rigorousintuition.ca

HOW TO BE A FUCKBOY WITHOUT REALLY TRYING




Step 1: Remember that your feelings are the only ones that matter. Also, remember that you don’t have any because you’re a man and not a bitch.



Step 2: Make the right selection. Avoid girls with older brothers and active fathers. One of them might beat your ass. Also, because girls with fathers won’t let you do anal.



Step 3: Always remind her how lucky she is to be with you. “With” means whatever you want it to mean. This is about you, not her.



Step 4: Text her non-stop for three months about how much you like her. Take extra care to treat her like your girlfriend, and then randomly stop responding to her messages. When she becomes rightfully enraged, tell your friends that you think she’s crazy.



Step 5: Fuck one of her good friends. (Preferably during the three months that you were texting her non-stop). Then tell her to chill because you’re single and can fuck whomever you want.



Step 6: Convince her that you’re a really good guy who’s just woefully misunderstood. Use phrases like: “I just never met the right one I guess.” and “I don’t like who I’m becoming.” Bonus points if you can mention how you’re “not like other guys.”



Step 7: Once she’s thoroughly convinced that you’re one of the good ones, gain her sexual trust. Start out slowly, one base at a time kind of thing. Then take her virginity.



Step 8: After she’s sexually attached, start fucking her regularly. Then tell her that you can never be official because you have too much respect for yourself to date a girl who’s not a virgin.



Step 9: Always remember what you deserve. Here’s a list of your unalienable rights:

a virgin girlfriend
a virgin girlfriend whose only ambition is to raise you in all the ways your mother failed to.
a virgin girlfriend/mother who’s loyal enough not to leave you if and when you cheat.
a loyal virgin girlfriend/mother who sits at home thinking of ways to be more loyal, more motherly, and regenerates her hymen every day before you have sex.


Step 10: Get your shit together.



Step 11: Please get your fucking shit together.




Tylah Gantt is an accounting major at the University of Notre Dame. When she isn't
busy draining her soul in the name of capitalism, you'll find her hurriedly
scrawling half thoughts on napkins and her iPhone notepad. Her biggest
accomplishment to date is being named MVP of her tee ball league. Tylah will be
pursuing her MFA in fiction at Fairleigh Dickinson this upcoming fall because she
still has no idea what to do with herself.

Wilhelm Reich's

The Mass Psychology of Fascism

as scripted by the Surveillance Camera Players

Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders:
Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence

By: Henry A. Giroux

Violence and the Politics of Masculinity

Unlike a number of Hollywood films in which violence is largely formulaic and superficially visceral, designed primarily to shock, titillate, and celebrate the sensational, Fight Club uses violence as both a form of voyeuristic identification and a pedagogical tool. Although Fight Club offers up a gruesome and relentless spectacle of bare knuckled brutality, blood curling, and stylistic gore, violence becomes more than ritualistic kitsch, it also provides audiences with an ideologically loaded context and mode of articulation for legitimating a particular understanding of masculinity and its relationship to important issues regarding subjective agency, gender, and politics. Violence in Fight Club is treated as a sport, a crucial component that lets men connect with each other through the overcoming of fear, pain, and fatigue, while reveling in the illusions of a paramilitary culture. For example, in one vivid scene, Tyler initiates Jack into the higher reaches of homoerotically charged sadism by pouring corrosive lye on his hand, watching as the skin bubbles and curls. Violence in this instance signals its crucial function in both affirming the natural "fierceness" of men and in providing them with a concrete experience that allows them to connect at some primal level. As grotesque as this act appears, Fincher does not engage it--or similar representations in the film--as expressions of pathology.25 On the contrary, such senseless brutality becomes crucial to a form of male bonding, glorified for its cathartic and cleansing properties.26 By maximizing the pleasures of bodies, pain, and violence, Fight Club comes dangerously close to giving violence a glamorous and fascist edge.27 As a packaged representation of masculine crisis, Fight Club reduces the body to a receptacle for pain parading as pleasure, and in doing so fails to understand how the very society it attempts to critique uses an affirmative notion of the body and its pleasures to create consuming subjects. Terry Eagleton captures this sentiment:

Sensation in such conditions becomes a matter of commodified shock-value regardless of content: everything can now become pleasure, just as the desensitized morphine addict will grab indiscriminately at any drug. To posit the body and its pleasures as an unquestionably affirmative category is a dangerous illusion in a social order which reifies and regulates corporeal pleasure for its own ends just as relentlessly as it colonizes the mind.28

But the violence portrayed in Fight Club is not only reductionistic in its affirmation of physical aggression as a crucial element of male bonding, it also fails to make problematic those forms of violence that individuals, dissidents, and various marginalized groups experience as sheer acts of oppression deployed by the state, racist and homophobic individuals, and a multitude of other oppressive social forces. What are the limits of romanticizing violence in the face of those ongoing instances of abuse and violence that people involuntarily experience everyday because of their sexual orientation, the color of their skin, their gender, or their class status? There is no sense in Fight Club of the complex connections between the operations of power, agency, and violence, or how some forms of violence function to oppress, infantalize, and demean human life.29 Nor is there any incentive–given the way violence is sutured to primal masculinity-to consider how violence can be resisted, alleviated, and challenged through alternative institutional forms and social practices. It is this lack of discrimination among diverse forms of violence and the conditions for their emergence, use, and consequences coupled with a moral indifference to how violence produces human suffering that positions Fight Club as a morally bankrupt and politically reactionary film.30

Representations of violence, masculinity, and gender in Fight Club seem all too willing to mirror the pathology of individual and institutional violence that informs the American landscape, extending from all manner of hate crimes to the far right’s celebration of paramilitary and proto fascist subcultures.

