Transcripts / Decrypting the Alt-Right: How to Recognize a F@scist

Introduction 

"You will not replace us! You will not replace us!" 

"Blood and soil! Blood and soil!"

"White lives matter! White lives matter!" 

…

 "Excuse me. What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?" 

…

 "A local World War II veteran wants you to hear and see this next story because he’s worried what he fought against so long ago is making a comeback here in the United States– He believes what happened–"

Scheiße!

Hi. In this video, I’m going to talk about how to recognize a fascist.

To begin, let’s take a look at what fascism is. Contemporary fascists share three core beliefs, 1: People of European heritage are, or ought to, constitute a biological, cultural and political unity known as the white race; sometimes dog-whistled as "Western culture", 2: Jews are masterminding the destruction of the white race through multiculturalism and non-white immigration, a plot that fascists call “white genocide” or “ethnic replacement”, 3: The only way to save the white race is to establish a "white homeland", or "ethnostate", from which non-whites and degenerates must be purged.

Now as I’ve argued in past videos, all three of these beliefs are false. So what is it that's attracting people to fascism? Well, let’s take a look at a contemporary Nazi propaganda video and see if we can figure that out.

“Who are you? I’m not talking about your name or your occupation, I’m talking about something bigger, something deeper. I’m talking about your connection to a culture, a history, a destiny. Our ancestors had a very strong sense of their identity. They could say 'I’m a Roman', 'I’m a Saxon', 'I’m a Dane'." 

Good news, boys. You no longer have to be some schlubby fuck riding the escalator at Ikea, thinking how much you hate your job as a marketing and communications associate, because the sun hath risen on the day wherein you take your father’s claymore in hand and defend Voltaire and adorable blonde children against Black civil rights, you know, just like the Vikings did! 

"We’re often told that being an American, or a Briton, or a German, or any European nationality is about being dedicated to a collection of abstractions and buzzwords: democracy, freedom, tolerance, multiculturalism. But a nation based on freedom, is just another place to go shopping." 

So, life is basically sad. And in capitalist society that sadness is a sense of isolation, an anxiety that there’s nothing more to life than acquiring 1990's collector’s edition Tampa Bay Buccaneers/Slim Jim beer steins until you die. Fortunately, thanks to fascism you don’t have to! Fascism promises you a part in something greater than yourself, a homeland for your people, a sense of belonging to a tradition that stretches back thousands of years and as far into the future, just be sure to be extra proud of the parts of your heritage that involve buying and selling other human beings as property. 

The most basic way to resist fascism is to recognize its propaganda for what it is. The idea that appreciating European culture is in some way linked to the establishing a white ethnostate is just nonsense. Your enjoyment of Beethoven, or white babies, or whatever it is you get off to, is in no way impeded by the proximity of people with different skin colors and traditions. And it certainly does not require nation, culture, and geographic ancestry to all become the same thing. 

But in order to recognize fascism you need to do a lot more than reject the most overt propaganda. In the wake of the disastrous alt-right rally in Charlottesville earlier this month, the Nazis have been driven back into the shadows. At least two of their major websites were shut down, Confederate monuments were removed all over the country, and several prominent fascists have begun backpedaling. None of this means fascists will go away, it just means they’ll have to be more subtle and indirect.

Shortly after the Charlottesville rally a post titled “Fixing the Alt Right” appeared on /pol/, the imageboard where millennial Nazis talk strategy and trade pictures of Japanese nymphets.  The post outlines some basic fascist strategy.

“Don’t get trapped in an echo chamber where you can no longer relate to normies. 

Pretending that Charlottesville didn’t massively push the average white person away is really stupid. We have a chance to actually make changes now that Trump has shifted the Overton window to the right, but we need to be smart and make the movement appealing to the AVERAGE white person."

 And the way to do that is:

“Disavow all Nazi/KKK edgelord LARPers. There is no way to lose public support quicker than going around making Nazi salutes and holding Tiki torches while chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’. This instantly makes the average person hate you.

Build a populist movement with realistic, incremental overt goals. Repealing the 1965 Immigration Act and replacing it with something that both limits total immigration and prioritizes white immigration is an actual tangible political goal. 

Keep the long-term goals covert, and don’t ever reveal your power level. Talking openly about a white ethnostate only leads to failure and the average public turning against you, so disavow anyone who reveals his power level. Leftists will recognize dog whistles and know we’re crypto, but normies won’t listen to them."

