Film Sessions: Crypto-Fascism and a Modern “Shirt Group” on Media Madness
Editor’s note: welcome back to Film Sessions; our quasi-regular feature on Media Madness in which I share, analyze and expand on a relevant video created by someone on the left wing of YouTube.
Learning from the Worst
Have you ever stopped to examine a task you’re performing and suddenly realized you’re going about it all wrong? As those of you who’ve read my body of writing on Americanized fascism, or some of my prior editions of Film Sessions can attest, I spend an awful lot of time debunking crypto-fascist propaganda. While I genuinely consider this sort of work necessary, I must confess that there are times I find playing whack-a-mole with this week’s hottest trends in crypto-fascism, utterly exhausting. Furthermore, because fascists literally never stop trying to create new ways to package the same old reactionary bullshit, the value of debunking each individual argument tends to diminish over time.
Recently I found myself wondering if it might not be a better idea to talk about how crypto-fascist propaganda functions, and in doing so, hopefully arm readers to identify crypto-fascist propaganda in real time. In this week’s edition of Film Sessions, a new video about the Proud Boys by Leon Thomas on the Renegade Cut channel, allows me to do just that. Buckle up boys and girls, we’re about to examine the dumbest fascists in the Pig Empire to figure out how crypto-fascism works.
“There are also however, a great many intellectually-stunted thug reactionaries who are quite demonstrably not the brightest individuals in America. This means that the crypto part of their crypto-fascist obfuscations cannot afford to be particularly complicated; otherwise the pinheads who ultimately join the groups like the Proud Boys wouldn’t understand the appeal.
I’d personally describe the Proud Boys’ ideology as “bog standard neo-nazi garbage that crudely substitutes the word ‘nationalism’ for ‘fascism’ and the term ‘western culture’ for ‘white people’ to spread reactionary and hateful ideology.” These guys are literally “Fascism for Dummies”, and their ideology represents a sort of lowest common denominator in American fascist thought. This in turn makes them an ideal training subject case for folks who’re learning to recognize crypto-fascist ideology in the wild as it were.”
To learn more over on Media Madness, click on the quotation block above, or the header below:
Crypto-fascism and Proud Boys, Featuring: Renegade Cut
- nina illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
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