Understanding Fascism as Childish Tantrum

Fascist regimes throughout history have one thing in common: They're all based on pathetic cringe loser shit

When you step back and look at the situation in the United States right now as a millennial, it really feels like a comedy premise that some really cringe internet writer would have come up with in 2013 and tried to make into a low budget movie: An army of young adult geeks who call themselves Doge conquer and ransack Washington DC under the banner of Kekistan to purge it of SJWs in the name of lulz.

In fact they actually did try to make this movie in 2013. Or something similar. It was called The Chronicles of Rick Roll and it never made it past a trailer:

Now it’s happening, though, and It turns out that this isn’t actually very funny.

Elon Musk, who has the emotional maturity of a nine year old but a power that presidents envy, has conquered the US capital and his army—a bunch of script kiddies from 4Chan barely out of high school—is sacking the city.

Their mission is stamping out “woke,” a dubious concept none of them can define, and “DEI,” which can be defined but means something different when they say it. These are in both cases euphemisms. They’ve come to eliminate feminism, and reduce the presence and visibility of non-white people in the workforce and media.

It’s fascist, yes, but it’s also pathetic. It’s pathetic in a way that makes you see fascist regimes of the past in a whole new light and realise they were always pathetic.

The cliché that people use to explain and justify fascists coming to power is best illustrated by a quote from a G. Michael Hopf novel: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.”

It was something that I’d always believed because it sounds about right, but it’s only as I watch what’s now going on that I realise the fundamental error in this theory. Look at these people. Elon Musk isn’t a strong man, he’s a fucking dipshit. He skips around stage making “hurrr hurrrrrr” noises and when he takes to the microphone he sounds like the Matt Damon puppet from Team America. He’s the charisma of Goofy with the personality of Pete.

And I want to be clear that I have nothing whatsoever against Goofy, he is a treasure

Hard times don’t create strong men. Hard times lower the threshold to the point where weak, pathetic, losers have a chance at seizing control. Hard times lower civilization’s immune system to where it can get its ass kicked by the human equivalent of the common cold.

The first years of this decade were really hard times for America. Trump is responsible for much of that. He was a weak man who created hard times, and Biden wasn’t a strong enough man to fully correct course when the economic fallout from Trump’s bungled pandemic response hit. Cue egg prices, cue Elon Musk, the pied piper of gutter Nazis.

Musk ran a recruitment program on Twitter and through Discord servers and internally through Peter Thiel’s companies in the weeks after the election – the assignment was to build a task force of highly motivated young software engineers to eradicate Woke and DEI from the federal government. The job would be long hours with little pay, so applicants would need to be highly motivated by their hatred of Woke and DEI alone. There is a very specific type of person who is going to answer that call.

You get Marko Elez, an open and proud racist who temporarily resigned from Musk’s militia when journalists dug up his racist tweets and there once was a time when resigning was what you were supposed to do when that happens. The Vice President, who is apparently not Elon Musk but some other guy named Vance, reinstated him with the reminder that this is kind of why he was hired in the first place.

Vance, Elez, and the new US Attorney Ed Martin are all also linked somehow to a pseudonymous neo-Nazi on Twitter who goes by the name Captive Dreamer and from whom Vance may have gotten the tip for the whole Haitians eating cats lie that appeared in the run-up to the election.

Then there’s Edward Coristine, a 19 year old malicious hacker and deep cybercriminal associate whose social media nickname is “Big Balls.” He has connections to scummy Chan culture infested doxing and DDoS groups and his recent employment history shows him having been fired for the deliberate mishandling of sensitive information.

That’s a great resume for someone who has apparently been granted unlimited access to secure private data at the US Treasury and has apparently been made Senior Advisor to the State Department. Much of his social media history has been wiped beyond recovery but there’s some evidence he’s connected to the creepy Aporia/Steve Sailer race science and eugenics Substack circle.

