Fascists Really Believe It

Living through a global resurgence of fascism, the greatest difficulty has proved to be not arguing against it, but convincing non-fascists that fascism’s adherents really mean it. That they believe what they are telling us they believe—and they will act accordingly. 

The overwhelming instinct is to view calls for 100 million deportations in the US, civil war in the UK, arresting or executing political leaders, eliminating of trans people, rolling women’s rights back centuries, legalising domestic violence, and global genocide as a sort of trolling, or ugly incoherent rhetoric. But these are plain statements of intent. That modern fascists haven’t fully achieved these goals doesn’t somehow prove they don’t want to. 

Fascism is an ideology like liberalism, socialism, or conservatism. Its key narratives, values, and goals are very different from those other creeds, but it still has those features. It is a representation of the world, designed to govern how people think and behave. Its most horrific actions follow clearly and directly from that representation. 

And like those other ideologies, fascism has adherents. Strength of belief varies, but for many tens of millions it is the primary software they use to make moral and political decisions. Politicised people are usually sincere in their core commitments. If you gave a socialist a lever that would seize the wealth of every billionaire, they would pull it. Similarly, if you gave a fascist a lever that expelled or exterminated every non-white person in their country, they would pull it—and they’d be enthusiastic about doing so. 

Historically, when fascism has fully seized the state, it has built such a lever and then pulled it. Contemporary fascism (let’s call it neofascism) is building such levers where it can, and pulling whatever others it can get its hands on to move us towards that goal. It is quite open about this. 

In one way, this is the most obvious thing in the world. Yet it can be incredibly difficult to live with this truth. Many deny it outright. Others accept the right has radicalised, even that this is fascism, but still struggle to accept that fascists will act in line with their beliefs in the same way that they, as progressives, act in line with theirs. It’s comforting, after all, to see fascism more as ugly rhetoric than actionable ideas. To imagine they will stop short of the most extreme implications of their worldview. If this were true, it would at least preclude the worst outcomes.

But there is very, very little reason to think that it is. 

The distancing instinct

Matthew Taylor Coleman had a good life. He loved to surf and was the founder and owner of the Lovewater Surf School in Santa Barbara, California. He was married and had recently had two children—a 2-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter. In August of 2021 he drove them down to Mexico in the family’s van without informing his wife, who, while she would notify authorities when she couldn’t get in touch, was not seriously alarmed. She merely asked for help finding and contacting him. 

For some time previously, Coleman had been immersing himself in the world of online conspiracy theories. He was a follower of QAnon—a political movement that believes Donald Trump is secretly fighting a global elite of satan-worshiping pedophiles—and had come to believe that its anonymous prophet, “Q,” was communicating with him directly. He had also engaged with the theories of David Icke, who claimed that global elites were actually the ‘Anunnaki’—an ancient race of reptilian humanoids from the Draco constellation masquerading as people.

Coleman had connected these dots to his own family. His wife was also a QAnon adherent but he had come to think, he would later say, that she was a shapeshifter and had passed on “serpent DNA" to their children. If nothing was done a contagion would spread, and the children would grow up to be “monsters”.

In Mexico, Coleman allegedly stayed a night in a hotel then drove his young children to a remote ranch and killed both using a spearfishing gun. A report from Mexican police documents that the bodies were then stabbed “over a dozen times” each with a wooden stake.  He hid them in some bushes and drove back to the United States where he was stopped at the border and quickly confessed.

What you believe to be true about the world will determine how you interact with it. Most of us would kill a snake to save a person. And that seems to be what Coleman imagined he was doing. When asked if he knew what he did was wrong, he replied yes, but “it was the only course of action.”

There is an instinct to distance ourselves from such stories. This, I think, comes from the same place as denialism about neofascism. ‘Such views are surely utterly fringe’ is an immediate first reaction. But they aren’t. QAnon is pretty mainstream these days; around 25% of Republicans believe in it. The ‘lizard people’ conspiracy is rarer, but not vanishingly so. A poll found 4% of Americans—that would be 11 million adults— bought into it. Perhaps some respondents were just trolling, but not all. In my door-knocking activist days I talked to at least a half-dozen people who sincerely believed it. 

