Editor’s note: welcome back to Film Sessions; a monthly feature on NIDC in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video created by someone on the left wing of YouTube.
Hello my friends; happy, um, November I guess. After taking a month to kind of re-establish my bearings and fire up a new blog, I'm back in the swing of things early with a new essay-length Film Sessions post on ninaillingworth.com. Today we're returning to important discussions about whiteness, and the corrosive nature of low-key white supremacist ideology in online left spaces; with an assist from a creator never-before featured in our study rotation. Join me as we examine John the Duncan's new video about why decolonization is not genocide, and Vaush is not a credible source of left wing analysis; this month in Film Sessions.
Hello folks, how's your morning going? Mine could be better!
Last night I learned that when the universe is trying to tell you something, and you refuse to listen, she can go out of her way to make sure you grasp the point. In one three hour period, it became utterly apparent to me that I was going to have to change some things, long term, about the way my writing is organized.
First, a few of my most loyal readers approached me on social media to express their misgivings about the micro-analysis blogging I've been doing on Facebook. Specifically, they wanted to read my weekday blogs, but they had no desire to help a company as evil as Facebook in any way. This immediately put me in an awkward spot because while I like some of the technical aspects of blogging on Facebook, and a great number of my readers use only Facebook for their social media needs; I can't disagree with folks who want to boycott the platform.
There's no denying the fact Mark Zuckerberg is literally a supervillain billionaire reactionary whose business model harms journalism, and helps fascists; whether that's his intention, or not. As an independent writer, I'm pretty much required to use Facebook to reach new readers; it's just how the business works in 2021. Without a proverbial gun to my head however? I'd almost certainly boycott the platform myself; there are far better social media services available for free these days, although some of them also tend to be run by reactionary billionaire tech bros.
A little while later, I was still mulling over the problem while working on the latest edition of Film Sessions here on Media Madness. That series has been featured on this blog because when I first started it, the posts I was making were very much blog material; just a quick intro, an embedded video link and some keyword tags. Over time however, these Film Sessions posts evolved into heavily-sourced essays in their own right.
Now I don't know how much you know about the software Blogger uses to let me create this website, but my experience working with it has taught me a few things. If what you're asking Blogger to do is let you bang out a few ranty paragraphs, attach a picture, and link to a few sources, this platform is really good at its job. If on the other hand you ask the platform to work like a full blown website, letting you post multi-thousand word essays with hundreds of links and embedded video player boxes, things break down quickly. Specifically, Blogger starts eating your links and bizarrely, some of the spaces between words and sentences.
You can see where this is going, right? While I was pondering ways to solve the Facebook conundrum, Blogger ate a whole bunch of my research links and chewed up the article formatting. This is not even remotely the first time this has happened to me here on Media Madness, and while it may be my fault for not saving my research links in another location, that doesn't change the fact that I lost hours of hard work in one sitting this time.
At that point I found myself approaching what I assumed was my absolute peak of white-hot rage; as it turns out however, I assumed wrong. A few moments later, while I was out of the room trying not to punch my monitor, Google Chrome triggered an automated update I'd forgotten to turn off. The open websites auto-restore failed, and failed again a few minutes later when I tried to do it manually. In other words, I lost every open tab on my browser and with it literally all the research links I've been saving; compromising progress on as many as four or five projects I'm working on.
Naturally then, I started laughing; but not in a happy way.
When I finally stopped thrashing about on the floor in anguish however, I decided that there probably were a few easy solutions to my converging problems. Going forward, I'm going to make some changes in terms of what types of articles go where in my down-market media empire (snicker) and in doing so, alter how I use this site in particular:
I'm going to start using Media Madness as a media-focused blog. Pursuant to this, I'm going to migrate my weekday blog posts (which always include an article link) to this website; we'll call the new feature "Nina-Bytes" because I like making a horse's ass of myself, clearly. I will continue to cross post these micro-analysis blogs for the Facebook only crowd, but their home base will remain here. Other posts will likely include blog-length social media discussions, short take downs, and advertisement links for my full length media essays on NIDC.
I'm moving the Film Sessions feature, and all full length essays off Media Madness, and on to ninaillingworth.com (NIDC.) While I will still posts linked advertisements for those features here, I'm absolutely done losing any more work to Blogger's buggy software. I will also be moving the new In the Aggregate feature to NIDC and altering its composition slightly to allow for easier compilation of all my social media writing.
Obviously, none of this is how I wanted to spend the wee hours of my Tuesday morning, but I feel the technical limitations of the Blogger platform have pretty much forced my hand here. Throughout the day I'm going to slowly transfer the pre-existing seven Facebook blogs to this website; subscribers are asked to please excuse unwanted notifications in advance. Hopefully by tomorrow this will all be a bad memory and we can just proceed forward as if I've always been smart enough to use the blogging software for, well, blogging.
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."
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.
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:
(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.)
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.
Over the past couple weeks however, Chapman has released consecutive, interrelated video essays about climate catastrophe as it pertains to capitalism, and its handmaiden imperialism respectively. In response, I'm going to change up our format a little bit here on Film Sessions and group these two videos together with a third, slightly older video about why the origins of our climate crisis don't actually matter to our survival as a species, into a single analysis essay. To facilitate organized reading, I'll put my analysis under each embedded video and then lump all the additional resources and citations into a footer at the bottom.
As always you can check these presentations out on YouTube by clicking the headers above each video, or simply watch inside the embedded boxes below.
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.
So what kind of questions are we talking about answering here? How about things like "just who the fuck is Nick Fuentes," or "where did this goddamn muppet come from," and why does this discount Matt Gaetz-looking dipshit matter at all?" Although I don't want to spoil too much of the video, let's offer up some back of the napkin answers to these three basic queries:
To describe Fuentes accurately but still in the broadest possible strokes, it would be best to refer to him as an extremely fucking online fascist provocateur who seeks to repackage white nationalist ideas and eliminationist conspiracy theories for a conservative audience; an audience he is able to reach because, I shit you not, he's got a stock broker's haircut and wears an ill-fitting, off-the-rack suit. While our featured video does a good job of running through some of Nick's greatest reactionary hits, you can also read more about him in this Southern Poverty Law Center report, as well as numerous other outlets that track online fascists.
In other words, even by the extremely permissive standards of the "defend free speech for nazis" brigade online, Fuentes isn't a victim of political repression so much as a guy engaged in criminal acts of inciting violence; which means this isn't a civil liberties issue at all, and pretending otherwise ultimately makes one a party to those acts - at least from a moral perspective. Even setting aside the fact that Fuentes probably isn't on the no-fly list, the hard truth here is that whatever harm preventing this muppet from stepping on an airplane causes to political freedom in the United States, is more than offset by the harm reduction accomplished by simply not defending and legitimizing a shithead like Nick Fuentes with "civil liberties" arguments on his behalf; especially from the "left." Frankly I'm inclined to believe it's probably alwaysa bad idea to cry tears of outrage for fascist criminals who sincerely want to kill you for political reasons, but as always your mileage may vary.