Fight Club does not rupture conventional ways of thinking about violence in a world in which casual violence and hip nihilism increasingly pose a threat to human life and democracy itself. Violence in this film functions largely through a politics of denial, insulation, and disinterest and is unable to criticize with any self consciousness the very violence that it gleefully represents and celebrates. Fight Club portrays a society in which public space collapses and is filled by middle class white men--disoriented in the pandemonium of conflicting social forces--who end up with a lot of opportunities for violence and little, perhaps none at all, for argument and social engagement.31 Macho ebullience in Fight Club is directly linked to foreclosure of dialogue and critical analysis and moves all to quickly into an absolutist rhetoric which easily lends itself to a geography of violence in which there are no ethical discriminations that matter, no collective forces to engage or stop the numbing brutality and rising tide of violence. While Jack renounces Tyler’s militia-like terrorism at the end of Fight Club, it appears as a meaningless gesture of resistance, as all he can do is stand by and watch as various buildings explode all around him. The message here is entirely consistent with the cynical politics that inform the film--violence is the ultimate language, referent, and state of affairs through which to understand all human events and there is no way of stopping it. This ideology becomes even more disheartening given the film’s attempt to homogenize violence under the mutually determining forces of pleasure and masculine identity formation, as it strategically restricts not only our understanding of the complexity of violence, but also, as Susan Sontag has suggested in another context, "dissolves politics into pathology."32

The pathology at issue, and one which is central to Fight Club, is its intensely misogynist representation of women, and its intimation that violence is the only means through which men can be cleansed of the dire affect women have on the shaping of their identities. From the first scene of Fight Club to the last, women are cast as the binary opposite of masculinity. Women are both the other and a form of pathology. Jack begins his narrative by claiming that Marla is the cause of all of his problems. Tyler consistently tells Jack that men have lost their manhood because they have been feminized, they are a generation raised by women. And the critical commentary on consumerism presented throughout the film is really not a serious critique of capitalism as much as it is a criticism of the feminization and domestication of men in a society driven by relations of buying and selling. Consumerism is criticized because it is womanish stuff. Moreover, the only primary female character, Marla, appears to exist to simultaneously make men unhappy and to service their sexual needs. Marla has no identity outside of the needs of the warrior mentality, the chest-beating impulses of men who revel in patriarchy and enact all of the violence associated with such traditional, hyper-masculine stereotypes.33 Iron John : a book about men (Reading, Mass. Addison-Wesley, 1990); For a sustained critique of this position, see James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). But representations of masculinity in Fight Club do more than reinscribe forms of male identity within a warrior mentality and space of patriarchical relations. They also work to legitimate unequal relations of power and oppression while condoning "a view of masculinity predicated on the need to wage violence against all that is feminine both within and outside of their lives."34 Masculinity in this film is directly linked to male violence against women by virtue of the way in which it both ignores and thus sanctions hierarchical, gendered divisions and a masculinist psychic economy. By constructing masculinity on an imaginary terrain in which women are foregrounded as the other, the flight from the feminine becomes synonymous with sanctioning violence against women as it works simultaneously to eliminate different and opposing definitions of masculinity. Male violence offers men a performative basis on which to construct masculine identity, and it provides the basis for abusing and battering an increasing number of women. According to the National Center for Victims of Crime, an estimated six million women are assaulted by a male partner each year in the United States and of these, 1.8 million are severely assaulted.35 Affirming stereotypical notions of male violence while remaining silent about how such violence works to serve male power in subordinating and abusing women both legitimates and creates the pedagogical conditions for such violence to occur. In short, Fight Club provides no understanding of how gendered hierarchies mediated by a misogynist psychic economy encourages male violence against women. In short, male violence in this film appears directly linked to fostering those ideological conditions that justify abuse towards women by linking masculinity exclusively to expressions of violence and defining male identity against everything that is feminine.

American Dream » Fri Jan 13, 2017 3:23 pm wrote:

HOW TO BE A FUCKBOY WITHOUT REALLY TRYING




Step 1: Remember that your feelings are the only ones that matter. Also, remember that you don’t have any because you’re a man and not a bitch.



Step 2: Make the right selection. Avoid girls with older brothers and active fathers. One of them might beat your ass. Also, because girls with fathers won’t let you do anal.



Step 3: Always remind her how lucky she is to be with you. “With” means whatever you want it to mean. This is about you, not her.



Step 4: Text her non-stop for three months about how much you like her. Take extra care to treat her like your girlfriend, and then randomly stop responding to her messages. When she becomes rightfully enraged, tell your friends that you think she’s crazy.



Step 5: Fuck one of her good friends. (Preferably during the three months that you were texting her non-stop). Then tell her to chill because you’re single and can fuck whomever you want.



Step 6: Convince her that you’re a really good guy who’s just woefully misunderstood. Use phrases like: “I just never met the right one I guess.” and “I don’t like who I’m becoming.” Bonus points if you can mention how you’re “not like other guys.”



Step 7: Once she’s thoroughly convinced that you’re one of the good ones, gain her sexual trust. Start out slowly, one base at a time kind of thing. Then take her virginity.