The other way this distancing instinct can go is to label all such people and beliefs as crazy. If by that one means having a mental model of the world out of line with the reality of it, then this is almost definitionally true. Coleman was, post-arrest, diagnosed with an unspecified form of mental illness (“Other Psychotic Disorder”) and his mental condition has deteriorated badly during incarceration. But there had been no signs of mental illness, or documented criminality, on his part prior to this. Neighbors described him as a loving family man rooted in his Christian faith. 

‘These are not people like me’ seems to be what is often, tactically, being said in our distancing reactions. A disheveled homeless man might rant incoherently about lizard people on a subway, but he is not important; he can be ignored or institutionalized. Skinhead thugs might still cling to white nationalism, but they likewise exist at the margins of society.  

Neither assumption is justified. Neofascism, I have argued extensively, exists across the class spectrum. If you live in a nice middle-class suburb, you don’t want to think of your neighbors as fascists who would have the state kill you if they could. Yet all the data in the world suggests at least some of them are. Some will believe in overt white supremacy, just as some will believe in QAnon. Matthew Coleman was not a marginalised person. He could have been your neighbor.

Belief 

Would you ever, personally, kill someone? Responses vary, but even those who say they never would, pause after saying that, then provide an exception. And always the same exception. ‘Unless I had to protect my family.’

It’s a perfectly sensible, sane exception. I’m not faulting it. Self-defense might also be mentioned. If, say, faced with a home invasion, someone who wanted to harm you and your loved ones, most of us would be prepared to kill. 

Alexis Bukrym, who in 2017 was a 23-year-old living away from her parents for the first time in Florida, was startled by a crash and an unknown figure entering her room. She drew a handgun and fired a single round, hitting them in the chest. We have no reason to doubt her account of events. Nor that she sincerely believed this was an intruder and she was in danger.

Bukrym had in fact shot her roommate and best friend, who she believed was out for the night. He would spend months in the hospital—including in a medically induced coma—and very nearly die on multiple occasions, but eventually pull through. 

There are two aspects of Bukrym’s beliefs that led her to pull the trigger. The first is what she thought was descriptively true about the world. Matthew Coleman believed that his children were shapeshifting serpents, and Bukrym believed her roommate was a violent intruder. If either of those things were true, their actions would make sense. It is what you would’ve likely done in their place. They were wrong of course—dangerously wrong—but you are not immune from being wrong. 

The second is the values framework with which Alexis approached what she thought were the facts of the case. She was raised by avid gun owners, had first fired a gun at the age of ten, and had practiced extensively with them. She believed in gun ownership. Her instructor had told her “The number one thing is you have to be prepared to take another life if it came down to it.” It is reasonable to suppose that this too influenced her actions. 

Political ideologies like liberalism, socialism, and fascism have both these elements. They offer us a picture of the world—descriptive claims about what is going on. They also provide a set of values that help their adherents to determine what actions are right, or justified, either individually or collectively. It’s useful to distinguish between the two—descriptive and moral representations of the world—but they’re not fully separable. In Bukrym’s case, the values of gun ownership depend on descriptive claims about how dangerous the world is, and what an efficacious answer to that looks like. Conversely, holding these values may well have primed her to believe she was in a life-or-death moment, where another person might not have. 

The line from belief to action is crystal clear here. I think we can all at least imagine what was going through Bukrym’s head—and why she did what she did. In day-to-day, small-scale scenarios we have no problem understanding that what people think is true about the world will determine how they act. But people often struggle to see that the same thing is true in politics. 

Bukrym believing something false nearly killed her best friend, but similar false beliefs exist at scale and determine how people vote, what parties run on, and why nations go to war. Coleman probably did sincerely believe in serpent DNA, but beliefs every bit as intellectually indefensible are held by disturbingly large minorities of electorates and some of the most powerful people in the world.

Political beliefs are no different 

Most people will kill to protect themselves or their families. This is true on the personal level, but also on the national scale. It is a fair characterisation to say that Ukraine right now is facing a genocidal war of conquest from Russia. Civilians are killed. Children are kidnapped en masse. Based on that (correct) understanding of the world, many Ukrainians have fought and killed, when they would not have otherwise done so. Also on the basis of this descriptive understanding of the world, most western liberals (including myself), have used their political voice and their votes to urge their governments to assist Ukrainians in killing Russian combatants more effectively. 

