This arrived in my inbox IN THE NICK OF TIME. You’re no idea how badly I needed to laugh this morning. I’m in the U.S. and when I tell you it’s grim, it’s…grimmer?
I’m not certain about the grammar of grimmer but you get the idea.
Perhaps the problem lies not so much with Fascism as it does with Liberalism, after all it's been LIberalism that's allowed/encouraged the Fascists to come out of the woodwork in the first place. When the initial attacks on free speech and progressive views came under attack, the LIberals did nothing, said nothing:
“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”
There are those who did speak out. No one listened. They didn’t get air time because they’re not considered important and our media is bought and paid for.
Very funny, but very sad as well. “If you can’t beat them. then join them”. Unfortunately, many of my family have gone down the right wing Facebook wormhole. Speaking to many of them at Christmas was like talking to people from Nazi Germany. People who had previously quite liberal. Now demanding we deport every Pakistani man because they are all potentially child groomers and rapists! I despair. All of their information came from Facebook. So, so sad.
For a moment, I was going to stop my paid subscription . Then I paused . And read your whole article. Only 2 weeks in and we live in such fear, horror and extreme sadness.
I know. I am struggling every day and this is only Monday. Trying to get calls and emails out to many representatives and senators. Thus battle must be won.
Except that Stanford University published a study some years ago that showed that what the 99% want has 0% effect on the actions of Congress, and what the 1% wanted has 99% effect on the actions of Congress.
Why are you indulging in such a fruitless endeavor? It's high time we used more effective methods.
I think that it's because the American people are too lazy and too scared to do anything else.
Keep your home fires burning ! We need to know we’ve got an attentive audience.
If one group of legal beagles can drag the greatest democracy in the world down their misogynist rabbit hole ~ Project 25 has to first be WHIPPED INTO a
So brilliant and hilarious. Oddly, I decided to try this out this morning (before reading your piece), as I was with some friends whose politics veer from left to right. Well, one person's politics veers extremely right, to be precise, and he couldn't join us, so I adopted his attitudes to make sure his views were represented. Saying the unsayable felt incredibly liberating for about five minutes, and then I started to feel nauseous. Like you, Hanif, I fear I will never make a good fascist.
Your last paragraph eloquently sums up the hoax of nationalism. Of course, my first reaction on seeing the photo,in spite of the tongue in cheek, was to say take down that picture! On the other hand it could be your insurance for a very different future…
Yeah I don't think I could ever wear the maga cap, even in jest or mockery. "America's Hitler" has already harmed the lives of countless people, less than two weeks in. A demented psycho surrounded by capable psychos.
Well said, “a demented psycho surrounded by capable psychos.” Trump isn’t the problem, he’s completely maneuverable, it’s the people controlling him that scare the shit out of me.
While you write it so funny, I feel it so sad. While you made a point of loving life and people, I get to understand and thank you for writing and be brave writing. ☘️❤️ Thank you for being so bold, so strong and effortlessly love this life in this sad time.
It’s horrible here in the US. My son just lost health care (gender health). His health has been precarious for years; you can imagine the pain. %*%< satire is the only way!!! Thank you. 💙
Loved this! Very eloquent, supremely funny and summed up how I felt when Trump was re-elected - wait, am I missing something? Is he actually a good thing? But no, he is not, and it is all hollow. Thanks for making me laugh out loud and realize I am not alone.
Trump is the result of capitalist society moving further and further to the right since the 1970s. The CIA has been running things since they killed JFK.
There are a pair of cartoons (they have since evolved into memes) which illustrate in simple terms the purity spiral that resulted in moderate liberals being maliciously labelled as far-right extremists by the lunatic fringes of the left.
The first of these – 'My Fellow Liberal?' was created by the cartoonist, Colin Wright, in 2021. Since I cannot post pictures in the replies I will describe it for you:
The first image in the cartoon, labelled 2008, is of a political scale, with a pair of stick figures standing at either end, the one on the left representing liberals, and the one on the right representing conservatives. Standing just left of the centre is another stick figure who is identified as 'me'.
In the second image (labelled 2012), the liberal is portrayed running farther to the left at great speed, leaving in their wake a puff of hot air. 'Me' remains left of centre, though closer to the mid-point than before. The centre line appears to be recalibrating.
