually supporting terrorism; and if powerful administration officials are to be believed, so is protesting against Trump and his fascist regime:
Trump Adviser Compares Opposing Abrego García’s Detention With Backing Terrorism
“As independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported, White House Senior Director for Counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka said in an interview with Newsmax that the divide between the Trump administration, which has sent hundreds of people to a notorious foreign prison without trial and disobeyed a Supreme Court order, and those who oppose its actions boils down to a disagreement between those who “love America” and those who “hate America.”
Those committed to abandoning constitutional rights guaranteed to anyone on U.S. soil, according to Gorka, are in the former camp.
“We have people who love America, like the president, like his Cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans,” said Gorka. “And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists.”
“And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them?” Gorka said. “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”
Let’s start by stating the obvious: in a just universe, Sebastian Gorka would have been tried, convicted, and “deported” via rocket directly towards the sun years ago because he’s an unhinged nazi pushing racist “class of civilizations” propaganda to justify bombing Muslim-majority countries. Here in our modern fascist-dominated unreality however, this hate-fueled muppet is the Trump regime’s “Senior Director for Counterterrorism.” In other words Gorka, a bloated fascist toad who left the first Trump government in disgrace, is the guy literally in charge of going after “terrorists.” Which is a rather ominous situation if you’ve been paying attention to US political news because “terrorist,” is also the word multiple Trump administration officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, and deputy DHS secretary Troy Edgar, have used to describe Tesla vandals and anti-Trump regime protestors in general.
As such, it should absolutely alarm you when Seb Gorka goes on TV to repeat and reinforce the US government’s fact-free claim that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is literally a “terrorist,” and starts characterizing people who oppose Trump’s illegal “deportation” of Garcia as folks potentially “aiding and abetting” terrorists; because again, for some mysterious reason (they’re all nazis too) the Trump regime gave this disgraced War on Terror-era reject authority over protecting America from whoever the hell the regime says are “terrorists” apparently. How Gorka finds the time to do so amid his typically busy day of doing Islambophia, warmongering, and spreading fascist ideology, remains a mystery.
Look I hate to keep beating the drum about American imperialism and War on Terror policy decisions being why we’re in this moment, but ultimately almost everything the Trump regime is trying to do to transform the United States into a fascist dictatorship rises out of those two horrible realities. Trump is using a fake “war” against “gangs” that the president alone has the right to declare “terrorists” for any reason at all, to grant himself emergency powers to do all sorts of fascism; and Gorka (as well as other regime officials) are quietly, but repeatedly asserting the regime’s right to take this fight against “terrorism” to the streets of America. On its face, none of this is legal; but given the ridiculous Calvinball powers our society has already granted the imperial presidency to make war, fight “invasions,” and stop “terrorism,” it’s entirely possible these chucklefucks will get away with it all. Especially when a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court that has already allowed Trump to declare a fake war in the first place, holds final say on the legality of the regime’s actions.
I Don’t Know How To Make Cis-Het People Care About Trans Lives
What if American society kicked off a pogrom, and nobody who wasn’t a target even noticed? I don’t know how many times I have to tell cis-het people that we’re in the middle of a real anti-trans pogrom, and that when a the state says you don’t exist they literally mean to make it so; but it might be a good time for non-trans people to start paying attention because the fascist GOP is signaling their intentions to eliminate gender-affirming care, including adult care, entirely. Which is clearly how the regime literally plans to end the existence of trans people, without having to worry about messy arguments over our civil or human rights:
The Trump Administration Threat To Transgender Adult Care Is Growing At Lightning Speed
“It appears increasingly likely that the Trump administration is preparing to target transgender adult healthcare nationwide. In his campaign video, Trump stated he intends to investigate gender-affirming care for transgender people of any age. At the same time, reports indicate the Department of Health and Human Services is preparing to release a junk science review targeting both transgender youth and adults, with one internal letter referencing plans to study the “chemical and surgical mutilation of children and adults.” The warning signs for transgender adults are blaring: when Republican legislators say behind closed doors that their goal is to end gender-affirming care “for everyone,” and when figures like Michael Knowles call for the “eradication” of transgender people at CPAC, this is what it looks like when those words begin turning into action.
It would not take much for transgender adult care to be severely disrupted. The forthcoming HHS report could be used to justify a national executive order threatening hospital funding for any institution that treats transgender adults. Given the widespread over-compliance already seen in response to executive orders with no statutory authority—whether around DEI rollbacks, the erasure of LGBTQ+ people, censorship of AIDS/HIV prevention resources, removal of critical historical narratives, or retaliation against law firms that challenge the administration—such an order could have sweeping, chilling effects. The threat of investigations alone could freeze care for countless trans people, forcing providers to pause services out of fear. These disruptions are already underway in Arizona following Planned Parenthood’s decision to halt transgender care—an early indication of the nationwide consequences should the Trump administration continue its campaign against transgender people unchecked.”