That doesn’t suddenly stop for false representations of the world. There’s a reason eliminationist creeds will often stress threats to you or to your children: if you can convince people these dangers are real, the range of options they will support, or even participate in, expands radically. 

The objection is often made that when it comes to ‘extreme’ political views we shouldn’t interpret these literally—they are more just people signalling identity, or going along with what their group says. On this view, Trump supporters say “mass deportation now” not because they actually want it, but because it’s a slogan of their side. 

That objection takes something true and allows it to overwhelm everything else. All political beliefs have an identitarian component, because all people have a sense of their own identity. But this doesn’t mean that’s all that they are. A statement can be both an ingroup signifier and a sincere belief. Mostly people do not arrive at their representations of the world from a path of pure deductive reasoning. Our beliefs tend to start cautious and become confident. Saying or hearing something again and again makes it feel true. Voiced support for “mass deportation now” likely did start as going along with a group, or being edgy, for many Republicans. But over time it became a passionately held and actionable commitment. We become who we pretend to be.

The other big objection is that ordinary people might believe such things, but their leaders don’t. This is a pervasive and powerful narrative about neofascism: that it’s a ploy, or ‘distraction’ from what elites are really concerned with. ‘They keep us fighting a culture war to stop us fighting a class war.’ 

There’s a plethora of responses here: you can point out that this trivialises the suffering neofascism is already causing minorities, or that the new right has often harmed business interests (Brexit, tariffs, the Strait of Hormuz). I would also add that we have psychological reasons to doubt that having power necessarily makes people more instrumentally rational. It encourages the urge to humiliate, for instance, which can lead elites to behave in profoundly counterproductive ways. But let’s just go back to the building blocks of belief.

Elites, including the leaders of nations, are people. Like all people, they need to form descriptive and moral representations of the world. They would not be capable of thinking and acting without them. And, like all people’s, these representations can be wrong.

‘Mistakenly shooting a believed intruder’ incidents happen at the national level all the time. Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López became convinced by bad intelligence that his neighbors Brazil and Argentina were conspiring against him. This, together with an overestimation of his own military capacities, led him to launch a war that caused the alliance against him he had feared, the destruction of his country, and ultimately his own death. The standard progressive narrative on the 2003 Iraq War is that the Bush administration self-consciously lied in order to steal the oil. But I think the better analysis is that they were self-deceiving and had genuinely come to believe both that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that creating a democracy after the war would be easy. 

And anyone with even a passing interest in history will be able to name a half dozen national leaders with ‘lizard people’-type beliefs off the top of their head. Charles VI of France believed he was made of glass and would shatter if touched. Greek military officer Georgios Hatzianestis lost a war in 1922 owing to the same delusion. Stalin at one point embraced a bizarre pseudoscientific theory called Lysenkoism which held that genetics was a “bourgeois invention.” On this basis, thousands of biologists were purged and Soviet agricultural practices transformed, compounding famines in which millions died. Being hopelessly wrong does not mean a belief cannot be consequential. 

This is your brain on fascism

Political ideologies are both necessary and necessarily dangerous. Just as we have to form beliefs about the world in individual instances (is that shadowy figure an intruder or a roommate?), we have to have frameworks for larger questions. Should I vote; if so, for whom? My friends are going to a protest; should I join? 

Because beliefs guide action, they are dangerous. The liabilities of genuinely believing people around you are reptilian monsters should be obvious. In a more mundane way, being primed to see a ‘bad guy with a gun’ around every corner also makes you more likely to harm someone than you would be otherwise. What makes fascism so dangerous is it takes both these mechanics of belief and dials them up to 11 at scale. 

You don’t see the world this way—I’m just guessing, based on you being 2,500 words into an article in a magazine called Liberal Currents—so it can be very counterintuitive that other people do. You (likely) have a number of core liberal views such as the moral equality of persons, or that race does not determine ability. These are often tacit, sometimes operating at a subconscious, or semi-conscious level. Ideologies are interpretive lenses through which we make sense of our social and political worlds. And, like a pair of glasses you’ve been wearing so long you’ve forgotten you have them on, our core commitments can feel natural. We have to remind ourselves that we are indeed wearing glasses, and that not everyone sees the world this way. 