The final image (2021) depicts the liberal figure standing far away on the left, having dragged the centre line some way along with them. 'Me', despite not having changed their position, is now right of centre. The liberal stick figure, who has their hands planted judgementally on their hips, is calling out to them “Bigot!” The conservative figure simply says “LOL!”
The second cartoon – a four-panel strip – depicts a figure straddling the centre line of the political debate, proclaiming somewhat smugly and self-righteously that 'both sides make some good points'.
In the following panel, a blue figure, representing the left, angrily pushes them over the centre line. As they are being helped to their feet by a pair of pale red figures (representing moderate conservatives), the exasperated liberal, asks them disingenuously “Why are you siding with the bad guys?”
These cartoons reflect my own experience, along with the experiences of many other moderate liberals in recent years, who have been purged by the extreme left for wrongthink. A good example would be Elizabeth Ellen who runs Hobart – an online literary magazine. A few years ago, Ellen committed the cardinal sin of interviewing the conservative Cuban writer, Alex Gomez, who currently resides in Miami. On the basis that Gomez held some very mild opinions that were nonetheless considered illiberal, the Hobart editorial team protested and demanded that the interview be taken down – how dare this individual with nonconformist opinions be given a platform to speak! Ellen, who is a person of courage and integrity, stood her ground, at which point her editors resigned en masse. She subsequently rebuilt Hobart, though continues to suffer for her principles. Recently, while promoting her new novel, she struggled to find bookshops who would host her for a public reading. On X (formerly Twitter), she lamented that 'bookshops are the new churches'. If anything, I think churches are far less puritanical and ideology-driven. Recently there were claims that staff at a large, well-known bookshop in London were hiding copies of the conservative commentator, Douglas Murray's new book on publication day and informing anyone who requested a copy that it hadn't been released yet. I don't shop there any more.
My own excommunication from the left occurred around 2014 when I found myself inadvertently caught up in Gamergate – a movement that has been widely and wilfully misrepresented. Broadly speaking, Gamergate was the result of videogamers standing up to a group of no-talent progressives who were attempting bully their way into the industry using Mafioso tactics, eg: 'That's a nice game studio you have / videogame you've made. It would be terrible if someone were to ruin your professional reputation by calling you out as racist / sexist on social media. Of course, if you were to employ us as consultants then maybe that wouldn't happen...' The perpetrators of this racketeering had the support of the media and were able to set the agenda.
The Gamergaters who stood in resistance were portrayed both as a disparate group of terminal virgins (male white-supremacists of course) who lived in their parent's basements, and also as elite hackers who were sophisticated enough to be able to influence world events at will, and who were instrumental in getting Trump elected in 2016. Brad Glasgow – the only journalist I know of who conducted objective research in this area, drew conclusions that echoed my own observations – that Gamergate began as the moderate left telling the extreme left 'keep your politics out of our hobby'. Later, after Milo Yiannopoulos got involved, the movement became more conservative. (At the time, Yiannopoulos was a flamboyant gay man with a preference for well-hung black men. He was employed at Breitbart. He has since renounced his homosexuality and demoted his husband to the status of housemate). I made friendship's with people who I would have never associated with under normal circumstances and which persist despite us disagreeing on practically everything.
Around the same time, some of my more ardent liberal friends cut me out of their lives. I had questioned to the dogma. I had noticed an unwillingness to engage in debate among people on the left, who were more likely to shut down attempts at discussion with absurd pejoratives. When calling people Hitler began to lose its potency, it was replaced by 'Nazi'. There was a type of person who commonly includes the words 'be kind' somewhere in their social media profiles, who appeared to relish the prospect of some guilt-free violence against those who had been un-personed in this manner and who therefore, in their minds, had it coming. Recently 'Nazi' has been replaced by 'far right' which is used just as broadly and, in the majority of cases, just as inaccurately to the point of being meaningless.
