From Twitter to Terrorism, the Far Right Isn’t Taking No For an Answer
Image Credit: Scott Olson
America’s Rejected the Far Right Democratically — So Now It’s Trying to Take Society by Force
by umair haque
I’m going to use a word I don’t use often, or lightly. Sinister. There’s a thread running through recent events, and it’s a sinister one. That thread goes like this. From Twitter to terrorism, the far right won’t take no for an answer. What do I mean by that?
The other day, a fanatic opened fire at a gay club in Colorado Springs, killing five people. Police are investigating it as a hate crime, and odds are, that’s exactly what it’s going to be. You hardly shoot only a certain kind of people and kill them unless you hate them.
Meanwhile, over at Twitter, the Creepy Billionaire who Burned $44 Billion did exactly what he said he wouldn’t do, and yet we all knew he’d do anyways — he reinstated Trump, without the “council” that he pledged making the decision. And not just Trump — but lunatics and fanatics of all kinds. Twitter, as a quite predictable result, immediately boiled over with the worst kinds of hate, now that the leash was off — 99% of tweets directing racial slurs at footballers haven’t been deleted.
What connects those two things? Anything? Everything. Both are ways the far right is trying to control and dominate social spaces — even if it means coercion, invasion, violence, brutality. On Twitter, hate speech is now OK — and of course, that turns into actual hate crimes, of extreme violence, like murder. And the far right shrugs and pretends like these things aren’t connected. Just joking!! Ha-ha!! But of course, it’s not magic, and they’re intimately connected. Having been repudiated, the far right won’t take no for an answer, and is resorting to force now instead, to control social and public spaces.
Let’s put that in context, so it’s even clearer. What did America just do? It just rejected the far right, in a big, historic, even globally singular, way. Trumpist candidates were defeated by significant margins more or less across the board. Americans said “we’ve had enough,” loudly, firmly, and they meant it. Enough of what, though? Enough of the childishness of the fanatics — and enough of the hate, too. Americans seem to want a return to civility, to decency, to a society where people aren’t at each others’ throats, where minor political differences aren’t suddenly the stuff of death and rape threats. They want a functioning society grounded in norms of comity again. That’s remarkable stuff, because the world is going the other way.
But — and it’s a big but — the far right isn’t taking no for an answer. You see, it begins from a place of anti-democratic pseudo-philosophy — so why should anyone’s consent matter?
Hence, its new crusade goes like this: if it can’t have what it wants politically, well, it’ll just use force. And both Twitter and the atrocity in Colorado are perfect examples of that. In them, you see, with stunning, disturbing accuracy, how hate speech gives way to the real thing, hate crime, how the point of hate is to become violence.
When I say “if the far right can’t have what it wants politically, it’ll just use force,” what is the “it” that it wants? Control. Of what? Social and public spaces. The norms which exist in them. In order to achieve its ultimate goal, control over relationships. To the far right, only some kinds of relationships are “permissible.” Gay ones, for examples, aren’t. Using death and rape threats, meanwhile, to establish a relationship of intimidation is perfectly alright, especially if they’re against women. The point is to control a society’s relationships. Why?
To achieve the larger purpose of the far right. A cleansing. Purification, where the subhumans know their rightful, moral place, and it’s under the superhumans. All of this goes right back to our old friend Nietzsche, who literally described all this set of relationships as “master” and “slave,” dividing the world up into “ubermen” and “undermen.”
Hence, the point of controlling public spaces is to control relationships, and thus to control social existence. You can’t date that person. You can’t be that. You can’t exist as that kind of person, in that way. Gay? Sorry, not allowed. A woman, in love with someone who’s not of “pure” blood? Questionable. A kid, who wants to read this kind of book, because maybe you might be...that’s banned. And to police these boundaries of social relationships and existence, the far right uses hate, which becomes violence, even while its disavowed as a “joke.”
But is it? Is it really a joke when there are now reinstated accounts on Twitter whose quasi-philosophy is that minorities are the cause of the woes of the pure and true, that women are weak, and yet they poison men with their sexual wiles, that women and minorities are parasites, that homosexuality is unnatural and that any deviation from binary gender is a sickness, that all these people are “subhuman,” and barely worthy of life, only deserve to exist if they don’t push it, and only in the ways that the “superior” see fit…and then in the “real world,” others go out an enact those beliefs, with violence, right down to the point of murder?