Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.
Rep. Paul Gosar shared an anime video of himself killing AOC. This was her response.
As a socialist writer trapped in a capitalist dystopia, I spend a lot of my time pointing out the links between the study of political economy, and events occurring in the news of the day; you might call it an educational commitment to exploring both theory, and praxis. Earlier today on Instagram, I published a Pinko Postcard discussion that briefly touched on the organized efforts of American fascists to mainstream reactionary ideology and political practices. Here on Nina-Bytes then, I'd like to explore what this normalization and weaponization of fascist political techniques looks like in real time; with an assist from everyone's favorite coup plotter and white supremacist in Congress, Paul Gosar.
Given the uniformly atrocious coverage this event has garnered in the mainstream media, I decided to use this November 9th, 2021 post by Rachel Treisman on npr.org as our primary anchor because while it still misses the mark, she at least provides some context on the reactionary nature of Gosar's actions. In case you missed it, Congressman Gosar published an explicitly fascist anti-immigration video that featured modified anime footage of himself murdering Congresswoman, and noted target of reactionary ire, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While much of the media has inexplicably chosen to cover this event as inter-personal drama between rival factions on the Hill, students of fascist propaganda techniques will recognize immediately that this is no laughing matter. Let's fill in that context, shall we?
The first thing you need to remember is that Paul Gosar is absolutely a fascist; you can call him a Trumpist if you prefer, but because the terms are largely synonymous, it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference. He's spoken at white nationalist conferences, raised money with fascist influencers, and oh yeah, there's that small matter of Gosar's intimate involvement with the January 6th fascist coup plot to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election; which reportedly included the Congressman promising blanket pardons to participants in the event of a successful coup. Even this guy's own family says he's a white supremacist.
The second bit of largely-missing context here, comes from the nature of the video Gosar shared, and how it has been edited. The video explicitly employs fascist political propaganda about an "attack of immigrants" and shows multiple elected GOP nazis committing acts of outrageous violence in response, through edited anime clips. Furthermore, given the fact that the anime chosen, Attack on Titan, has strong fascist overtones and has already been coopted by reactionary extremists in the Pig Empire, I don't think the stench of neonazism involved here is any sort of accident. In other words, even if Gosar's staff hadn't depicted him slashing AOC's throat, this would still be a fascist video tweeted out by a sitting Congressman in America.
Finally of course, there's the context of the violence depicted in its own right, and Gosar's predictable keyboard reactionary response to being criticized for it. While crackers and collaborators absurdly pretend that folks are accusing Gosar of literally threatening to cut Ocasio-Cortez's head off with a sword, the specter of stochastic terrorism and the usefulness (for the fascists) of injecting the threat of violence into standard political discourse, is largely ignored. Even the bizarre insistence from the Congressman's office that folks "relax" because it's just "a cartoon" echoes the standard playbook of f*ckboi "ironic" nazis online.
Frankly the truly alarming thing about this story is that we as a society, and mainstream American media as an institution, already know all of this because we've collectively seen it all before. Sara Palin taught the media that right wing politicians are fine with stochastic terrorism as long as their rhetoric fires up the base. Andrew Anglin's leaked style guide for the Daily Stormer makes it clear that nazis are actively trying to mainstream fascist ideology every waking moment of the day. We know ironic nazism, is really just nazism. And as of last week, we can no longer deny the fact that these folks are fascists, actively plotting an authoritarian takeover of America, and the larger Pig empire.
It would be nice if an American media establishment that claims to be defending democracy from the fascist creep, deemed all that worth mentioning in between blow by blow coverage of the back and forth between Gosar and the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, it's just not in their nature.
nina illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst.
You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
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