Theory Discussion: On Media, White Nationalism & Hugo Weaving

Why Hugo Weaving Made Me Write This

I must confess that as a general rule I pay very little attention to the thoughts of musicians, actors and other individuals in the entertainment industry. Part of the reason for this is almost certainly that I don’t like rich people very much and rich people are typically over-represented in “show business” and entertainment journalism; you rarely come across three page interviews with the unionized light and grip guy who has worked on a couple hundred movies over his thirty year career, for example.

More importantly however, I frankly feel that the vast majority of entertainment coverage in the media is insipidly vapid, seemingly by design. It’s entirely possible that more actors, performers and entertainment artists have all kinds of wonderful and thoughtful insights about our larger society, but you can be damn sure Entertainment Tonight isn’t going to talk about any of them for fear of alienating given segments of their viewing audience for any reason at all. There are of course always exceptions, but in my experience they’re pretty rare, and they’re usually musicians.

So you can then imagine my shock when a friend of mine who is aware of my antifascist writing pointed me towards this recent and surprisingly topical interview with actor Hugo Weaving at the Daily Beast – a trashfire neoliberal interventionist rag that spends a great deal of its time punching left.

Now to be clear, we’re hardly talking about a great work of political and media theory here; much of the interview concerns Weaving’s new movie (Measure for Measure) and a largely pedestrian discussion that touches on numerous fairly “safe” liberal political issues like gun control, the appropriation of the actor’s films to fuel the American culture war, and his decision to work on the groundbreaking pro-trans film “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” Weaving’s replies are all well thought-out, reasonable and measured but there’s really nothing in there to write home about; you’ve certainly heard it all before, even if I agree with Weaving on much (although not all) of it.

There was however one question and answer portion I think is worth exploring a little further here today. Specifically, I’d like to look at the following snippet of the interview because the discussion was not only unusually controversial and relevant, but also because Weaving’s response showed both a profound insight into our current political and media environments, as well as a tragic-comic degree of bog-standard liberal blindness to the culpability of our ruling establishment in our present social disintegration and thus, the rise of Americanized fascism.

“This is a heady question but why do you feel this rise of white nationalism is occurring?”

“If you don’t have a media that is upheld by your government, defended by your government, and championed by your government, and indeed if the leaders of that country deliberately destroy that sense of what journalism should be in order to gain power, then you’re in trouble. And you also have the rise of the internet. Print media is going out the window, and there are many, many voices. Having many, many voices is good but when the leading journalists of the day are being killed around the world or ripped down, and this sense of “fake news” is being thrown at them of all people while actual “fake news” is being championed, you get all sorts of conspiracy theories coming out and crazy, crazy beliefs. America is particularly infected by it. It’s a terrible, terrible disease.

I can see it happening here too. I can see it with [Rupert] Murdoch, just as an obvious example. When you have that ability to twist the truth, and to revere the lie, and to put out the lie as truth, the whole notion of what’s real and what’s not goes out the window, and the result of that is you get all sorts of crazy people thinking they’re right. There are major problems with unemployment, the environment is being plundered, big business is reaping profits and running the world. There are so many things wrong that it’s no wonder people get angry or upset, and it’s no wonder that people don’t know what to believe, because we have such appalling, immoral leaders. There’s no sense of right and wrong, and people take the law into their own hands. “These people who don’t look like me? They’re the cause of all my problems, and I’m going to kill them”—these ideas have been seeded by our leadership.”

Well that’s certainly something you don’t find every day in the “entertainment” section of an online rag like The Daily Beast, now isn’t it? Of course, because this is still an interview in mainstream American media, and much of the U.S. ruling establishment remains loathe to actually use the important word “fascism,” this question specifically focuses on the rise of white nationalism. As I discussed in a recent homework assignment however, the simple truth is that these two terms are largely synonymous in the American experience; white nationalism is simply the preexisting form of reactionary racial extremism the Pork Reich is exploiting to install overt fascism in the United States and other parts of the Pig Empire. Even beyond that distinction however, there remains a lot to untangle here – so let’s start with what’s good about Weaving’s answer, which is mostly found in the second paragraph.