I attended some Gamergate meet-ups in London and so got to see its true social make-up. It was like a cross-section of UK – a more diverse crowd you could not hope to meet: All genders, races, religions, sexualities, careers, and social statuses. The thing that surprised me the most was the ranges of ages, from students to pensioners. The first person I ever spoke to at a Gamergate meet-up was a heavily-pregnant Pakistani woman. We'd assembled in a metropolitan pub to tell a group well-connected neo-puritan grifters, who were adept at playing the victim, to go fuck themselves. One of these aforementioned grifters would eventually drive an autistic man to suicide with accusations that, following some forensic Internet sleuthing, were determined to be baseless.
Currently the left is in a tizzy; somehow Trump is back in power and this time he's brought Elon Musk along with him. The irony is that, if democrats had not vilified Tulsi Gabbard to the extent that they did, they might have had a more credible candidate to go up against Trump in preference over the awful Kamala Harris. The inconvenient truth is that nobody worked harder to get Trump re-elected than the extreme left: The corruption; the dishonesty; the gaslighting; the denial of truths that were plain to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear; the violence both literal and underhand; the weaponising of the apparatus of the state against its ideological opponents; all conducted more of less out in the open, with malicious glee, by people who thought the pendulum would never swing back the other way. Eventually even people on their own side saw the need for course correction.
A similar thing is occurring in the UK. 10 Downing Street is currently occupied by a robotic authoritarian, whose pension is protected by bespoke act of parliament, who uses the law selectively to bludgeon his critics and who appears to regard the role of leader as a job interview for whatever globalist think-tank he will be decanted into after he wears out his welcome. Everything he currently does paves the way for a Farage government; a consequence of those moderates on the left and the right being too lazy, cynical, corrupt and incompetent to govern effectively and the electorate waking up to that reality. When that happens, you get someone like Farage.
I do not define myself as liberal any more. Being excommunicated by some of my left-leaning friends, who could not bear to have their beliefs questioned, made me neither hateful nor bigoted. I am pretty much the same as I always was, with a few exceptions: The experience made me more thoughtful and open minded to a broader range of ideas. I have no patience for people who want to burn things down or vandalise priceless works of art. I like builders: Builders of families and communities and bridges between communities and businesses and nations. That's progress I can get behind.
Wonderfully and eloquently written. Aside from the injustice of it, throwing the term Nazi around flippantly has rendered it meaningless to the point that, like in the proverbial story of the boy who cried 'wolf', people are starting to either shrug the accusation off or to be unable to recognise the real thing when it comes along.
Christopher Hitchens didn't necessarily move to the right, he just couldn't accept that the Republicans were a greater threat to the West than Al Qaeda, nor that Clinton bombing an aspirin factory, to divert from his infidelity, was beyond criticism. Bill Hicks used to explain his obsessional hatred of boy bands by saying that if people found something so unpalatable irresistible how would they cope with something as seductive as fascism. Finally watch Mussolini, Son of the Century; the book it's based on is brilliant.
This arrived in my inbox IN THE NICK OF TIME. You’re no idea how badly I needed to laugh this morning. I’m in the U.S. and when I tell you it’s grim, it’s…grimmer?
I’m not certain about the grammar of grimmer but you get the idea.
we watch from afar in deep dismay and bewilderment xxx
It’s even more terrible than it looks.
It's a scab covering the festering infection beneath.
Actually, Trump is busy exposing the infection of leftism.
And it’s glorious!
Bye bye troll.
Wish I was afar…god I’d love another passport besides the one Dimp has made a sick joke.
I'm watching from up.close in deep dismay and bewilderment also. Heavy on the dismay! 🇨🇦
So exposing and rooting out MASSIVE government corruption (maybe in the trillions of $$) is “grim.”
What a weird thing to think.
Perhaps the problem lies not so much with Fascism as it does with Liberalism, after all it's been LIberalism that's allowed/encouraged the Fascists to come out of the woodwork in the first place. When the initial attacks on free speech and progressive views came under attack, the LIberals did nothing, said nothing:
“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”
- Martin Niemoller.
"First they came for the journalists. We don't know what happened next."
Nope, the fascism is the fault of fascists.
EXPAND your reading! (And LISTENING, and WATCHING too).
Ck out Substack & find some writers, reporters, artists, housewives, social workers, dog walkers, we’re all here.
James Fallows is my current newbie … easy voice to listen to reporting hard news… these are hard times… for the truth ..
