Media Madness: Film Sessions: Crypto-Fascism and a Modern "Shirt Group"

Editor's note: welcome back to Film Sessions; our quasi-regular feature here on Media Madness in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video created by someone on the left wing of YouTube.

What Is Crypto-Fascism?

As I briefly alluded to in the latest edition of In the Aggregate, chasing down and debunking the deceptions, dog whistles, and coded language inherent to all fascist propaganda efforts is an exhausting, if still wholly necessary exercise. This type of antifascist effort is necessary because fascists lie relentlessly and habitually. Furthermore, debunking these lies can be exhausting because fascist propagandists spend seemingly half of their waking lives finding new and convoluted ways to lie, or at least evade detection while promoting fascist ideology and political activities.

Why would they go through all that trouble? Well, consider the situation from the odious perspective of the fascist "intellectual" or content creator for just a moment. Ultimately your goal is to build power by uniting politics with violence, and you accomplish that by recruiting more and more fascists, while eroding democratic structures. This is however, no simple task. Given fascism's history of racking up truly astronomical body counts through mass violence and genocide, as well as the fact that its adherents typically end up dead in a muddy ditch once a fascist regime eats itself, it's actually pretty hard to just come right out and say "hello, we're the nazis!" If you do that, people might stomp you out before you achieve any of your goals.

The obvious solution to this problem is to lie about, or otherwise obfuscate your ideology, and especially your long term political goals. Unfortunately for the fascist propagandist however, this activity creates its own set of complications. After all, if you lie too well, the reactionary lumpen you're trying to recruit may literally lose the plot. This ultimately requires you to communicate your ideas and intentions in a coded, almost encrypted way, that obviously signals to brainwormed fascist thugs you're on the same side, while simultaneously generating plausible deniability in what might be called "respectable discourse." This is then the essence of what we call "crypto-fascism."

Crucially (for the fascists,) this type of encrypted "double speak" gives them a structural advantage when competing with Pig Empire liberals for influence and power; particularly in the public discourse. After all, the liberal devotion to capitalism and its inherently reactionary consequences, means they're already playing their own game of "Simon Says" built around coded language and an odious, deadly ideology. If however the target of this rhetoric understands the nature of the dog-whistles, as both the anti-fascist left and marginalized folks the fascists are trying to intimidate often do, this structural advantage is lost and the nazis are exposed for the pathetic hatemongers they objectively are.

A Case Study in Crypto-Fascism

The key then becomes understanding the coded camoflauge various fascists use to promote and propagate their ideology. This is unfortunately complicated by the fact that there are a dizzying number of hate groups, propagandists, and fascist "intellectuals" working on new ways to express these ideas all the time. The good news for anti-fascists however, is that virtually all of these obfuscations must conform to certain themes and ideas inherent to the fascist worldview; if you learn the themes, you can break down the code in real time. I'm confident that today's highlighted video can help us get a better handle on understanding this type of fascist bafflegab.

Produced by YouTube creator Renegade Cut (otherwise known as Leon Thomas,) this fifty minute video essay explores the history, activities, and ideological motivations of the Proud Boys. If you are lucky enough that you somehow haven't heard of the Proud Boys, they are a nationwide crypto-fascist gang with surprisingly close ties to the right-wing establishment in America, who engage in political violence and intimidation to protect and project white supremacist and nationalist political policies, standards, and ideas. They are quite literally a fascist shirt group, and would have been recognized as such in the America of the 1930s.

There are also however, a great many intellectually-stunted thug reactionaries who are quite demonstrably not the brightest individuals in America. This means that the crypto part of their crypto-fascist obfuscations cannot afford to be particularly complicated; otherwise the pinheads who ultimately join groups like the Proud Boys wouldn't understand the appeal. I'd personally describe the Proud Boys' ideology as "bog standard neo-nazi garbage that crudely substitutes the word 'nationalism' for 'fascism' and the term 'western culture' for 'white people' to spread reactionary and hateful ideology." These guys are literally "Fascism for Dummies", and their ideology represents a sort of lowest common denominator in American fascist thought. This in turn makes them an ideal training subject case for folks who're learning to recognize crypto-fascist ideology in the wild as it were.

In today's feature presentation, our presenter does all the legwork by taking you deep inside the guts of the Proud Boys organization. Examining both investigative journalism, and the words of the Proud Boys themselves, Thomas guides us on a journey to answer a plethora of important questions about who these reactionary thugs are, and what they ultimately represent. Who started the Proud Boys, and why? How does the gang's crypto-fascist code work? What do they really mean by "western chauvinist?" How are the Proud Boys able to utilize token minorities to hide their fascist nature? Who is Henry "Enrique" Tarrio, really? Who actually leads the Proud Boys? Why is the gang inextricably tied to the Trump movement? Given their legal troubles, are the Proud Boys finished, and if not, why are they still dangerous?

For the answer to these questions, aspiring scholars of fascism, fascist politics, and crypto-fascism are encouraged to check out "The Violent Rise of the Proud Boys" from Renegade Cut by clicking on the header or the video box below:

The Violent Rise of the Proud Boys on YouTube

(Unfortunately, this video is age restricted on YouTube; likely because in describing the Proud Boys, one is unavoidably required to mention fascist political violence. I assure you, there's nothing particularly adult about this video - to watch just click through "watch this on YouTube" in the box above.)