Frankly, I have to admit that trying to convince people around me that a fascist government literally means to end me and folks like me is pretty disheartening. Plenty of trans people and legal observers warned us that Christian Nationalists had no intention of stopping with trans youth sports bans, and society at large simply shrugged; now we’re watching fascists pass laws that ban trans youth medical care, and bathroom ban bills that never got off the ground eight short years ago are all the rage. The fascist American right has openly admitted that they’re trying to drive trans people out of public life, and we’ve caught them on tape admitting they want to criminalize being trans and ultimately end the existence of trans people. Hell, the goddamn nazi President of the United States publicly acknowledged he wants to end all gender affirming care, even for adults, and on his very first day in office he issued an Executive Order officially declaring that there were only two “biological” genders and thus trans people don’t exist. Now the larger fascist right seems poised to use anti-sterilization laws meant to protect marginalized people from eugenicist freaks and federal funding mechanisms, to deny life-saving gender affirming care to everyone in America regardless of age; so much for these anti-vax nazis’ commitment to “bodily and medical” autonomy, right?
The truth is, if all of that is not enough to make cis-het people realize these nazis want to eliminate (by any means necessary) trans people, then I don’t know how to make them see the obvious truth; or worse, I don’t know how to make them care. The warning signs that this project is ultimately about eliminationism and possibly even genocide have been there from the very beginning; and yet cis-het people, even folks who call themselves liberals and were happy to chase clout supporting “trans rights” a mere 8 years ago, have simply ignored them; indeed, the Democratic Party has at times joined the nazis in justifying the persecution of trans people because defending trans rights is “unpopular” after a solid decade of unchecked otherizing, dehumanizing, and attempts to criminalize trans people in the public discourse.
And what have these all wise and unconcerned heterosexuals in America won for their troubles? A fascist dictatorship run by Christian Nationalist freaks who rode to power, in part, on a drummed up moral panic about trans people just existing. I hope you folks are happy with your harvest; I probably won’t live long enough to see the day you find out.
It’s Not the Sci-Fi Stories, It’s All That Fascism
When Tech-Bro billionaire oligarchs were the darlings of “liberal” capitalist society, their homages to sci-fi literature were considered “quirky.” Today, on the verge of what some call a “techno-feudalist” dictatorship in America paid for by many of those same Big Tech billionaires, a recent opinion piece in The Guardian raises an important question; was society ignoring the warning signs that these rich megalomaniacs took the wrong lessons from the stories we all grew up loving?
The Big Idea: Will Sci-Fi End Up Destroying the World?
“We can see this most clearly in the way the dystopian settings of so much cyberpunk fiction are seen by today’s tech leaders as prophetic visions of a world they need to try to escape – whether by colonising Mars, building metaverses or, in the case of Vance’s billionaire patron Peter Thiel, backing efforts to create new city states by buying land in developing countries. In the original novels it tended to be people like them responsible for creating the dystopias in the first place, but they’ve somehow projected the blame on to the masses.
In Snow Crash there’s something called “the Raft” – a collection of boats filled with infected, mind-controlled refugees headed for America’s west coast. It’s an image that recalls the viciously racist 1973 French sci-fi novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, in which a huge fleet of Indian refugees destroy western civilisation. It’s had a far-right fandom ever since and has been referenced by former Donald Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon. It’s a particular favourite of Stephen Miller, Trump’s lead policy adviser and close friend of Musk (Miller’s wife, Katie, is the Doge spokeswoman).
It’s not much of a jump to see the actions of Thiel and Musk, and many of those around them, as an attempt to forestall this fate, linking, as they do, the racial obsessions of the far right with their odd brand of tech-utopianism. When Thiel writes that “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible”, or when Musk makes up wild stories about the Democrats using benefit fraud to import migrants, they are unabashedly expressing this fear of being overrun. The greatest irony of all is that in their desperation to build escape routes, they risk creating the very dystopias they fear.”
To answer our question above, yes society did ignore the warning signs that these “broligarch” billionaires were reactionary freaks with terrible ideas and increasingly, enough money power to try and make those ideas a reality; but not necessarily for the reasons the author implies in this article. I think at this point it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that guys like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and even Jeff Bezos are deeply unserious thinkers whose wealth allows them to surround themselves with actual scientists, engineers, and inventors who can turn their pulp fiction fantasies into reality; so it’s not really a surprise that these rich dilettante get their ideas from mass market sci-fi novels. What I think is far more instructional however, is to look at which science fiction ideas these folks gravitate towards; specifically the hyper-capitalist, racist, fascist, and authoritarian ideas commonly found in the sci-fi novels they grew up with.
I’m not a psychic of course but I don’t think it’s an accident that billionaire Tech-Bros who buy whole governments and seem intent on installing a technologically-enhanced form of fascism in America, gravitate towards stories and ideas about power, superiority, and the apocalypse that many critics have rightfully described as fascist in nature; nor do I think its a coincidence that these would-be “Masters of the Universe” have that in common with fascist propagandists like Curtis Yarvin, or even the Trump regime that Musk has bought outright control of. When you factor in that almost all of these same people are also interested in things like eugenics, neo-fascist corporate dictatorships, and racialized birth rates on a global scale, it becomes pretty clear that the origin story here is about powerful people looking for ideas that support their reactionary, supremacist, authoritarian beliefs; not a fascination with literary fiction.
In the end I think that’s the handle many people are missing when they’re trying to understand the so-called “Dark Enlightenment.” These people don’t believe in fascist ideology because they think they’re right; these rich bastards are folks who have been presented with the problem of how to maintain their wealth and power on a boiling planet even as the capitalism that grants them everything is going to kill billions, and fascist ideas are the only way they can square that circle, so they’re always on the lookout for more of them. Sci-Fi stories aren’t going to destroy the world; but the fascism that was so easily hidden inside many of them just might.
- Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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