Step 8: After she’s sexually attached, start fucking her regularly. Then tell her that you can never be official because you have too much respect for yourself to date a girl who’s not a virgin.



Step 9: Always remember what you deserve. Here’s a list of your unalienable rights:

a virgin girlfriend
a virgin girlfriend whose only ambition is to raise you in all the ways your mother failed to.
a virgin girlfriend/mother who’s loyal enough not to leave you if and when you cheat.
a loyal virgin girlfriend/mother who sits at home thinking of ways to be more loyal, more motherly, and regenerates her hymen every day before you have sex.


Step 10: Get your shit together.



Step 11: Please get your fucking shit together.




Tylah Gantt is an accounting major at the University of Notre Dame. When she isn't
busy draining her soul in the name of capitalism, you'll find her hurriedly
scrawling half thoughts on napkins and her iPhone notepad. Her biggest
accomplishment to date is being named MVP of her tee ball league. Tylah will be
pursuing her MFA in fiction at Fairleigh Dickinson this upcoming fall because she
still has no idea what to do with herself.

http://queenmobs.com/2016/05/fuckboy-wi ... ly-trying/

Confronting the New Right

Hierarchy vs. Egalitarianism
The New Right believes that there are ‘natural’ human hierarchies, and that attempting to change that sacred order is part of the reason society is a mess. In the words of one New Right writer:

“The true Right, in both its Old and New versions, is founded on the rejection of human equality as a fact and as a norm. The true right embraces the idea that mankind is and ought to be unequal, i.e., differentiated. Men are different from women. Adults are different from children. The wise are different from the foolish, the smart from the stupid, the strong from the weak, the beautiful from the ugly. We are differentiated by race, history, language, religion, nation, tribe, and culture. These differences matter, and because they matter, all of life is governed by real hierarchies of fact and value, not by the chimera of equality.”

Resistance to fascism has so far sought only a return to liberalism. Instead, a new workers’ movement must fight for the world we want.

Fight to Win

Erik Forman

The question of the labor movement under fascism is the question of what to do when it is already too late. Racist vigilante attacks are intensifying, comrades are being indicted, workers are being deported, bosses are breaking labor law with even greater impunity, the press is under threat, civil liberties are disappearing, politicians are attempting to rule by diktat, police are even more out of control, war is on the horizon. Everywhere, the threadbare niceties of the state under liberalism have vanished.

We are not ready for this. The general strike seems like the only reasonable response, but the existing left and labor organizations are hard-pressed to mobilize for one. The working class is self-organizing, but success remains far from certain. What is this hell we are entering? How did we get here, and what role can the working class play in helping us find a way out?

ORIGINS OF FASCISM

Fascism did not start out as a pejorative term. The word originates from the Latin fasces, a term for a bundle of sticks bound together around an axe so that they could not be broken, a symbol of unity and power. In ancient Rome, the fasces were carried by lictors, the bodyguards of magistrates and other state officials. The sticks could be unbundled to mete out beatings as prescribed by magistrates. The axe was used for the death penalty.

Fasci first appeared in social movement usage not on the right, but on the Italian left in the late-nineteenth century as a symbol or term for “league” or “group” for various socialist and syndicalist organizations. It was in fact a former socialist who indelibly stamped fascist as an adjective for the far right: Benito Mussolini. His politics were shaped by the conflicts of modernity: violent class struggle, a bourgeoisie attempting to build a nation and a national market, and war. For a young Mussolini, working-class power seemed to be the way forward. But after beginning his political career in the Italian Socialist Party, the failure of the socialist movement to prevent World War I, as well as the outpouring of patriotic feeling released by the war, catalyzed Mussolini’s conversion from class politics to a new brand of nationalism.

Mussolini promised to make Italy great again, to return to the golden age of the Roman Empire. In his view, this could only happen through a new cross-class national unity, a powerful state under the tutelage of a new elite of Übermenschen, and a march toward war. The first task of Mussolini’s fascism was the violent repression of workers’ and peasants’ movements in the wave of strikes and occupations after World War I, followed by the destruction of independent labor organizations once state power was attained.

The conditions of crisis that had led to Italian fascism soon gave rise to parallel movements in other countries. Perhaps because of the visibility of Nazism, in particular in US popular culture, the fascism of the 1930 serves as the primary reference point for analysis of the right-wing authoritarianism we face today. The fascists of Italy, Falangists of Spain, Nazis of Germany and their less well-known counterparts across the Western world believed their elite were destined to rule as autocrats because they had won out in the war of all against all — or must do so. The new elite would lead the nation in an imperialist project of gaining more spazio vitale (living space, or as the Nazis would call it, Lebensraum), seeking to displace British or American hegemony over the capitalist world-system and gain their people’s place under the sun.

Fascism cast culture as nature. It enforced and strengthened hierarchies based on ethnic or gender identities, claiming that some are meant to be masters and others to be slaves. Fascist governments replaced liberal guarantees of civil liberties and independent civil society organizations with a reimagining of the nation as a patriarchal family based on a racist conception of self and other, and corporatist organizations subordinated to the state. Corporatism here does not refer to corporations in the sense of a private company — it actually referred to the incorporation of bosses, workers and state bureaucrats in a single overarching organization that would supposedly reflect their common nationalist interests.