There’s Gavin Kliger, who’s attached to the so-called Groyper movement, led by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Other than that he’s your standard hard-line Mass Deportations Now red hat Derek Chauvin superfan from Team Fuentes/Loomer/Bannon, which makes it kinda curious that he’s working for Musk, but I suppose the opportunity to smash the government is a fine reason to cross that particular picket line. He has a Substack in which he reveres, for some reason, Matt Gaetz, a man who is so likely to be a child sex trafficker that even the most MAGA wing of the party wouldn’t risk it.

So yeah these guys have access to your Social Security Number right now. It's not ideal.

The list goes on but guys, look at the sad, pathetic, miserable picture being painted here. This is it, this is what we’re replacing “wokeness” with. This is what winning looks like.

This is the reality of White Culture.

Stand aside, Johannes Vermeer

The funny thing is, the people involved in this culture all have Roman statue profile pictures. They’ll angrily tweet pictures of drag queens and pride parades, they’ll demand to know why there are black people performing at the Super Bowl, and their ideal for American society is a confused pastiche of Medieval European cathedrals and Cold War era nuclear family propaganda posters.

There are no cathedrals planned for Trump’s America, though. What you’re getting instead is Secretary General Big Balls of the Longcat Department of Skibidi Rizz.

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Do you think China is going to be intimidated when a Kekistan canton is added to the US flag and they carve a Soyjack into Mount Rushmore?

Trump has fired the entire board of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, declared himself its new Chair, and installed his former Director of National Intelligence as its director, something that would be on the nose for a South American tin-pot junta. Trump famously hates the performing arts. The only culture or entertainment he engages with is right wing news punditry and golf. The closest thing he has to any knowledge of the entertainment industry comes from his time as a TV game show host.

What kind of high cultural highlights are going to come out of a performing arts center whose sole creative directors are a slumlord and a fucking spook? Sorry to the Roman statue avatars, but it’s not going to be Shakespeare. It’s more likely military parades.

The plan, they say, is to make America great again. But there are no grand projects planned, no growth proposals to actually restore America to some imagined past glory. Instead they're going to demolish the Presidio for no reason at all. Just smashy smash smash.

While reading for this piece I stumbled upon one of the most insightful essays I’ve read in a long time: The Jock/Creep Theory of Fascism by

John Ganz

. It’s two years old but it’s as prophetic as it is historically accurate.

They were the best of fwends and the fun never ends...

What’s happening in America today is a climax in a story that’s around two decades old and I’ve been documenting it and trying to, I think, assemble a book about it. It’s largely about the historical enmity between geeks and jocks, but in reality this has been driven by the geeks’ envy of the jocks. The more they tried to emulate the jocks, and largely failed, the more bitter, vengeful, cruel, and pathetic they became, and moved politically and culturally toward the far right.

This led to a series of escalating tantrum events in geek culture. Gamergate was one of the best known ones. It was a years-long shit-fit of unpopular creeps engaged in what they perceived as a war to excise feminism, racial diversity, and themes in general from a pop culture they thought belonged solely to them. Most of the players involved were either deeply malicious geeks like Carl Benjamin or geeks playing jock kayfabe, like Mike Cernovich and Roosh Valizadeh.

If you remember when this guy was everywhere you might be a millennial like me

Steve Bannon was an actual jock who successfully weaponized this movement to rally it behind his jock presidential candidate. The cruel geeks—the creeps, to use Ganz’s terminology—were willing to use intimidation methods that nobody officially connected to the Trump campaign could get away with.

The creeps suffered setbacks but they weren’t permanently defeated. They just got angrier, more insular, more radicalized. Now they’re back, but without Bannon. This time their General is also a creep. This time Caeser has given them the keys to every door in the empire and invited them to exact vengeance.

What John Ganz points out is that the Jock/Creep dynamic is one that has played out consistently through the history of fascism. In the 20^th Century, the Italian Fascists embodied the jock archetype, where the Nazis embodied the creep archetype.