There are those who did speak out. No one listened. They didn’t get air time because they’re not considered important and our media is bought and paid for.
Both
Very funny, but very sad as well. “If you can’t beat them. then join them”. Unfortunately, many of my family have gone down the right wing Facebook wormhole. Speaking to many of them at Christmas was like talking to people from Nazi Germany. People who had previously quite liberal. Now demanding we deport every Pakistani man because they are all potentially child groomers and rapists! I despair. All of their information came from Facebook. So, so sad.
That’s beyond Sad. That’s Dangerous. Ignorance does no one useful service. Our beloved by all of us Country is being tested in every way.
Please listen to James Fallows on Substack. . . And many other writers, artists, neighbors from around the world & country.
Gather more information w depth . We ALL MUST OPEN our minds and hearts to this real democracy buster — Project 25.
Project 2025 is Trump's version of Mein Kampf.
I closed out my FB account yesterday and I feel free.
algorithms used by Facebook to increase user engagement
Phew! I suspected this was satire but these days the most improbable people turn fascist. Interesting insight about it being basically dull though
I believe that's actually a part of it. A lot of those MAGAnuts are just plain bored and have nothing else to do with themselves.
For a moment, I was going to stop my paid subscription . Then I paused . And read your whole article. Only 2 weeks in and we live in such fear, horror and extreme sadness.
You said only two weeks in and I thought ..”that can’t be right...can it?” Mercy me, what a blow
I know. I am struggling every day and this is only Monday. Trying to get calls and emails out to many representatives and senators. Thus battle must be won.
Except that Stanford University published a study some years ago that showed that what the 99% want has 0% effect on the actions of Congress, and what the 1% wanted has 99% effect on the actions of Congress.
Why are you indulging in such a fruitless endeavor? It's high time we used more effective methods.
I think that it's because the American people are too lazy and too scared to do anything else.
Me too :))
Just so hard not to have a knee jerk reaction to all that is happening. I feel like all I do is brace for ignorance and ugliness
Keep your home fires burning ! We need to know we’ve got an attentive audience.
If one group of legal beagles can drag the greatest democracy in the world down their misogynist rabbit hole ~ Project 25 has to first be WHIPPED INTO a
Such a brilliant read, thank you Hanif. And thank goodness you said this:
The future deserves better than beige uniforms and hate-filled squares.
Dead bloody right!
Hurrah Hanif ! You’ve still got fire in your belly! ‘Anger is an Energy’ as young Johnny used to say (before he turned right wing)
‘no wall can keep out the realities of a shared world.’ Abso-fucking-lutely
Keep on keeping on xxxxxxx
So brilliant and hilarious. Oddly, I decided to try this out this morning (before reading your piece), as I was with some friends whose politics veer from left to right. Well, one person's politics veers extremely right, to be precise, and he couldn't join us, so I adopted his attitudes to make sure his views were represented. Saying the unsayable felt incredibly liberating for about five minutes, and then I started to feel nauseous. Like you, Hanif, I fear I will never make a good fascist.
Your last paragraph eloquently sums up the hoax of nationalism. Of course, my first reaction on seeing the photo,in spite of the tongue in cheek, was to say take down that picture! On the other hand it could be your insurance for a very different future…
Yeah I don't think I could ever wear the maga cap, even in jest or mockery. "America's Hitler" has already harmed the lives of countless people, less than two weeks in. A demented psycho surrounded by capable psychos.
Well said, “a demented psycho surrounded by capable psychos.” Trump isn’t the problem, he’s completely maneuverable, it’s the people controlling him that scare the shit out of me.
Since when has the US presidency been anything else? I'm 78 and it's been a long time since we had a same president.
His possible future insurance:))🤭🤭👍👍
While you write it so funny, I feel it so sad. While you made a point of loving life and people, I get to understand and thank you for writing and be brave writing. ☘️❤️ Thank you for being so bold, so strong and effortlessly love this life in this sad time.
It’s horrible here in the US. My son just lost health care (gender health). His health has been precarious for years; you can imagine the pain. %*%< satire is the only way!!! Thank you. 💙
Loved this! Very eloquent, supremely funny and summed up how I felt when Trump was re-elected - wait, am I missing something? Is he actually a good thing? But no, he is not, and it is all hollow. Thanks for making me laugh out loud and realize I am not alone.