Fascists paid lip service to “socialism” for the Volksgemeinschaft (the Nazi concept of a racially pure “people’s community”), but they found their most willing partners in the project of rationalizing social, political and economic life in the bourgeoisie. Fascists in league with big capital subjected the working class to a redoubled divide-and-conquer strategy. Some sections of workers were included in the Volkgemeinschaft, bound up in corporatist schemes of labor-management compromise in exchange for loyalty necessary for war-making. But those who were not thought to belong to the “master race” were excluded from any form of representation or organization, and subjected to hyper-exploitation. Millions of Jews, Roma, eastern Europeans and others deemed Untermenschen were subjected to persecution, forced labor and genocide.

For the working class, fascism is the bloody assertion of heteronormative, patriarchal capitalism without democracy. The mythologization of hierarchy and the nation, intensified oppression based on ethnic and gender identities, glorification of war, and violent repression of worker and social movement organizations were hallmarks of all the historical regimes we call fascism — Hitler’s National Socialists, Franco’s Falangists and others. Today, most of these characteristics are also present in the new wave of right-wing regimes taking power in the West, as well as in India, Russia, Turkey and other authoritarian capitalist states of the periphery.

CONTINUITIES WITH LIBERALISM

As participants in this unfolding catastrophe, we tend to emphasize its discontinuities with the postwar liberal order that preceded the current unraveling. But the continuities are in fact more alarming, and more important to understand if we want to eradicate fascism root and branch, once and for all. Fascism is possible not in spite of liberal capitalism, but because of it. Both historically and philosophically, fascism is rooted in the same Western tradition as liberalism. Fascism continually reemerges because its seeds are incubated in the contradictions of capitalism.

The capital-F Fascism of authoritarian government is possible because of the lower case-f fascism that thrives in everyday life under capitalism. The centralized state was an invention of the bourgeoisie, a business innovation necessary to manage its affairs. Its bureaucracy stands ready-made for takeover by fascist thugs. Eichmann-like obedience necessary for the Fascist political project is inculcated by the state and corporate bureaucracy built by the bourgeoisie. Fascists march to war down roads that were paved by centuries of European colonialism and imperialism. The fascist discourse of national greatness is nothing more than a continuation of the nationalism of the imagined community constructed by the bourgeoisie.

The fascist enforcement of gender norms is a grotesque exaggeration of the patriarchal division of labor engendered by one form of capitalism. Fascism’s celebration of hierarchy and legitimation of class society is an extreme form of the twin lies of liberalism: “meritocracy” (barely distinguishable as a concept from Social Darwinism) and racist essentialism. Racism itself was born of the Western project of colonialism, and given a stamp of legitimacy by Enlightenment science that sought to taxonomize all things, plants, animals and people.

Liberalism promises to keep its Id in check with guarantees of the rights of man, but this was always a promise more often broken than kept. The majority of our planet’s inhabitants have already been living under a permanent state of exception. The test runs for the Nazi Holocaust were the late-Victorian holocausts of mass murder in Africa, and the genocidal colonization of the Americas and uncounted colonial massacres.

In the capitalist core, millions have long lived their lives as what Giorgio Agamben termed homo sacer — a term from ancient Rome signifying those who are deprived of rights by the state, and subject to extra-judicial violence by the George Zimmermans of the world. Across the capitalist core, immigrants and refugees live without the promise of any kind of liberal human rights, facing possible deportation in any interaction with the authorities.

Clintonite cosmopolitan liberalism claims that these oppressions are atavisms of the past, even though they are renewed every day. It promises to unite the world Benetton-like in a multicultural global market, where everyone is equally free to exploit and be exploited. Liberalism will occasionally apologize for its racism, sexism and colonial massacres, and may make affirmative action reforms to stabilize its rule and rationalize production, or in the case of the US government’s eventual concessions to the civil rights movement, to compete ideologically with the Soviet Union. But there is one place where it can never acknowledge illegitimate hierarchy: the workplace. And it is precisely here that the contradictions that propel the world toward fascism are rooted.

How the alt-right’s sexism lures men into white supremacy


Though many consider the alt-right to be primarily a fringe movement encompassing multiple ideologies (including white nationalism and white supremacy), its supporters’ unorthodox tactics for promoting those ideologies were fundamental to Trump’s campaign, and thus fundamental to his victory. Said tactics include engaging in extremist discourse, using deceptive irony and racially tinged internet memes to confuse people into dismissing the “alt-right” label as a synonym for internet trolls, and spreading false and misleading information. Thus, it’s no surprise that the movement has become a focal point of the subsequent culture war and narrative surrounding the president-elect’s transition to the White House — particularly outrage that Trump arguably won through racist rhetoric and that his chief strategist is directly associated with the alt-right movement.

But one foundational aspect of the alt-right’s various belief systems has been significantly downplayed following the election — even though it may be the key to understanding the movement’s racist, white nationalist agenda. While it’s true that the movement is most frequently described in terms of the self-stated, explicit white supremacy that defines many of its corners, for many of its members, the gateway drug that led them to join the alt-right in the first place wasn’t racist rhetoric but rather sexism: extreme misogyny evolving from male bonding gone haywire.

The “alt-right” label is tricky to define, but the movement’s top priority is elevating the status of white men
Don’t let the term “alt-right” fool you; despite the fact that it’s the self-chosen descriptor adopted by many white supremacists, the ideology under the hood is still the same. Not only do members of the alt-right support the most extreme version of Trump’s campaign promises to deport millions of immigrants and create a national registry for Muslims, but their ultimate goal is to ethnically cleanse nonwhite individuals from America and establish a completely white ethno-state.

