Recommended Reading: Corporations, Fascism, and Profit
Editor’s note: Recommended Reading is a weekly feature here on NIDC that shares links to, and casual commentary on, three related news articles in a simple rundown blog.
Profit Has No Ethos
Ultimately, I think one of the hardest things for people in the Pig Empire to accept about the rise of fascism, is how little the corporate actors in our society actually care about it at all; indeed, if their political campaign donations are to be believed, the corporate sector is almost certainly for the adoption of fascism, which is highly lucrative for capitalists until things start falling apart, as soon as possible. On some level, it’s simply much easier for the average person in our society to understand supporting fascism as a function of pure ideology, as opposed to the utter banality of corporate actors helping fascism succeed, simply because it’s profitable.
In today’s return edition of Recommended Reading then, I thought I’d keep things simple by looking at three stories that barely registered in the larger discourse, but also reveal a corporate power structure in the Pig Empire that either doesn’t care about the fascist creep, or is actively spending money to ensure its ascension to power.
Facebook’s Fascist Failbus Drives On
Let’s start our tour of corporate collaboration with a company whose presence on this list will surprise no one, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, or as he’d prefer you call it, Meta. At this point, “giant tech company platforms dangerous fascists on social media because they can’t be arsed to enforce their own moderation policies” is such a common genre of story, the idea that we’re talking about simple negligence here starts to strain credulity. Let’s take a look at this Vice News article by Tess Owen to find yet another example of Facebook’s commitment to spending as little time, money, or effort as possible to merely appear to be disrupting fascist organizing on its platform:
The Boogaloo Movement Keeps Finding Ways to Return to Facebook
“But the majority of the Facebook pages remain a noisy, chaotic rabble that glorifies violence and guns and takes a nihilistic view of the future. Some even continue to openly share instructions for making explosive devices. And on its fringes, the movement appears to be evolving in ways that Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project, finds alarming.”
To sum things up; the violent fascist militia culture known as “The Boogaloo Movement” has once again colonized Facebook, despite the platform’s repeated, but largely lackluster attempts to remove them. Indeed, the “Boog Bois” have become so adept at counteracting Facebook’s “whack-a-mole” approach to moderating violent right wing extremism and hate speech online, that they recently ran a coordinate op to replace shuttered pages the day after Facebook shut them down, pretty much out in the open. Please keep in mind that this is the same company whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had to be dragged before the U.S. government to testify about why he was letting fascists organize on his platform before he finally did anything about these extremely dangerous reactionaries.
As such the handle here isn’t all that hard to grasp; when Zuckerberg and Facebook tell you they’re working to stop online hate speech and violent right wing extremism, what they really mean is “we don’t actually care that much, but if it starts to make us look bad, we’ll do something wholly ineffective to make the bad press stop, and then go right back to empowering online nazis.” I can’t say I’m surprised, but countering the bad faith narratives of corporate actors who empower fascists isn’t just a hobby of mine; it’s a passion.
Public Private Partnerships In Collaboration
I suppose this is one for the “they walk among us” fash-watch files, but it also serves to demonstrate the existence of openly fascist elements in our security and military forces, and how capitalist structures are quite fine with platforming fascist ideology, for a profit. Let’s turn to The Guardian’s Jason Wilson for a story about a fascist who publishes nazi propaganda in South Dakota, with the help of some (not actually) surprising supporters:
US publisher of pro-fascist books revealed as military veteran
In this article we meet twenty-something year old nursing trainee and reported US air force reservist Bailey Ross; and also a former member of white nationalist organization American Identity Movement, who spends his spare time running Agartha Publishing LLC out of South Dakota, a company that “republishes pro-fascist and anti-communist works whose copyright has expired” and spruces them up by adding “eye-catching cover designs.”
If you know anything about reactionary capitalist hellworld, you won’t be surprised to learn that Ross sells his (explicitly fascist) books using Shopify to process payments, and hell yes Amazon is involved:
“Agartha sells from its own website using Shopify as a payment processor, but also sells books on Amazon outside the US. Its titles were available on country-specific Amazon platforms serving other including Australia and the UK, with orders fulfilled using Amazon’s own print-on-demand service.”