In the fascist worldview, the fundamental unit is the nation—the people—the true Volk. Fascists do not care about individual rights, but nor are they looking to raise welfare generally. The nation is not the state or existing institutions. Rather it is a group defined by race and culture. 

This, in many ways, is the core descriptive premise of fascism: only certain races can produce certain cultures. Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf claimed “All that we admire in the world to-day, its science, its art, its technical developments and discoveries, are the products of the creative activities of a few peoples.” By “peoples” he means racial groups. Hence, “The maintenance of civilization is wholly dependent on such peoples. Should they perish, all that makes this earth beautiful will descend with them into the grave.” He returns to this idea throughout the text and many of his arguments are premised on it. 

And it sounds quite…contemporary, doesn’t it? Quite Trump era. Something you’d hear from one of the more dressed-up new right commentators on Twitter. In the context of discussing Mexican migration, Stephen Miller posted “Civilization will not endure without the West. The West will not endure without the USA. And the USA will not endure without borders.” Same basic argument. Racial separateness (or ‘racial purity’ as a twentieth-century fascist would say) is required to sustain “the West,” which is required to sustain “civilization.” In response to an inoffensive Joe Biden post on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Miller claimed the then President was prioritising “diversity” (read ‘racial impurity’) over “the rule of law, patriotism, unity, the constitution, faith, civics, culture, assimilation, or any other foundation of society.”

In response to a story about the white share of New Zealand's population falling to 55.9%, Elon Musk posted “The doom of Western Civilization must be averted!” Again, same exact idea: Only white people can produce “Western Civilization,” so white people becoming a minority would destroy all the fruits of that. 

This is the core concern. ‘Immigration’ for neofascists is merely a way of talking about race—one that the media insists on taking at a preposterous face value. Rupert Lowe, the man Musk wants as British Prime Minister, decried how parts of Manchester had been “demographically vandalised,” saying “You could be standing in the middle of Pakistan.” He’s not bemoaning people’s immigration status; he’s seeing non-white faces. When ministers say they’re deporting ‘illegal immigrants,’ neofascists reply that they still see hundreds of them in the street. They’re not checking the papers of everyone they pass. They just mean non-white people. 

Why different races are thought to produce different types of culture varies a bit between types of fascism. In Mein Kampf Hitler claims it is a deduction from the past:“History furnishes us with innumerable instances that prove this law.” He actually got many of his ideas on race from occultist groups like the Thule Society, forerunners of the Nazis who believed the titular Thule (a Nordic Atlantis) was populated by God-men from whom the Aryans descended.

For neofascists, Charles Murray’s work—which claims there is a genetic component of general intelligence which is different between races—is an important formulation. Indeed, it is largely treated as settled science by them. It isn’t, but for fascists it reflects a truth that’s blindingly obvious. This is what Trump is referencing when he describes people as “low IQ,” an epithet he reserves almost exclusively for women of colour.

Musk has also endorsed this argument, sharing a post on “racial average differences” in intelligence arguing that there were such differences in cognition and that they were innate. “It’s just obvious if you’ve met three humans and are honest.” The pseudoscience varies by generation, what remains core is the claim that purportedly inferior races are both unable to produce or sustain high culture, and also threats to it. Having lower cognitive abilities means they are less able to solve problems without violence. This is a claim Murray has made many times. and Musk even has a theory as to why: In a post the hectobillionaire endorsed, Will Tanner explained that white Europeans’ superiority was the result of a successful eugenics experiment: “by hanging criminals for centuries, executing 1–2% of each generation until doing so became unnecessary because the crime genes had been weeded out.”

It’s at this point eyes roll up and out of the back of heads. These are not, to put it mildly, sensible ideas. The distancing instinct comes back: surely neofascists don’t believe that. But they do! Nothing else even begins to make sense of their behaviour. Musk posts about this stuff all the time, often dozens of times a day. I’m not highlighting the odd intemperate tweet. The man appears to be genuinely outraged by “white extinction.” He was advocating race riots in the UK as he became a trillionaire (a status he’s now lost). It is, at best, obsessive. While it is disgraceful that his open fascism hasn’t harmed his business prospects more, it also hasn’t helped him. There’s no ulterior motive here.