Members of the alt-right tend to be young white men spouting blatantly racist, nationalist, and misogynistic views that align eerily well with historical fascism, and many of these men openly advocate harassment and discrimination (or worse) of women and minority groups. (Indeed, since the election, overt tension surrounding these various spheres has led to hundreds of reported hate crimes.)...


Over the past few years, Gamergate and male-centric Reddit communities have popularized the idea of “social justice warriors,” commonly abbreviated as SJWs. This disparaging label is an updated way to accuse progressives of extreme political correctness. The “SJW” label is a huge and successful weapon in the alt-right’s arsenal; it paints feminists as manipulative, oversensitive, shrill women who attack men with claims of sexism at the tiniest of provocations while rejecting their sexual advances.

Men who deploy the “SJW” attack seek to reestablish control and agency over the cultural conversation by ridiculing progressive attempts to seek greater diversity and representation in media, and to dismiss basically anything that could be deemed “multiculturalism” or representation (see: Gamergate and this year’s Ghostbusters backlash).

However, nested within the alt-right’s fight against SJWs is a flagrantly radical, white supremacist element.

Members of the alt-right frequently refer to progressive culture as “cultural Marxism” — a favored catchphrase of Breitbart founder Andrew Breitbart. The academic term “cultural Marxism” is a positive one that denotes the spread of Marxist values throughout culture, but its common use today is much more pejorative. Members of the alt-right view SJWs who are actively trying to make art and culture more inclusive as attempting to incite sociocultural and socioeconomic upheaval under the guise of “diversity.”

In fact, the term “cultural Marxism” is descended from actual Nazi propaganda — a distrust of modernism and the spread of non-Germanic culture that Hitler called “cultural Bolshevism.” In his book A History of Nazi Germany: 1919-1945, historian Joseph W. Bendersky notes that the phrase was code for the cultural purging that preceded the Holocaust. “Hitler referred to ‘cultural Bolshevism’ as a disease that would weaken the Germans and leave them prey to the Jews,” Bendersky writes. “A moral struggle was underway, and the outcome could determine the survival of the race.”

The updated alt-right version of this idea primarily targets feminists and progressives as the instigators of this cultural demise. Their belief in insidious cultural plots against white patriarchy leads them to overlap and interact with another branch of the alt-right — the innumerable online right-wing conspiracy groups that see Jewish, Islamic, and foreign plots in perceived attacks on white patriarchal culture. The all-or-nothing urgency and the blatant nationalism and white supremacy of Hitler’s version of the phrase is still intact.

The Republican Lawmaker Who Secretly Created Reddit’s Women-Hating ‘Red Pill’

Of several notorious “red pillers” who frequent the forum is Milo Yiannopoulos, who did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) last year. Yiannopoulous recently resigned from his post as senior editor at Breibart News following comments he made that were interpreted on both sides of the political aisle as condoning pedophilia and child molestation. (On Facebook, Yiannopoulous contended that his comments were selectively edited and taken out of context. Later, in a news conference announcing his resignation, Yiannopoulous stated that some of his comments were “simply wrong.”) A frequent reader of r/TheRedPill, Yiannopolous is popular among subscribers, which is not surprising: His brand resonates with the community that also blames feminism for subjugating men into second-class citizens.

Yiannopoulos, a gay man who in his AMA described transgender people as having a “brain disease,” says today’s feminist-driven society pays no heed to “laws that men’s rights advocates are complaining about.” Indeed, men’s rights activists often do complain of the “injustices” they face: for instance, child support and alimony laws that they say women abuse. Red Pillers call this “divorce rape:” trapping men into marriage, sometimes by a pregnancy originally calculated for such an exploitation, followed by a divorce in which women reap cash prizes.

In a post from 2012, Fisher explained that the con “…is why feminism pushes to increase alimony and child support. In the USA where feminism is completely unchecked, women can meet another man and profit from having two providers instead of one. Alimony and child support will ensure her lifestyle isn’t the one that suffers. The only risk a woman has for leaving her husband is if she’s too old and ugly to hook another guy. But even then, the amount of money she can get from her ex-husband is almost criminal.”

On The Red Pill, Fisher commonly expressed disappointment that the institutions of marriage and religion were destroyed by women’s equality. He maintained that as a result of financial independence, women were no longer compelled to remain faithful and as a result, men needed to protectively adapt their sexual strategy.

“Marriage, and yes, female oppression, slut shaming, religion, these were all a means to control hypergamy [infidelity]. Marriages might be considered loveless, and women might have been unhappy, but for men it meant marriages that lasted, commitments that continued, and protection against the fickle whims of females,” Fisher wrote on The Red Pill in November 2012.

“To give women autonomy is to take away the very thing that made marriage a realistic institution… what I dislike is the general attitude that somehow we owe [women] something for sex… Women enjoy the autonomy that feminism has afforded them… But don’t expect the relics from back in the day to continue to benefit you without the sacrifices you were making,” Fisher wrote on his blog Dating American, in 2012—just weeks before establishing The Red Pill.

The Philosophical Fascists of the Gay Alt-Right

By Maureen O'Connor



Jack Donovan — a 42-year-old skinhead icon and right-wing extremist — lived the gay life once. It was in the 1990s, after he left his parents’ blue-collar home in rural Pennsylvania to study fine art in New York, when he danced go-go in gay clubs, hung out with drag queens, and marched for gay pride. But then he dropped out, learned how to use tools and work as a manual laborer, studied MMA, and decided he wasn’t gay — just “an unrepentant masculinist.”