First of all, Weaving is absolutely correct that the rich guys who own corporate media have actively fostered a “post-truth” environment for their own political, social and financial advantage, and that this has had catastrophic knock-on effects among the general population. In fact, Weaving’s analysis here reads a bit like a layman’s understanding of the concept of fascist “unreality” and why violent right wing, reactionary or ultra-nationalist movements purposely foster that state in public discourse – namely to encourage loyalty towards the leader or movement even in the face of objective proof that they’re wrong, as discussed in the important works of scholars who study fascist movements like Hannah Arendt, Robert Paxton and Jason Stanley.

Additionally the actor should be commended for connecting, however briefly, the ongoing and all-pervading atmosphere of ruling class malfeasance, plunder and yes environmental genocide that is undoubtedly driving the fear, resentment and paranoia fueling the fascist creep in our society. To say that this type of material condition-based analysis that connects ruling class criminality to broader societal instability is rare in the corporate media, would of course be something of a mild understatement.

Finally of course it was gratifying to see Weaving directly connect “appalling, immoral” leadership in our societies and the violent, xenophobic rhetoric of nativist politicians to deadly fascist terrorism and violence in a way that could jeopardize his career – after all, white nationalist Trump supporters watch movies too. While this type of discourse will occasionally appear in corporate “liberal” media immediately in the wake of a racialized mass shooting, discussion of the direct connection between ultra-nationalist political rhetoric and ultra-nationalist political violence apparently remains a subject uniquely ill-suited to penetrate the Pig Empire public consciousness on an every day basis; constant and blunt repetition is the key and that duty has largely been abandoned by a “liberal” political and media class more interested in swiping nationalist patriotism, troop worship and flag humping from the right at this exact moment.

Quite simply, that’s an awful lot of reality for a single paragraph response to an interview question and it’s refreshing to see Hugo Weaving use his platform as a film star to inject some much-needed nuance, honesty and proper contextualization to one of the most important discussions of our lifetime; lord knows the American corporate media isn’t likely to do so on its own. About that first paragraph tho…

 

Unfortunately, right before he starts dropping truth-bombs in the second paragraph of his answer, I believe Weaving damages his own credibility and thereby undermines his argument by accepting and repeating three dangerous conceits commonly propagated in the mainstream liberal establishment.

The first conceit and the easiest one to address is the idea that people are falling into conspiracy theories because of the decline of print journalism, the rise of the internet and the existence of “many, many voices” in the discourse. Naturally, this theory simply does not survive even rudimentary historical examination; after all the Nazi Party managed to use the Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy theory to (briefly) subjugate most of continental Europe without so much as a fax machine, let alone the internet. While there may have been no shortage of cranks willing to preach social Darwinism and antisemitism in the pre-Reich period of German history, the intellectual theories that propelled Nazism were largely confined to a small circle of race scientists, nationalist thinkers and social critics whose messages nevertheless found a home in the German national discourse through pamphlets, beer hall meetings and the infamous speeches of various Nazi “luminaries.”

Of course none of this is meant to imply that fascist propagandists haven’t made excellent use of the internet to spread lies, conspiracy theories and fascist ideology; they most certainly have. The existence of this same phenomenon in the pre-internet era does however at least suggest that heavy-handed proposed “solutions” like the mass censorship of the public internet are extremely unlikely to stop either the spread of reactionary conspiracy theories, or the ongoing fascist creep in the Pig Empire.

The second conceit, which is more clearly implied than actually stated is that the violent ultra-nationalists, white supremacists and their sympathetic volkish allies on the far right of American politics or media actually believe the unhinged lies and conspiracy theories that appear to be fueling reactionary extremist politics. Unfortunately this assumption survives neither contact with available evidence, nor any sort of studied examination of the antagonistic purpose of fascist intellectual discourse or debate and the role of conspiracy theories and a shared mythology in fascist political culture. As anyone who has ever argued with social media nazis can tell you, belief and sincerity are irrelevant to the fascist so long as they can “win” the argument and spread white nationalist or other hateful ideas in the discourse.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s examine a few quotations from fascism and propaganda scholar Jason Stanley’s fairly accessible “How Fascism Works: the Politics of Us and Them” to understand why actually believing the conspiracies is very much besides the point – highlights and citation links are my own:

“Conspiracy theories function to denigrate and delegitimize their targets, by connecting them, mainly symbolically, to problematic acts. Conspiracy theories do not function like ordinary information; they are, after all, often so outlandish that they can hardly be expected to be literally believed. Their function is rather to raise general suspicion about the credibility and the decency of their targets.“