Trump is the result of capitalist society moving further and further to the right since the 1970s. The CIA has been running things since they killed JFK.
There are a pair of cartoons (they have since evolved into memes) which illustrate in simple terms the purity spiral that resulted in moderate liberals being maliciously labelled as far-right extremists by the lunatic fringes of the left.
The first of these – 'My Fellow Liberal?' was created by the cartoonist, Colin Wright, in 2021. Since I cannot post pictures in the replies I will describe it for you:
The first image in the cartoon, labelled 2008, is of a political scale, with a pair of stick figures standing at either end, the one on the left representing liberals, and the one on the right representing conservatives. Standing just left of the centre is another stick figure who is identified as 'me'.
In the second image (labelled 2012), the liberal is portrayed running farther to the left at great speed, leaving in their wake a puff of hot air. 'Me' remains left of centre, though closer to the mid-point than before. The centre line appears to be recalibrating.
The final image (2021) depicts the liberal figure standing far away on the left, having dragged the centre line some way along with them. 'Me', despite not having changed their position, is now right of centre. The liberal stick figure, who has their hands planted judgementally on their hips, is calling out to them “Bigot!” The conservative figure simply says “LOL!”
The second cartoon – a four-panel strip – depicts a figure straddling the centre line of the political debate, proclaiming somewhat smugly and self-righteously that 'both sides make some good points'.
In the following panel, a blue figure, representing the left, angrily pushes them over the centre line. As they are being helped to their feet by a pair of pale red figures (representing moderate conservatives), the exasperated liberal, asks them disingenuously “Why are you siding with the bad guys?”
These cartoons reflect my own experience, along with the experiences of many other moderate liberals in recent years, who have been purged by the extreme left for wrongthink. A good example would be Elizabeth Ellen who runs Hobart – an online literary magazine. A few years ago, Ellen committed the cardinal sin of interviewing the conservative Cuban writer, Alex Gomez, who currently resides in Miami. On the basis that Gomez held some very mild opinions that were nonetheless considered illiberal, the Hobart editorial team protested and demanded that the interview be taken down – how dare this individual with nonconformist opinions be given a platform to speak! Ellen, who is a person of courage and integrity, stood her ground, at which point her editors resigned en masse. She subsequently rebuilt Hobart, though continues to suffer for her principles. Recently, while promoting her new novel, she struggled to find bookshops who would host her for a public reading. On X (formerly Twitter), she lamented that 'bookshops are the new churches'. If anything, I think churches are far less puritanical and ideology-driven. Recently there were claims that staff at a large, well-known bookshop in London were hiding copies of the conservative commentator, Douglas Murray's new book on publication day and informing anyone who requested a copy that it hadn't been released yet. I don't shop there any more.
My own excommunication from the left occurred around 2014 when I found myself inadvertently caught up in Gamergate – a movement that has been widely and wilfully misrepresented. Broadly speaking, Gamergate was the result of videogamers standing up to a group of no-talent progressives who were attempting bully their way into the industry using Mafioso tactics, eg: 'That's a nice game studio you have / videogame you've made. It would be terrible if someone were to ruin your professional reputation by calling you out as racist / sexist on social media. Of course, if you were to employ us as consultants then maybe that wouldn't happen...' The perpetrators of this racketeering had the support of the media and were able to set the agenda.
The Gamergaters who stood in resistance were portrayed both as a disparate group of terminal virgins (male white-supremacists of course) who lived in their parent's basements, and also as elite hackers who were sophisticated enough to be able to influence world events at will, and who were instrumental in getting Trump elected in 2016. Brad Glasgow – the only journalist I know of who conducted objective research in this area, drew conclusions that echoed my own observations – that Gamergate began as the moderate left telling the extreme left 'keep your politics out of our hobby'. Later, after Milo Yiannopoulos got involved, the movement became more conservative. (At the time, Yiannopoulos was a flamboyant gay man with a preference for well-hung black men. He was employed at Breitbart. He has since renounced his homosexuality and demoted his husband to the status of housemate). I made friendship's with people who I would have never associated with under normal circumstances and which persist despite us disagreeing on practically everything.