The same is true of the average neofascist. Voting for fascist parties has not advanced their material prospects. The parties themselves barely pretend to try to do so. The fascist resurgence is not primarily happening among the less affluent. What the followers ‘get out of it’ is more to do with status and standing—with having an identity affirmed—and being able to humiliate others. 

Those who went door to door in Belfast, attacking non-white people and burning their homes, did so because they believed the above picture of the world. They thought the presence of ‘immigrants’ in their communities was a threat to their culture, way of life, and physical safety. In other words, their stated motivations were their actual motivations.

Reason and emotion

I stress that because there can be a tendency in contemporary discussions to view fascism purely as a bundle of emotions, absent any set of ideas structuring them whatsoever. This, in itself, is nothing new. Almost as soon as fascism appeared on the world stage people have wanted to demark it in this way. “It has certain magical beliefs—leadership adoration, supremacy of the master Race,” German Marxist theorist Franz Neumann wrote in exile in 1944, “but [it] is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.”

And there is a similar sort of divide within modern scholarship, with many wanting to stress the emotional and/or psychological side. Robert Paxton, for instance, concludes his major book on fascist ideology by characterising “the ideas that underlie fascist actions” as “belong[ing] more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”

Obviously this is at least partially right. It would be preposterous to characterize fascism as a purely intellectual exercise. All ideologies have an emotive component. I often stress the passionate, caring, optimistic, adventurous sides of liberalism because there can be a tendency to view the creed as bloodless and bookish. For fascism however I fear we go too far the other way, often forgetting that there’s any framework to it at all.

What Paxton talks of as “mobilizing passions” are, to my eye, very clearly also representations of the world that form a structured framework. For example: “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies” has a moral component (justifying action), an emotional one (victimhood), but also a descriptive empirical one (an assessment of the level of threat you face).

I think theorists of fascism can be misled by the fact that it does not have bookshelves of theory behind it in the way that liberalism, socialism, and feminism do. But not all ideologies have this. Conservatism largely doesn’t. Plenty of religions are based more on practice than close reading of texts, but they still have a framework of ideas for how the world works.

And even for ideologies that do have such a bookshelf, I think we can massively overstate the day-to-day importance of such theory. Socialism has theory, but in terms of how most of its adherents are thinking most of the time, what they’re using are much simpler high-level heuristics. The framing ‘they keep us fighting a culture war to stop us fighting a class war’ that I criticized earlier would be one example, ‘our politicians are captured by the power of big money’ another. These derive from and operationalize a small number of central values (or “core concepts”), and so tend to form a satisfying picture of the world, that allows an adherent to feel like they understand what is going on. 

Such simplification is both necessary and useful. Ideologies need to be actionable. We can’t be sent scurrying back to do a literature review whenever we have to make a decision.

So if we ask, ‘is there neofascist theory?,’ the answer is ‘kinda, but not really.’ There are individual ideas that catch on, like Murray’s bell curve or Gad Saad’s “suicidal empathy,” not to mention a lot of scraps of internet pseudoscience floating around. There are various attempts to build an intellectual framework for ‘post-liberalism,’ but I’m not sure how influential any of them have been. They seem to be more following the movement rather than leading it. There is a literary tradition here—but the core texts are posts, blogs, and memes more than academic tomes. 

But if you consider neofascism at the level most ideologies are operating at most of the time, a framework of ideas is clearly visible. 

Seven key neofascist narratives 

Neofascism’s defining features are a set of core values—the nation, masculinity, violence, restoring a mythic past—and key narratives built around these that form a functional and actionable picture of the world. There is of course judgment and interpretation in coming to a concise list, but this is a distillation of what they say, not what I am reading into it.

I postulate seven key neofascist narratives. These are:

1. Only white people can produce and sustain the highest culture (“Western Civilization”).
2. The different racial-cultural nations are necessarily in zero-sum, violent conflict. 
3. Violent masculinity is needed to save white nations (and hence civilization).
4. Women are not capable of this. Their role is to breed the race, not lead it.
5. Because our leadership has become feminised and corrupted, white nations have been contaminated by contact with inferior races.
6. A political purge is required, followed by a society-wide purge of the contaminating elements.
7. This will restore the white racial-cultural nations to their previous (mythic) glory.

This is not quite how a neofascist would say these. Like all groups, they have their own internal jargon, so I’ve somewhat translated them into everyday English. 