“The University of Connecticut philosopher Michael Lynch has used the example of “Pizzagate” as evidence for the thesis that conspiracy theories are not intended to be treated as ordinary information. Lynch points out that if one were actually supposed to believe that there was a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that was trafficking in child sex slaves for Democratic congressmen, it would be entirely rational to act as Edgar Maddison Welch acted. And yet, Welch was roundly *condemned* by those who promulgated the “Pizzagate” conspiracy for his actions. Lynch’s point is that the “Pizzagate” conspiracy was not intended to be treated as ordinary information. The function of conspiracy theories is to impugn and malign their targets, but not necessarily by convincing their audience that they are true. In the case of “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy theory was intended to remain at the level of innuendo and slander.”

“President Trump is not an outlier here; conspiracy theories are the calling cards of fascist politics. Conspiracy theories are tools to attack those who would ignore their existence; by not covering them, the media is made to appear biased and ultimately part of the very conspiracy they refuse to cover.”

“Hanna Arendt, perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest theorist of totalitarianism, gave clear warning of the importance of conspiracy theories in antidemocratic politics. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she writes: “Mysteriousness as such became the first criterion for the choice of topics… The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces the masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition… is only important because it convinces them of the consistency in time.”

“Because the audience for conspiracy theories readily discount their own experience, it is often unimportant that the conspiracy theories are demonstrably false.“

“Once a public accepts the comfort of conspiracy thinking as an explanation for irrational fears and resentments, its members will cease to be guided by reason in political deliberation.”

“Pratap Mehta wrote: The targeting of enemies—minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals, intellectuals, assorted protestors—is not driven by a calculus of ordinary politics….When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.”

Even fascist ideologues themselves have openly admitted that “believing” conspiracy theories known to be false is an act of group solidarity and right-think; a focus on the “spirit” of these horrible ideas rather than the factual accuracy of the story being spread. For just one example of this let’s turn to David Renton’s “The New Authoritarians” for a moment:

“In 1937, (Julius) Evola published an Italian edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Evola was well aware that the document , with it’s claims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, was a Tsarist forgery. But it was the patriotic duty of all nationalists, he wrote, to tell themselves that the Protocols were true: “Above all, in these decisive hours of western history, they cannot be ignored or dismissed without seriously undermining the front of those fighting in the name of the spirit, of tradition, of true civilization.“

“Yet in his 1953 book, Men among the Ruins, Evola continued to assert that “the forces of global subversives,” were waging “an occult war” on Europe. These opponents, Evola explained were “Jews… secret agents of world subversion.” He described those who disbelieved in the Protocols as “rabid,” and insisted that the Protocols where an accurate description of Jewish behaviour, even if they had in fact been forged by anti-Semites.“

Indeed, drawing once again on the teachings of Jean-Paul Sartre, I would add that the lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories serve three distinct purposes in fascist politics, each of which is objectively enhanced by knowing that the information is false. Insisting that absurdities and conspiracy theories are real simultaneously drags the discourse from the factual (where the fascist is weak), into the realm of emotional appeals (where the fascist is stronger,) allows the fascist to engage in “trolling the libs” and acts as a signifier of in-group status among fascists in the body politic – one that has the distinct advantage of being more discreet than a blazing red MAGA hat, for example.

So why does it matter what the fascists actually believe? Well obviously, if fascist propaganda and conspiracy theories aren’t about facts, but rather emotions, there is little value to be gained in adopting standard “liberal” anti-fascist praxis; things like “fact-checking” or debating fascists to “beat them in the marketplace of ideas” are not only ineffective but they ultimately only provide the fascist with more opportunities to poison the discourse and spread reactionary and often eliminationist ideology. Let’s return for a moment to Professor Stanley’s observations – emphasis and citations are once again mine:

“The argument for the “marketplace of ideas” presupposes that words are used only in the “descriptive, logical or semantic sense.” But in politics, and most vividly in fascist politics, language is not used simply, or even chiefly, to convey information but to elicit emotion.

The argument for the “marketplace of ideas” model for free speech works only if the underlying disposition of the society is to accept the force of reason over the power or irrational resentments and prejudice. If the society is divided, however, then a demagogic politician can exploit the division by using language to sow fear, accentuate prejudice, and call for revenge against members of hated groups. Attempting to counter such rhetoric with reason is akin to using a pamphlet against a pistol.“

Finally however it is Weaving’s third conceit, in which he succumbs to the seductive myth of a forgotten Western free press, that is perhaps the most dangerous and unforgivable of the lot.