Mussolini was an aggressive hypermasculine bully who demanded unquestioning subservience and sought to project raw power and replenish the glory of Rome. Hitler, however, was a shrieking dipshit who complained about how hard done by he was and thought white people were owed something by birthright and his country was full of Woke and it was all the Jews’ fault.

ES GEHT UM ETHIK IM VIDEOSPIELJOURNALISMUS

Here's the thing, though: Both creeps and jocks, ultimately, are losers. Which is why fascists are always losers. Mussolini wasn’t actually super competent and accomplished and powerful. He was an asshole with an anger problem. He was a violent bully from childhood who beat and stabbed his classmates, and later, his girlfriends. His trains didn’t actually run on time, most of the accomplishments he took credit for were actually achieved by his predecessors, and when war came to Europe, it was his military that was the weakest and most soundly defeated.

Hitler has the more famous loser reputation. He was on the receiving end of bullying, not that this excuses a damn thing about him. A failed artist, a weak soldier, a bitter and pathetic creep who blamed everyone but himself for his shortcomings and whose rise to power had more to do with time, place, and luck than skill.

Neither of these men had any idea how to build the glorious cultural empires they envisioned. They only knew how to throw tantrums and smash things. Like Trump, Hitler installed himself and one of his lieutenants as sole directors of the nation’s cultural center, the Reichskulturkammer, and proceeded to produce jack shit. They spent the entire duration of their rule smashing up and burning art that already existed. They had, like, one official artist of the Reich and he only reproduced mimicries of Ancient Roman sculpture.

My masterpiece: Michelangelo's David, Smaller, And Slightly More Concerned By the Situation

lon Musk’s sacking of DC follows the very same pattern of fascism: A flailing temper tantrum by cringe losers.

To the Gamergate shitheads this is like Make-a-Wish Foundation with no limits. It’s an opportunity that would only have come to them in their wildest power fantasies: Edgy, smirking teenage memelords storming through Washington with Top Security Clearance and the passwords to every federal computer terminal, on a mission to delete anything they don’t understand, or that looks too woke, or unilaterally fire anyone they suspect of being an SJW. Stern-looking armed personnel standing down from their post at the President’s order while Meme Captain Kekius Maximus or Harry Bolz or whatever the fuck he’s calling himself this week chuckles like a dimwit and throws up “ironic” Hitler salutes.

It's pathetic.

Again, besides nap time and a snack, what comes after the tantrum? Because I’m sorry but the grandness, artisanship, and vision of White Culture that peaked in 1345 is not coming back. If you discount anything that these brave Kekistanis want to remove from American culture for being woke or foreign inspired or Black inspired or gay or deranged or degenerate, you need to understand that the only notable thing White Culture has produced within the past decade is 10,000 identical pictures of a cartoon ape.

The Trump/Musk administration has no proposals for producing anything. In true fascist style, their plans only involve removing, purging, breaking, deleting, censoring, and punishing. After that, the apparent plan is to annex several other countries including Canada, Greenland, Panama, and Gaza. But like, fucking, why? Does Trump really think Canada’s wokeness is enough to justify entering America into its very own Russia/Ukraine quagmire? Because, if there’s any comparison, the only way that’s going to end is with one million dead American servicemen and a ceasefire treaty that grants the United States ownership of New Brunswick.

We’re on week 3 of 208 of the Donald Trump Revenge Tour, so a lot of things can happen ahead of us. Maybe the courts will catch up to what’s happening and block enough of it to stabilize the ship. Maybe one of Musk’s child soldiers will accidentally (or deliberately! For the lulz!) delete the file system of the US Treasury. Maybe enough people will do the right thing and boycott Musk’s products, destroying his power at the source. In any case, the only real barrier to stopping these idiots from bulldozing the United States back to the Thirteen Colonies is someone in the government having Bigger Balls than a 19 year old with a broccoli haircut.

Seriously, this is a choice.