Obviously you can read the rest of the article for more details about the kind of nazi trashfire propaganda this muppet is selling, more or less in the open, but the key point here is that when people talk about fascists being normalized to the point of banality in larger American society, it’s examples like this that they’re referring to. This guy was in Identity Evropa while enlisted in the United States Coast Guard, and he’s selling white nationalist books on mainstream online platforms, while apparently still serving as a reservist. These are not fringe people in our society, and it’s not an accident that all these fascists gravitate toward careers and organizations where we encourage normalized fascism, more or less openly; policing and the military, being just two obvious examples.
Fascism, Hypocrisy, and Klan DeVos
Although this story did generate some widespread coverage, mostly in sports-adjacent media, I think it’s worth examining again here because I believe the fascists in our society are making pretty good hay off the fact that most people honestly don’t get that corporations (and their owners) are either in bed with the fascists, or really don’t care either way. Of course there are some exceptions, but “business” in America is more or less funding these guys, or happy to adapt under their direction, as a general rule. For an example of what I’m talking about, check out this article by Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria, and Rebecca Crosby, on Popular Information:
Orlando Magic donates $50,000 to DeSantis Super PAC
This is a simple enough story; the NBA’s Orlando Magic, a basketball team that quite literally holds public “Pride Nights,” and actively courts the LGBTQ community as customers, gave fifty thousand big ones to noted anti-LGBTQ pogrom director, and fascist King of Florida Ron DeSantis’s SuperPac. Why? Because the team is owned by one of the most prominent fascist families full of rich people in America, the DeVos clan – specifically Dan DeVos, son of the late Richard DeVos. These folks already donate oodles of money to DeSantis, but this donation was specifically made by the Magic, presumably for legal purposes.
“Direct corporate donations to federal candidates are prohibited. But a donation to Never Back Down is just as good as a donation to DeSantis’ campaign. The Super PAC has “effectively morphed into an arm of the campaign — even hosting DeSantis on recent bus tours through Iowa.” In the first half of 2023, Never Back Down spent $33.7 million, much of it on traditional campaign functions like polling and canvassing. DeSantis’ official campaign spent just $7.9 million since its launch.”
The larger point here isn’t all that complicated either; the rich people who own and control America, are more or less the rich people who’re funding the fascist creep; the DeVos Klan serving as a very prominent example of that phenomenon. Toothless street nazis are dangerous to our health, but pretending that the corporate machine, and the billionaire nazi muppets who own it, have any intention of saving us is both foolish and ahistorical. The people that own the companies, are also the people paying for the fascism. Not every time, but most of the time.
It’s the Money Honey
And there you have it folks; a brief cross section of the cynical, hypocritical, greed-fueled mendacity of corporate collaboration with fascists seeking to end democratic life in our society. Whether through negligence, ambivalence, or malevolent greed, we’re talking about four very large, and powerful businesses that present themselves as supportive of diversity, inclusion, and marginalized people with dollars to spend, while openly but quietly working to allow, encourage, or enable devotees of an inhuman ideology and political practices that are fatally corrosive to the very people they call customers.
Of course, given the long international history of corporate collaboration with fascist movements they could profit from, perhaps none of this will surprise you. Indeed, when I told a friend who asked what I was writing about, the premise for this article, his reply was literally “of course. Fascism is a tool of extremely rich people to brutally rob and pillage society systemically and on a massive scale. It is the fuel for an industry of violence, theft, and murder to profit the few.” This is objectively true, and a pretty good answer for why rich people actively fund fascist movements, but it fails to account for corporate collaboration with fascism that has no real ideological purpose at all.
The truth is that ideological motivations aside, there’s good money in serving the fascist project, and the shops will open tomorrow whether you have democratic rights, or not; corporate power and the quest for profit, has no ethos.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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