Now look, I’m not trying to be a sh*tlord contrarian jerk and Hugo does have a point about the corrosive effect of politicized attacks on the media, the very real danger journalists face from reactionary leaders in the West, and the intrinsically fascist nature of the far right’s outraged cries of “Lügenpresse” and “fake news.” Weaving’s implication that without these problems the world would be blessed with an adversarial, crusading corporate media however, suggests a naivety about the media’s role in a capitalist society that openly calls the actor’s credibility into question; and he knows it, because later on in the interview Weaving manages to work in a critique of the media’s failure to challenge reactionary politicians and the “reality TV” nature of political coverage. Despite this and even without reading too far between the lines, the sum total of Hugo’s argument in this instance still appears to be that right wing media and anti-media demagogues are the problem, while government support of the liberal mainstream media is the solution; and whoa boy is that a problem for me.

For starters, people aren’t choosing to tune out mainstream media because of Trump and indeed his attacks, which are hardly unique, have actually increased the trust in media among liberals. Ultimately, one of the reasons the swine emperor was able to win at all is that media trust was already at record lows in America, well before he was elected. That isn’t the biggest problem here however, because even setting aside that politicians, including American presidents, have been attacking and undermining the credibility of the press for hundreds of years, the image of a corporate, for-profit media desperately trying to use the light of truth to halt the fascist creep Weaving is invoking, almost certainly owes far more to romanticized films like “All the President’s Men” than any current identifiable reality.

Maybe Weaving is right about a purely hypothetical free press being the answer to burgeoning white nationalism, but the very real corporate “centrist” press in our societies are neither free nor committed to fighting fascism. We’re talking about a collective group of people and corporations who have responded to the rise of Downmarket Mussolini by attacking the left flank of the Democratic Party, drawing false equivalencies between antifascist protesters and violent white nationalists, as well as rehabilitating any right wing, murderous war criminal who says anything unkind about Trump; even if they recently worked for Trump, who is quite clearly a fascist. Frankly, when we’re discussing an institution that literally helped elect Donald Trump in the first place with billions of dollars worth of free media coverage, then we clearly aren’t talking about folks who’re part of the solution to white nationalism, but rather part of the bloody problem.

I mean, hello; earth to wealthy actor? Yeah, billionaires, even ostensibly “liberal” billionaires, aren’t buying news outlets so they can pay people to challenge the ruling establishment (even as represented by a fascist) and even when the corporate media tells audiences the truth, they do so in a way that specifically reinforces ruling class power, narratives and propaganda. Furthermore it is precisely the intersection of power described in Weaving’s statement “If you don’t have a media that is upheld by your government, defended by your government, and championed by your government,” that appears to be the point of failure.

Who buys newspapers and media networks again my friends? Right, billionaires; the very same billionaires who buy politicians. So if the billionaires who own the news don’t care about the truth but rather protecting their own interests, why would the politicians those exact same billionaires control care about the truth in media at all either? These are the same guys who built the propaganda machine currently being hacked by fascism and white nationalism to spread across the entire Pig Empire; the calls are coming from inside the house, Hugo.

Writing in May of 2019, I offered the following (still completely and obviously true) observations on this same corrupting entwinement in an essay entitled Wages of Rebellion and the Inversion Perversion in the Pig Empire:

“When I started turning this idea over in my mind after reading “Wages of Rebellion,” I quickly realized that this very same inversion of justice has spread beyond the courtrooms, think tanks and halls of power into seemingly every aspect of the American public life and rational consensus. It’s in the way esteemed corpse merchants in our publications of record insist we must give weapons contractors and corrupt logistics corporations trillions of dollars to help turn foreign countries into devastated, post-apocalyptic hellscapes and thereby “save those poor people” from tyranny. It’s in describing terrified migrants running from the fallout of Pig Empire foreign policy and American corporate greed as an “invading army” to justify even more violent (and profitable) repression against impoverished brown people. It’s in arguments against the legalization of marijuana and in arguments for the unrestricted right to bear arms. Inversion can be found in a New York Times Op-Ed about the need to give federal regulators carte blanche to funnel public money to obscenely wealthy bankers during the next financial crisis; an Op-Ed written by the very same men who decided to bail out corrupt banks instead of desperate American homeowners less than a decade ago. It’s in the gender pay gap. It’s in bootstrap mythology. This same inversion is baked into the structure of the US privatization debate. It’s in the idea that minuscule voter fraud is a serious threat to our democracy but widespread voter suppression is a result of lazy minorities simply refusing to obtain proper ID.”