The first narrative I’ve spent some time on. It serves two functions: first, it refocuses almost any issue back to race. ‘You care about scientific development, community, the arts?’ neofascism asks. ‘OK, those things are Western, white, they require a certain type of culture, and a certain type of demographic foundation.’ 

The second function is more specific to neofascism. Being able to move seamlessly back and forth between race and culture, or use culture as a stand-in for race, allows the ideology to mask itself—useful in an age when one cannot yet openly claim the fascist label. “I am not a racist I am a culturalist,” John Cleese (of “Monty Python” fame) posted recently, explaining his recent anti-migrant posting and decision to endorse Robert Lowe. “I prefer cultures that do not advocate stoning, pederasty, wife beating, female genital mutilation, and beheading opponents.”

Culture is real, and we can meaningfully talk about cultural differences (I’m not a relativist in that respect). But as a liberal pluralist, I’m inclined to see people as individuals who have multiple identities, and who chose their own characters and beliefs against that backdrop. Cleese is looking at the world through fascist glasses; these show only ‘nations’ as the fundamental units. Even if these are somehow only defined by culture, not race, he’s still assuming almost a hive mind, with the foreign, non-Western hive minds being necessarily violent and destructive. “It’s not radical Islam. It’s just Islam,” claims a post Cleese shared, which shows women being brutalised. Pretty bizarre, if you have the individualist glasses on, to assume women being beaten must agree with the ideology justifying it. Or that those fleeing repressive regimes must agree with their repression and seek to replicate them here. But that’s how the world looks to them. 

If the first narrative allows neofascism to speak to high-minded reason, the second provides it with more visceral appeal. They are trying to kill you and take your children. This flows directly from the ‘racial-cultural nation’ belief and is a central claim in any type of fascism. 

Hitler wrote of preserving civilization: “He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.” Musk endlessly shares images and videos of violent crimes with migrant or Black perpetrators and white victims. “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” Musk said, speaking remotely to a large anti-immigrant rally in the UK. “It’s in their genes,” Trump said of migrants crossing the southern border. “You know now a murder, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Stephen Miller gave the point a biblical gloss, quoting Deuteronomy 30:19, “Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live,” as a “timely message for the West.” 

In all forms of fascism the threat is portrayed as sexual. The threat non-white men pose to white women was a pathological fixation of proto-fascisms like the American ‘Southern civil religion,’ Nazi rhetoric, and is a fixture of neofascism. “Deport the third world rapists” is a common phrase of Rupert Lowe. ‘Third world’—or “third world savages,” to quote a Lowe post Musk shared—is an increasingly common term in neofascism. It should just be read as ‘racially inferior,’ rather than literally pertaining to a geographic region or national origin—a point Musk explicitly clarified, agreeing with a post that read “the third world is a people, not a place.” Likewise, the neofascist conception of ‘illegal alien’ or even ‘immigrant’ is broader than the formal legal meaning of those terms. Isn’t it a contradiction for Musk to rail against immigrants when he is one? Many ask. It is by our definition, but not by his.  

To progressives this—a movement centrally concerned with preventing rape that is almost exclusively led by rapists—can seem like a contradition. But it isn’t. The fascist concern is about property, not protection. When they talk of “third world savages” raping white women, they believe those victims are theirs, in a collective racial sense. It’s about control of a reproductive asset, not concern for people. From this perspective, mixed-race relationships and the rape of white women and children are examples of the same thing: property crimes against white men. That’s why wild claims of immigrant rapists go hand in hand with hysteria about falling white birthrates. This is a connection Saad and Musk have made explicit with the idea of a civilization itself being raped. 

In this life-or-death struggle men, violent masculine men, are needed to secure the women and children, the race, and civilization itself. “In order to preserve a certain culture, the type of manhood that creates such a culture must be preserved,” Hitler wrote. “Strong men make good times” is a common trope of neofascists. Musk called for “the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival.”