So at first glance this seems like a really silly, juvenile post that references Dragonball Z, but it actually displays a sense of realistic pragmatism and an incremental approach to long term goals that I wish were more common on the left. But of course the strategy described here isn’t new. Older generations of white supremacists have been doing this stuff for decades. When overt racism is politically unacceptable, politicians have to use coded language in order to appeal to racists. Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained the technique in an interview in 1981:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N—’. By 1968, you can't say ‘n—’– that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now that you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

So if you want to recognize a fascist you have to know how to read subtext and how to hear dog whistles; because 99 times out of 100 a fascist will disavow fascism, racism, and white supremacy, at least when they’re talking to you, a non-fascist. Rallies with swastikas and Nazi salutes are the exception, not the rule. Fascists are more likely to gain traction, and are hence more dangerous when they use subtler tactics. So for the rest of this video I’ll be describing the particular strategies that fascists use to code their ideas, and make them more palatable to conservatives, centrists, and liberals.

Strategy 1: Outright Denial

“Never reveal your power level. Disavow anyone who reveals their power level.” This means that if someone acts like a fascist, has fascist beliefs, repeats fascist talking points, and hangs out with other fascists, the fact that they publicly denounce fascism should be worth absolutely nothing to you, and shouldn’t even enter into your consideration of whether they’re a fascist. After all, “I’m not a fascist” is exactly what a fascist would say.

Strategy 2: Euphemism

“Of course I’m not a fascist, I’m an alternative Euro-nationalist simply trying to preserve Western values”. Fascists constantly shift their terminology in order to avoid the negative connotations that develop around the names of their movements whenever people figure out what they really are. 

So they insist they aren’t Nazis or white supremacists, just “white nationalists” or “alt-right”. But as people catch on to the fact that white nationalists and the alt-right are just Nazis, they’ll shift their terminology again and start telling you: “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m an identitarian”, or whatever the next thing is. But it’s still the same bastards, they’re just using a different name. 

They’ll also use euphemisms for core components of their beliefs. If talking about preserving a homeland for white people sounds too fascist, they’ll talk about preserving “Western civilization” or “Western culture” instead. If the phrase “white genocide” discredits them, they’ll say “ethnic replacement” instead. And if it’s considered hate speech to advocate purging non-white people, they’ll talk instead about purging immigrants, criminals, rapists, and terrorists, and leave it to the audience to catch the color-coding on their own.

Strategy 3: Pedantry

“It’s absurd to call me a Nazi, the German National Socialist Party hasn’t existed since 1945”. That’s right, and I bet he’s an isolationist too. Not an expansionist like the Nazis. Fascists use this kind of selective pedantry to dodge derogatory labels, and also to bog you down in a petty terminological dispute. This is a good way to waste your time and divert attention away from whatever led you to call them a Nazi in the first place. 

“I’m not a white supremacist, I don’t think that whites are superior to other races. I simply think we deserve a homeland of our own, as do all peoples”. There it is again. And next he’s gonna tell us that since Asians have the highest IQs, he’s if anything, an Asian supremacist. And then you’ll get sucked into arguing about IQ instead of talking about the fact that the main goal of the politics he supports is the political and social supremacy of white people over all other Americans and Europeans. In other words, white supremacy.

Strategy 4: Secret Symbols

Nazis have always taken an interest in occult symbols like the Black Sun on Fritz’s ring, or like the swastika itself, but more obscure symbols can be useful as a kind of secret handshake that lets Nazis recognize each other without normies taking notice. The best symbols to use for this purpose are ones that are not primarily associated with fascism or at least have some other meaning, such as the Othala rune or the iron cross. 

Better still are symbols that, until adoption by fascists, are completely innocuous. Modern fascists have taken to using almost arbitrary emoji as a way to wink and nod at each other, notably the frog 🐸 after pepe, the milk 🥛, and the OK sign 👌. So it doesn’t matter what the symbols are. In fact it’s important that the symbols constantly change, so that normies don’t catch on. By the time you watch this video they probably won’t even be using the frog anymore. Maybe it’ll be this ☝️, or this 🍆💦. 

The only way to find out is to watch fascists carefully and see what symbols they use to identify themselves. And of course another advantage of using innocuous symbols is that when leftists try to point those symbols out, the fascist can always say: “These gullible SJWs now think that even the OK sign is racist. Is there anything they don’t think is racist?” And the gullible centrists will be taken right in. The poor centrists, they’re so afraid that Antifa is going to punch them because of their hair or their emoji. And, you know, some leftists are assholes or idiots, so I should say, you should never assume someone is a fascist just because of their hair or because of the emoji they use. These are only little pieces of a larger puzzle.