“Naturally, the primary drivers of this American inversion infestation are the corporate media, politicians and a sprawling US lobbying industry; these are after all the bought-and-paid-for, non-threatening faces of modern plutocratic rule. What few seem to realize however is that after thirty years of deregulation, media consolidation and legalized bribery, these communication instruments are now entirely under the control of a limited number of monstrously rich people who, by virtue of their wealth and station in society, typically share the same hyper-capitalist, anti-democratic and socially revanchist political positions. This has created a sort of “perpetual inversion machine” in America, where inverted logic is employed by the rich to seize power over the national discourse, which in turn allows and even encourages the uber-wealthy establishment to push more inversion arguments into the public sphere to gain more influence, wealth and control; the cycle has become a perfect, self-propagating circle – is it really fair to call this a “conspiracy theory” when everything I’ve just described is both legal, and out in the open?”

To be perfectly f*cking honest with you, the profit motive and the corporate consolidation of a completely and utterly amoral Pig Empire media is really only the tip of the iceberg here. Has anyone in the media or the mainstream liberal discourse ever stopped to ask some basic questions about why people might be choosing to get their news from random bloggers and conspiracy websites?

If I were to ask Weaving why liberals don’t watch Fox News, he’d eagerly tell me that it’s because they lie; constantly and systemically. They lie about climate catastrophe, racialized crime statistics, recently they’ve taken to lying for the purposes of covering up absurd nonsense their hosts, or their fascist president just said only moments before. Fox will seemingly tell almost any lie in the right setting if it ultimately helps rich white fascists; including lies that might literally f*cking kill their objectively racist viewing audience. When they aren’t lying they’re spinning the news, implementing selective reporting and terrifying the sh*t out of your aging relatives about white nationalist conspiracy theories and migrant crime statistics, or worse.

You can of course say the same thing about the Sinclair Broadcast Group and as Weaving specifically mentions, the rest of the Rupert Murdoch-controlled News Corp media empire too. But countless essays have been written about why Fox News in particular cannot be trusted because they’re either lying, spinning or curating the news to benefit the ruling class right, pretty much all the time; this is a known quality of their programming.

Yet if I turn around an ask Weaving that same question about “the media” as represented by ostensibly liberal or centrist corporate organizations like say MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times, his answer is “so many voices?” They lie Hugo! Mainstream “liberal” and centrist media also tells lies to protect power, bolster the ruling class and sell a seemingly infinite number of unquestionably disastrous military conflicts that kill millions. They’re outright liars or at best disingenuous bootlickers for the ghoulish corpse merchants that run our society.

The “centrist” media lied or helped sell lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Iraq War. They lied, and lied, and continued to lie about the unhinged Bircher fever dream that was Russiagate until the bitter end; then they decided to lie some more about it. The larger Pig Empire media lied about whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. They all lied more times than I can count about the Bernie Sanders Democratic Party nomination campaigns and his supporters in 2016 and 2020. Media minions lied about the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement and antifascist protesters; this isn’t exactly a new thing either Mr. Weaving. Your trusted crusading adversarial media also spins the truth to protect rich donors, favored politicians and the centrist worldview at the expense of poor people, the marginalized and the labor class; denying that just makes you a fool.

Please keep in mind sir that we’re only talking about lies, spin and smears in the above example; if I were to include hypocrisy, naked self interest and the purposeful narrowing of the discourse, we might be here all day.

What about the stories the mainstream “liberal” media doesn’t even cover; like say the real effects of President Obama’s drone assassination program? A program which has of course, been just as quietly expanded under Trump. How many stories about Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood rape spree never made it off the cutting room floor until Ronan Farrow risked (and certainly damaged) his entire career to expose that monster? How many years did everyone know exactly what billionaire sex-slaver Jeff Epstein was doing to teen and pre-teen girls before the Miami Herald finally blew the lid off a scandal that reaches into the highest branches of money and politics on the planet? Just who exactly is it that decides what counts as a “conspiracy theory” anyway?