Around the same time, some of my more ardent liberal friends cut me out of their lives. I had questioned to the dogma. I had noticed an unwillingness to engage in debate among people on the left, who were more likely to shut down attempts at discussion with absurd pejoratives. When calling people Hitler began to lose its potency, it was replaced by 'Nazi'. There was a type of person who commonly includes the words 'be kind' somewhere in their social media profiles, who appeared to relish the prospect of some guilt-free violence against those who had been un-personed in this manner and who therefore, in their minds, had it coming. Recently 'Nazi' has been replaced by 'far right' which is used just as broadly and, in the majority of cases, just as inaccurately to the point of being meaningless.
I attended some Gamergate meet-ups in London and so got to see its true social make-up. It was like a cross-section of UK – a more diverse crowd you could not hope to meet: All genders, races, religions, sexualities, careers, and social statuses. The thing that surprised me the most was the ranges of ages, from students to pensioners. The first person I ever spoke to at a Gamergate meet-up was a heavily-pregnant Pakistani woman. We'd assembled in a metropolitan pub to tell a group well-connected neo-puritan grifters, who were adept at playing the victim, to go fuck themselves. One of these aforementioned grifters would eventually drive an autistic man to suicide with accusations that, following some forensic Internet sleuthing, were determined to be baseless.
Currently the left is in a tizzy; somehow Trump is back in power and this time he's brought Elon Musk along with him. The irony is that, if democrats had not vilified Tulsi Gabbard to the extent that they did, they might have had a more credible candidate to go up against Trump in preference over the awful Kamala Harris. The inconvenient truth is that nobody worked harder to get Trump re-elected than the extreme left: The corruption; the dishonesty; the gaslighting; the denial of truths that were plain to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear; the violence both literal and underhand; the weaponising of the apparatus of the state against its ideological opponents; all conducted more of less out in the open, with malicious glee, by people who thought the pendulum would never swing back the other way. Eventually even people on their own side saw the need for course correction.
A similar thing is occurring in the UK. 10 Downing Street is currently occupied by a robotic authoritarian, whose pension is protected by bespoke act of parliament, who uses the law selectively to bludgeon his critics and who appears to regard the role of leader as a job interview for whatever globalist think-tank he will be decanted into after he wears out his welcome. Everything he currently does paves the way for a Farage government; a consequence of those moderates on the left and the right being too lazy, cynical, corrupt and incompetent to govern effectively and the electorate waking up to that reality. When that happens, you get someone like Farage.
I do not define myself as liberal any more. Being excommunicated by some of my left-leaning friends, who could not bear to have their beliefs questioned, made me neither hateful nor bigoted. I am pretty much the same as I always was, with a few exceptions: The experience made me more thoughtful and open minded to a broader range of ideas. I have no patience for people who want to burn things down or vandalise priceless works of art. I like builders: Builders of families and communities and bridges between communities and businesses and nations. That's progress I can get behind.
Wonderfully and eloquently written. Aside from the injustice of it, throwing the term Nazi around flippantly has rendered it meaningless to the point that, like in the proverbial story of the boy who cried 'wolf', people are starting to either shrug the accusation off or to be unable to recognise the real thing when it comes along.
This is a very good and thoughtful piece, Sam. I hope a lot of people read it.
By the way seeing that cap on you is like a punk desecration, and it automatically squeezes the heinous ideology out of it :)
It took me a moment to understand that Hanif was leading the charge from Great Britain!
😂😂😂
Christopher Hitchens didn't necessarily move to the right, he just couldn't accept that the Republicans were a greater threat to the West than Al Qaeda, nor that Clinton bombing an aspirin factory, to divert from his infidelity, was beyond criticism. Bill Hicks used to explain his obsessional hatred of boy bands by saying that if people found something so unpalatable irresistible how would they cope with something as seductive as fascism. Finally watch Mussolini, Son of the Century; the book it's based on is brilliant.
I disagree. Hitchens suddenly became a Zionist in his later age. That is absolutely unforgivable.
A thrilling ramble through the moment’s quicksand choices! Some how you got unstuck, and somehow we will get unstuck.