But white centrists also need to understand, that the way you feel about Antifa at political rallies– "oh god what if they profile me and attack me unfairly"– that’s how a lot of Black people feel about the police all the time. And the fascists whose free speech you defend so often are trying to drum up exactly the sentiments that make the police dangerous to Black people, and that make it dangerous for queer people to be themselves in public. So, I hope that’s something you think about. Anyway, it’s not that the OK sign is inherently racist or that anyone who uses it is racist, and in fact it’s its very innocuousness that makes it useful as a crypto-fascist wink and nudge. But the misunderstanding about calling these little things racist sets the stage for:

Strategy 5: Camaraderie of the Accused

“The left accuses everyone of racism. They think all white people are Nazis. If it’s acceptable to attack and censor me, they’ll come for you next”. Fascists have very effectively exploited the general hostility toward “social justice warriors”, especially online. Unfortunately not all leftists have my "connoisseur’s eye" for detecting fascism, and some of them do throw the label at centrists or liberals. This doesn’t cause centrists to become allied with fascists– history shows that happens regardless– but it can accelerate the process; lending some plausibility to the fear that moderate centrists have that anti-fascists will come after them next. It’s tactically smart for fascists to make the most of this situation, and use it to pump up sympathy and solidarity from centrists.

Strategy 6: “Irony”, “Jokes”, “Satire”, and “Memes”

“Of course I wasn’t actually being racist, it was just an edgy meme. Can’t anyone take a joke anymore, or will the Antifa fascists violently attack you over humor now too?” Here’s a uniquely millennial twist on the racist dog-whistle. You shroud your sincere ideas in cartoon characters and memes, and then when called out, you mock your accuser for being a clueless normie who isn’t in on the joke.

Sometimes irony can be a safe way to explore ideas that you’re not quite ready to own yet. Before I realized I was transgender, I used to jump at any opportunity to crossdress “ironically”. So when you see people joking about being Nazis, they could be just joking, or they could be using irony to partially conceal the truth. It’s difficult to tell the difference, and that’s the point. 

“But Kekistan is just a satire of identity politics”. Well, it’s a hilarious satire of civil rights movements that just happens to use a Nazi battle flag. And while it may have been popularized originally by goddamn centrist YouTubers who are unable or unwilling to see how helpful they’re being to fascists, Kekistan became the perfect pseudo-ironic pretext for uh… "identitarians", including the ones who led the rally where an edgy shitposter hilariously memed his car into a crowd of people. No wonder the SPLC now describes it as a hate symbol. “Pff those normie fools, it’s just a joke".

Strategy 7: Shifting Blame

“Why doesn’t the mainstream media cover violent anti-white organizations like Black Lives Matter or Antifa?” This is essentially just a tu quoque fallacy, especially heinous because of the equivocation between fascist violence and anti-fascist violence, and between white nationalism and Black civil rights. The implication is that activism to reduce urban poverty or violence against Black people is just the mirror image of white supremacist ethnic cleansing. 

Shortly after the Charlottesville incident, our proto-fascist president called out Antifa and the “alt-left”, a term fascists invented to distract liberals and centrists, and establish the assumption that there must be some leftist equivalent of the alt-right. Because if you have a word for a thing, that thing must exist. “Both sides” rhetoric is useful to fascists because it diverts attention away from them, vilifies anti-fascists, wins sympathy from centrists, and helps to shift the center of acceptable discourse in their direction.

Strategy 8: Incrementalism

“You don’t have to support a white ethnostate to want common-sense policies about immigration. Of course I don’t support violence against the non-white people already here, but we do have a right to preserve our own boundaries and our culture, don’t we?” The common thread in all fascist strategies is deception and manipulation, often aimed at representing what is essentially an attack on non-white people as a defense of white people and “white culture”. 

The fascist’s long-term goal is a homogenous ethnostate, which at some point will require massive ethnic cleansing of one kind or another. But of course they won’t tell you about that, unless they think you’re also a fascist. The strategic fascist knows it’s better to start with realistic, achievable goals, and that means focusing first on stopping non-white immigration, something they’ll try to get you– the centrist, conservative, or liberal– on board with by emphasizing the danger and criminality of non-white immigrants and refugees. If they can whip up enough racist sentiment with that rhetoric, they can later turn that energy against the non-white people who are already here.