“I am not gay because the word gay connotes so much more than same-sex desire,” Donovan announced, under a pseudonym, on the first page of 2006’s Androphilia: A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity (echoing, probably unintentionally, the speech Tony Kushner wrote for Roy Cohn in Angels in America). “The word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics.” He appropriated a new term, androphile, to describe a man whose love of masculinity includes sex with other men.

Gay men are remarkably prominent — if not exactly abundant — in the alt-right universe. Take the infamous Milo Yiannopoulos, who powered a meteoric rise and fall on the sheer cognitive dissonance between his flamboyant self-presentation and callous politics. (When Out magazine profiled Milo, the story’s writer Chadwick Moore “came out as a conservative.”) Or artist turned reporter Lucian Wintrich, who joined the White House press corps when Trump-cheering blog Gateway Pundit (edited by a gay man) received its first credential. But even those men seem relatively mainstream when you compare them with Donovan, who has contributed to “dapper white nationalist” (and friend) Richard Spencer’s journal, advocates for a form of “anarcho-fascism,” and founded a chapter of a masculinist “tribe” called the Wolves of Vinland, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. (One member recently served time for burning down a historically black church.) Which makes sense when he shows me photos from their neopagan fight-club rituals, which sometimes involve nooses.

To hear Donovan tell it, his sexuality is a nonissue. It’s a point echoed by several of his peers, who don’t see their political views and sexual identities as contradictory but complementary. “Masculinity is a religion, and I see potential for androphiles to become its priests,” Donovan wrote in Androphilia, “to devote themselves to it” in a way that men who understand their manliness through women — in quantifying the number they’ve slept with or measuring “men’s rights” against “women’s rights” — can’t. And so androphiles like Donovan have found common ground with the gender-traditionalists and male-advocacy groups elsewhere in the messy carnival of the new right, where reactions to women range from outright hostility to benign disinterest.

And they’re not interested in queer solidarity, either. “Apart from Camille Paglia, of course, I can’t think of any interesting lesbians,” gay white nationalist James O’Meara told me in an interview. Or as Donovan said, “I think most of them are so married to feminism that I don’t think that’s even an option.” To say nothing of trans issues, which most gay alt-righters rejected (“I know three transgender people in our movement,” Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson offered, before arguing against the designation. “White nationalism should be straight but not narrow,” he said, inadvertently repeating a slogan popularized by an anti-bullying LGBT nonprofit.) Donovan sees himself as a member of the earliest generation of gay men who could be free to ditch the “victim mentality” of queer politics. In Androphilia, he praises activists who fought to decriminalize gay sex and to combat institutional indifference to AIDS “It would be remiss not to credit the Gay Rights Movement for fighting against this sort of oppression, intolerance, and intentional negligence,” he writes, but “having achieved relative tolerance for same-sex-oriented people in mainstream culture, and having brought an end to police harassment and widespread discrimination, the Gay Rights Movement has turned to nitpicking.” He isn’t against identity politics. He’s loud and proud about his race and his gender — traits that, unlike his sexuality, do not make him a minority. “Ten out of ten minorities agree that being a minority can really blow,” he explains in “Mighty White,” an essay defending white nationalism in those who fear losing, or in some contexts have already lost, majority racial status.

Donovan — whose partner of 20 years is a Trump supporter of Mexican descent — supports white nationalists, but denies belonging in their ranks. “I just think that’s a silly goal,” he says of the so-called white ethnostate. Whiteness, he points out, “is an American approximation of nationality,” which doesn’t make as much sense as, say, German nationalism — which he became familiar with when he delivered a speech praising masculine violence at a far-right German nationalist convention near Leipzig in February. Violence is a component of Donovan’s “gang theory of masculinity,” an idea he became so enamored of that he felt he could not actualize as a man until he had a gang of his own. Enter the Wolves of Vinland, a club started near Lynchburg, Virginia, by brothers Paul and Matthias Waggener, a pair of avid bodybuilders who love blackmetal bands (a.k.a. National Socialist Black Metal bands). The sons of an Orthodox priest, the Waggeners have said in interviews that they experimented with drugs, satanism, and “gangster shit” before discovering neopaganism, also known as “heathenism,” which became the foundation of their club.

ANCIENT ASTRONAUT ARYANS: ON THE FAR RIGHT OBSESSION WITH INDO-EUROPEANS

THE BIZARRE PSEUDO-HISTORICAL BELIEF SYSTEM BEHIND WHITE NATIONALISM

April 28, 2017 By Ramon Glazov

If you have watched Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, you will likely recall the catchy hair-metal song “Stonehenge”:

In ancient times
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history,
Lived an ancient race of people: the Druids.
No one knows who they were,
Or what they were doing . . .

It is true we do not know much about the Druids. We know even less about their forebears, the Indo-Europeans, who truly did live “before the dawn of history.” The Indo-Europeans left behind no Stonehenge, no trace of a writing system, no paintings of themselves or their society. We assume their homeland was somewhere between Eastern Europe and South Asia, but can only guess as to their genetics—did they look Slavic, perhaps, or were they more like Afghans?