Why should people trust a corporate “centrist” media that presents former Director of National Intelligence and known liar James Clapper as a patriotic American hero turned national security analyst when he outrageously claims Russia definitively altered the results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election? Why should folks put their faith in a mainstream “liberal” media that told them Bernie Sanders supporters were misogynist dudebro Russian assets whose successes were like Hitler’s conquest of Normandy? Why would anyone listen to a “free press” that prints Op-Eds by fascist politicians calling for a military crackdown on protesters? Why would anyone even bother to engage with media outlets prepared to print an op-ed about why bankers need more bailout money to respond to a potential financial crisis, written by the same ghouls that literally helped cause and exacerbate the last global financial crisis in 2008?

Who taught the public that the media was lying to them, that every fact had a possible spin and that the news was a goddamn choose your own adventure experience? And given all that, are we to be surprised that white-majority, settler colonial nations founded on genocide and in many cases slavery, are producing a whole lot of people who choose to believe in media sharing racist conspiracy theories and white nationalist ideology? I could write an entire multi-thousand word essay about the very clear and concrete reasons that nobody really trusts corporate media in America and instead just roots for their “team” in the discourse, but the truth is I already have written numerous essays that touch on those topics and provide (in some cases, extensive) citations – the list below is by no means exhaustive:

 

Wages of Rebellion & the Inversion Perversion in the Pig Empire (May 2019)

Theory Discussion: Advocates for Truth (March 2020)

The Casualties of Cacophony re: Snowden (September 2019)

Debunking the Myth of a Forgotten American Free Press (May 2019)

Lying Without Lying: Manipulation of Framing, Context & Depth in Media (Dec 2018)

Fear & Droning: Manufacturing Consent for War as a Public-Private Partnership (Jan 2018)

Fear, Loathing & Mayonnaise in the 2020 Dem Nomination Contest (November 2019)

Fantastic Lies: Special Ratf*cking Edition Pt 1 (January 2019)

Fantastic Lies: Special Ratf*cking Edition Pt 2 (January 2019)

Insidiocracy: Russiagate, Corporate Media & Losing My Religion Pt 1 (January 2019)

Insidiocracy: Russiagate, Corporate Media & Losing My Religion Pt 2 (January 2019)

Insidiocracy: Russiagate, Corporate Media & Losing My Religion Pt 3 (January 2019)

Insidiocracy: Russiagate, Corporate Media & Losing My Religion Pt 4 (February 2019)

Of Bernie Bros & Bolshevik Bot Networks (April 2017)

Joy-Ann Reid & the Return of McCarthyism (September 2016)

 

I mean are you taking the piss here Hugo, or what? Are you aware that Manufacturing Consent and Inventing Reality, foundational works on the captured nature of the American “free press,” were written over thirty years ago? Did you know that McChesney’s Rich Media, Poor Democracy was published in 1999? Are you aware that this discussion continues on into this day in books like Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc, Owen Jones’s The Establishment and How They Get Away With It, or one of my recent favorites Political Mind Games by Roy Eidelson? Frankly, there is simply no excuse for this level of naivety in our present political reality and we’re all out of time to keep pretending trying to restore the conditions that gave rise to this fascist wave represents a real solution.

Am I breaking Weaving’s balls too hard here? I don’t think so – while one might be inclined say he’s just an actor, the problem is that the ideas he’s representing in this answer are in fact a huge part of the mainstream liberal intelligentsia’s theory of resisting fascism, and apparently anyone else who doesn’t like their ideas either. When corporate media muppets tell me the solution to rising white nationalism is to champion their industry as a beacon of sacrosanct knowledge, it’s not hard for me to see the self interest at work here; but for the love of all that is decent that’s no reason for folks like you and I to believe them. This matters because even as you read this, the United States is locked in a dystopian 2020 Presidential election that features two candidates vowing to censor the internet to stop their own definitions of extremism; there are consequences for allowing governments to decide what is and isn’t “the news” and like most liberals, Weaving seems to have forgotten that the “good guys” don’t always hold the seat of power in our sham “liberal” democracies.

Could there be a role for a government-supported free press in stamping out white nationalism? Certainly, but not these governments and not this press. Pretending that you can stop the rise of white nationalism with the very same corporate ghouls who helped normalize it in the first place is a fairy tale.

And I’m sorry Mr. Weaving, but at this point I’m just too old for fantasies.

• Nina Illingworth