Strategy 9: The Free-Speech Defense

“You may not agree with what I say, but I have just as much a right to speak and assemble as anyone else”. Much of anti-fascist strategy involves limiting fascist’s ability to publicly recruit and intimidate, often by shutting down fascist marches and rallies or by pressuring platforms not to host fascists. 

The best way for the fascist to oppose that strategy is to appeal to the liberal value of free speech. Nothing tugs on those classical liberal heartstrings like a tale of woe about how unfairly silenced you are. But remember, fascists do not actually value freedom, democracy, or diversity. They only value the race, the people, the nation. Their long term goal is a society where there’s no room for anyone who isn’t white, or even anyone who isn’t a fascist, to exist. So you can begrudgingly concede to fascists their constitutional freedoms but remember, you shouldn’t expect any reciprocity from them. They do not care about “diversity of opinions”. That kind of talking point is just a ploy to protect fascist recruitment and intimidation, and to garner sympathy from centrists.

Why Fascist Strategies Work

Fascist strategies work, because centrists are usually naïve about them. They don’t notice dog whistles and usually give fascists the benefit of the doubt. Following politics with centrists can be like watching a raunchy comedy movie with children who don’t get sexual innuendo. There’s a whole hidden layer of meaning that they’re not picking up. This makes liberals, centrists, and conservatives who are not savvy to fascist strategy easy to exploit. Time and time again, such people end up inadvertently spreading around fascist memes and talking points without intending to or realizing it. And then they end up bewildered when leftists who recognize the dog whistles take offense. 

Now you might wonder, well… if fascists disguise themselves and liberals inadvertently duplicate fascist memes, then isn’t just about everyone suspect? Aren’t you in fact just a paranoid leftist who thinks everyone is a Nazi? Well, that’s what they want you to think! They benefit from the confusion and the appearance that the left is paranoid. I’ll admit there are cases where I can’t tell if someone is genuinely alt-light, or if they’re just an oblivious centrist who picked up the talking points. Likewise, it can be impossible to tell the difference between someone who is alt-light but not an outright fascist, and a fascist who’s concealing their power level. 

So in a sense, yes, I am a little bit paranoid. The other day the ACLU tweeted a picture of an adorable blond child with the caption “this is the future ACLU members want”, and for a second I was like, what the fuck? Because it has a close resemblance to a 14 words meme. But of course it’s unintentional, it’s the ACLU.

“I wanted to make sure, unlike most politicians, that what I said was correct, not make a quick statement. The statement I made on Saturday, the first statement, was a fine statement. But you don’t make statements that direct unless you know the facts.”

Yes, I have become crazy. But this paranoia, self-doubt, and questioning of your own perception is the psychological consequence of being constantly gaslit by fascists pretending not to be fascists and communicating in code. And it’s the intentional consequence of that, gaslighting is just another tool in the fascist’s psychological arsenal. 

How To Resist Fascist Tendencies

So, how do we get better at resisting fascist strategies? I know if you’re a centrist who has inadvertently repeated fascist rhetoric or defended fascists, it seems like the left all thinks you’re a Nazi and that we hate you; and I admit that I am pretty frustrated with you right now, obviously. But my forgiveness and encouragement are wide open to anyone who wants to get better at resisting fascism. Fascist strategies can be very subtle and very cunning, so don’t feel guilty for falling for them just try to get better at resisting. 

I guess my message to liberals, centrists, and non-fascist conservatives is this: if you care about even one person of color, or queer person, or immigrant, stand up for that person by opposing the alt-right and its allies. Do not give them a platform. Do not host debates with them on your YouTube channel. Yes they have a constitutional right to free speech, but they do not have a right to a megaphone and you should not be giving them one.

I know to a lot of you this just seems like the free marketplace of ideas, everyone expressing their ideas peacefully. But to more vulnerable people some ideas can be existentially dangerous, because if those ideas catch on their lives are at stake. Now if you’re just an average person without a big platform, then you actually can debate and you should be debating. Argue with your friends who are getting kind of alt-righty, argue with your family, argue with your coworkers. Let them know that you don’t agree, make them listen to a different perspective. 

And if you’re someone who’s gotten involved with the alt-right in the last couple years and is now disillusioned to find yourself in the midst of a dangerous hate group, you have to get out now. It's not too late, society will forgive you. If you don’t know how to leave look up Life After Hate, an organization founded by a former neo-Nazi that helps people get out of hate groups. And as for all you lefties, na zdrowie! Keep up the good fight comrades.