Although half the world’s people speak languages descended from theirs, we have no surviving samples of Proto-Indo-European. This has not stopped us from looking: since the 19th century, linguists have tried to reconstruct the ancient tongue by comparing and analyzing its daughter languages. A few online geeks have even created “Modern Indo-European” for daily conversation. I have saved onto my computer a wonderful “practical course” developed by an Italian physicist in his spare time. (In case you are wondering, the Modern Indo-European for “telephone” is “qelibhanom,” while “An esti wifi ghostiljoi?” means “Is there wi-fi in this hotel?”)

Given the above, it would be strange for someone to turn to this phantom prehistoric culture for answers to modern political problems. But, as Umberto Eco pointed out, the far right has a special fondness for “primeval truth.” Blank canvases are a boon to mythmakers, and the Indo-Europeans—sometimes, less accurately, called Aryans—have provided a convenient tabula rasa for 160 years of racist idealism. As we will see, even today’s alt-right does not know how to quit them.

The grandfather of all Aryan race theorists was French aristocrat Count Arthur de Gobineau. In 1853, he published a 1400-page tome, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, promising to diagnose “the mortal disease of civilizations” and explain how societies collapsed. He began, sensibly enough, by ruling out declining morals; the canker was not “fanaticism,” “luxury” or “irreligion.” Plenty of nation states had also survived bad governments. This might lead us to think that history is complex, that superpowers can rise and fall for hundreds of different reasons and that not even experts can reliably predict their lifespan. But rather than complicate geopolitics, Gobineau reached for a less logical conclusion.

His hypothesis was that every major civilization had been created by white Aryans; if the Aryan stock became “diluted” by other groups, the civilization would go into decline. Ancient Egypt was “an Aryan colony from India.” China was, too, before it “became absorbed in Malay and yellow races.” Also originally white, according to Count Gobineau, were “the Assyrians, with whom may be classed the Jews.” This list ran all the way to “the three civilizations of America, the Alleghanian, the Mexican and the Peruvian.”

Gobineau brutally concluded that non-Aryans were incapable of forming advanced societies:

In the above list no negro race is seen as the initiator of a civilization. Only when it is mixed with some other can it even be initiated into one.

Similarly, no spontaneous civilization is to be found among the yellow races; and when the Aryan blood is exhausted stagnation supervenes.

For Gobineau, this argument had its conveniences. Faced with any evidence of non-white civilizations, he could claim that white people had created them and then vanished. His evaporating “Aryans” were not unlike the “ancient astronauts” that UFO loons credit with building the Pyramids.

Such vagueness made his theory highly adaptable. In his book Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke charts the various ways this theory has been interpreted and deployed. While Nazi thinkers backed a genetic model of race, their Italian counterparts, such as influential fascist philosopher Julius Evola, developed a more esoteric reading. Discussing Arthur de Gobineau’s racial thought, Evola asserted that races only declined once their spirit failed. Evola actually rejected Alfred Rosenberg and other biological racists of the Third Reich, implying that their physical anthropology was based on reductionist and materialist science.

Propaganda in the Age of Fascism


“In the absence of an equally compelling counter-narrative, a significant portion of the masses will also embrace fascism, and history will be left to repeat itself.”

Political and aesthetic theory, from Alley Valkyrie

How the Alt-Right Is Using Sex and Camp to Attract Gay Men to Fascism


Queer people are not immune from fascist impulses.

At the National Policy Institute’s 2015 conference, alt-right star Richard Spencer's annual Nazi-fest, a speaker named Jack Donovan exhorted the crowd "to leave the world the way you entered it, kicking and screaming and covered in somebody else's blood." The same year, in the pages of the The Occidental Observer, one of the most prominent white nationalist webzines, another alt-righter, James J. O'Meara, held forth about how "behind the Negro, hidden away, as always, is the darker, more sinister figure of the Judeo. The Negro is the shock troop. The Jew is the ultimate beneficiary.” Aside from being open fascists and “white racialists,” Donovan and O’Meara have another thing in common: They’re both out gay men.

In his book The Homo and the Negro, O'Meara says that gay white men represent the best of what Western culture has to offer because of their "intelligence" and "beauty," and that "Negroes" represent the worst, being incapable of "achievement." Donovan calls women "whores" and "bitches," and, when a questioner on Reddit asked him his views of the Holocaust, responded, "What is this Holocaust thing? I'm drawing a blank."

Both have become influential figures in the alt-right; horribly, they are not the only gay men to respond to an olive branch lately offered by white nationalism. The opening of this movement to cisgender gay men is a radical change, "one of the biggest changes I've seen on the right in 40 years," says Chip Berlet, co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America. In the United States, unlike in Europe, out gay men have never been welcome in white supremacist groups. The Klan and neo-Nazi groups, the main previous incarnations of white hate in this country, were and still are violently anti-queer. And while a subset of openly gay men has always been conservative (or, as in all populations, casually racist), they never sought to join the racist right.

That was before groups like NPI, Counter-Currents Publishing, and American Renaissance started putting out the welcome mat. Since around 2010, some (though by no means all) groups in the leadership of the white nationalist movement have been inviting out cis gay men to speak at their conferences, write for their magazines, and be interviewed in their journals. Donovan and O'Meara, far to the right of disgraced provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, are the white nationalist movement's actual queer stars. But there are others in the ranks, like Douglas Pearce of the popular neofolk band Death in June. And there are many more gay men (and some trans women) who have been profoundly influenced by two white nationalist ideas: the "threat" posed by Islam and the "danger" posed by immigrants.

Donovan tries to sugarcoat his own racist beliefs when speaking to his main fan base, gay men who like his macho looks and straight men from the "pickup artist" culture and the manosphere who are desperately trying to learn from him how to be manly. Instead, reverting to the other half of the Nazi playbook, he prefers to highlight his hatred for "effeminacy," feminism, and "weakness." A beautifully muscular man of 42 who has perfected a masculine scowl in the many photographs of himself he releases on his website and Facebook page, he functions as beefcake for the neofascist cause. He’s parlayed his butch allure into a brand, earning money from a line of T-shirts and wrist guards that say things like BARBARIAN and a series of books that seek to instruct both straight and gay men in how to become more masculine and in particular, more "violent."

How Hungary Became a Haven for the Alt-Right

The increasingly illiberal European country offers shelter to a growing number of international nationalists.


Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks during his state-of-the-nation address in Budapest, Hungary, on February 10, 2017.

CAROL SCHAEFFER MAY 28, 2017

In February 2017, at the state of the nation address, Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary and the leader of the far-right, anti-immigrant Fidesz party, offered his vision for the country in the coming year. “We shall let in true refugees: Germans, Dutch, French, and Italians, terrified politicians and journalists who here in Hungary want to find the Europe they have lost in their homelands,” he proclaimed.

In reality, Orbán’s “refugees” have been moving to Hungary, and Budapest in particular, for years. A small clique of Identitarians, or aggrieved nationalists from Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and elsewhere, all motivated by their disdain for their home countries’ commitment to liberal values, have found an ideological match in his Hungary, where two extreme far-right parties, the governing Fidesz and Jobbik, the largest opposition party, make up most of the National Assembly. Jobbik is the first European political party to champion a border wall. Its members frequently express open anti-Semitic and anti-Roma sentiments, and prioritize the preservation of “Hungary for the Hungarians.”

This transformation has allowed a system of far-right culture leaders to flourish in Budapest. Coming from all over Europe and the United States, they have created a structured propaganda circuit, in the hopes of spreading their ideas far and wide.

At the center of the scene is a publishing house called Arktos Media. It is routinely referred to as the preeminent publisher of the alt-right by those within the movement and experts who study it, and is known for translating many canonical alt-right texts into English, including the first full-text English translations of Russian theorist Alexander Dugin—characterized variously on the left and right as “the intellectual guru of Putinism,” and “Putin’s Rasputin.” Dugin’s “ethnonationalism,” a belief in the creation of ethnically homogenous nation states, has been championed by white nationalists, who argue that Europe and America are innately white nations. Arktos titles largely promote a viewpoint it characterizes as “alternatives to modernity” that are critical of liberalism, human rights, and modern democracy.

Arktos originally began operations in India in 2010 when a Swedish businessman named Daniel Friberg absorbed a “traditionalist” publishing house run by American editor-in-chief John B. Morgan. Both lived in India for the first years of the company’s existence. In early 2014, both Friberg and Morgan moved to Budapest to continue to expand Arktos from within the European continent. (Morgan has since left Arktos and now works for Counter-Currents, a white-nationalist publishing house and website also partially based in Budapest.) Friberg, whose vision is central to Arktos, sees its mission as changing “metapolitics,” a term appropriated from 20th-century Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. In Friberg’s book The Real Right Returns, he argues that multiculturalism and liberal human rights—what he calls “cultural Marxism”—have been the dominant culture since the fall of Nazism, and outlines how transforming this culture space is necessary for political and social change.

Peter Kréko, a Hungarian political analyst and academic researcher of populism and extremism at Indiana University Bloomington, said that the timing of Arktos’s move to Budapest was no accident. In 2014, Jobbik’s popularity surged, thanks to a platform that pledged to preserve Hungarian ethnic purity. That year, Orbán was also re-elected to a second term, and Jobbik won 20 percent of the national vote and 47 seats in the parliament, while Fidesz grabbed a super-majority. The Identitarians “are happy that they feel that in Hungary there is a leader that represents their values. These are people with an almost medieval view on the world and they find a safe haven in Hungary,” Kréko told me.

It is difficult to tell where Arktos’s ideas end and Jobbik’s begin. For both, multiculturalism is the supreme enemy. Both believe in draconian immigration laws based on ethnic and racial preservation. The *pro-government newspaper Magyar Hirlap (which translates to Hungarian Newspaper) has published articles sympathetic to members of Friberg’s circle. Gabor Vona, Jobbik’s leader, wrote an introduction to Arktos’s translation of 20th-century intellectual fascist Julius Evola’s A Handbook For Right-Wing Youth, a collection of Evola’s essays targeted at young people interested in the radical right. Evola, who White House chief strategist Steve Bannon quoted in a 2014 speech at the Vatican, is considered by academics as “possibly the most important intellectual figure for the Radical Right in contemporary Europe.” Numerous Facebook posts show Friberg shaking hands with Vona and dining with Marton Gyöngyösi, another key politician in Jobbik credited with calling for all Jews in Hungary to be registered on a list.

When I spoke with Gyöngyösi, he voiced his admiration for Evola. Jobbik’s resistance to immigration, he said, is limited to people from “Africa or the Middle East,” because they do not share the same “cultural values” as Hungarians, as opposed to the “Austrians or Polish or American people who come to our country and who share the same civilization, the same religion, or the same values or way of life.” But despite Jobbik’s ideological overlap with the Arktos scene, Gyöngyösi denied that it has any influence over the party.