Neofascism also holds the converse: that “Women are not suitable for dealing with the amount of violence necessary to maintain civilization” they are “wired to care for babies” instead. This narrative (#4 on my list) informs neofascists’ thesis (#5) for what has gone wrong with ‘the West’ (read: the white racial-cultural nations), which is women voting, women leading, and men being effeminate. All such non-masculinity has allowed racial entropy to occur, either by being insufficiently violent towards domestic racial underclasses (gotta cull out those ‘crime genes’) or by allowing ‘third world savages’ (the racially inferior) into the country. “In order to save this country we are probably going to have to do things that make women sad :(” Twitter user PubWanghaf posted, to which Musk replied “true words.”  “Suicidal empathy”—to take Gaad’s phrase that Musk loves—is also heavily gendered in this way. Trump has said he’ll protect Western women whether “the women like it or not.”

At the same time, in taking on male roles, white women have abandoned their natural one: to breed the white race. Remember, because overwhelmingly white-majority nations are the foundation of ‘Western civilisation’, and because the racially inferior will kill all the whites if given the chance, this is an existential problem. One that neofascists rail against endlessly. 

And in this we can see the functional purpose that antisemitism plays in fascism. Put simply: if white men are so superior, how have white racial nations allowed themselves to be tricked in such a way? The answer tends to be to imagine a racial-cultural nation that has the intelligence of whites—it would have to—but that hates the white nations and wishes to destroy them. And that’s the Jews.

Here we see a significant difference between neofascism and twentieth-century fascism: the Nazis put their antisemitism front and centre. Neofascists are definitely antisemitic, but they tend not to lead with that, instead drawing people in with attacks on trans people and migrants while reserving the Jewish conspiracy stuff for the initiated. (Although we may note Musk has agreed with posts accusing Jews of “hatred against whites.” He also shared a post reiterating the old Nazi myth that Jews encourage whites to interbreed with other races, while not doing so themselves.)

So what has to happen? Simply and obviously existing leadership must be purged, violent white men given back their rightful position, and the racially inferior elements expelled or exterminated (#6). This will restore the racial nation to what it once was (#7). This is where fascism is both stupider and stranger than is commonly supposed. The racial-cultural nation is incipient, not actually real. The greatness of white people has been subdued, buried under effeminate leadership and ‘racial entropy.’

In all cases fascism looks back to a mythic past: noble Germanic warriors along the Rhine, pure-blooded Anglo-Saxons, square-jawed American settlers moving west, ugly AI pastiches of white suburban families from corporate ads of decades past. What never was must be made real again. Fascism is hence a project of total transformation—the painful, necessarily violent, rebirthing of the white racial-cultural nations. 

While neofascism seeks to displace liberalism and democracy, we should not see it as reducible to that. It has its own vision of the world, its own positive project. Despite seeming like the older creed, fascism is a creature of modernity, but isn’t just a reaction to it. Rather, like socialism, its vision is to some degree enabled by modernity—it is a picture of what to do with affluence and rapidly changing technological capacity. Aristotle imagined an elevated intellectual existence, but only for a leisurely elite. What if, Marxism asked, industrialisation and technology could make that life possible for everyone? In a similar way, fascism asks, what if the joys of crushing others, of the martial spirit, heroic myth, and an ideal of purity could be expanded from a warrior aristocracy to the racial-cultural nation as a whole? 

These seven key narratives form the framework through which neofascists interpret the world. Together they form a functionally coherent whole, a story about the nature of things that follows on from itself, and eases its adherents past its falsehoods and contradictions. 

This is why there are clear liabilities to considering neofascism purely as a creature of emotion. There’s a pervasive tendency to view being a fascist or a racist as functionally equivalent to just being an asshole, and that isn’t right. “Well, I don’t tend to campaign by going around calling people names,” former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer responded when asked if he thought Reform Leader Nigel Farage was a racist. A telling response. To him, it’s just a rude word, not a description of someone’s beliefs.

Reducing neofascism to emotion and personality goes hand in hand with an exculpatory move that centrists always make, in which someone cannot be a racist if they are nice, or friendly, or funny in other domains. If one reads ‘racist’ merely as ‘asshole,’ this makes sense. To my mind, it’s an utter non sequitur, like saying someone cannot be a flat-earther because they’re fun to have a pint with. We tend to associate bigotry with unthinking ‘hatred,’ but there is often a structure of ideas behind it, however false or pernicious. 

As much as anything, I think considering fascism purely as a creature of emotion can mislead us as to just how dangerous it is. Emotions are fickle, transient. I might hurt someone in anger, but then stop if they plead with me. However, if I believe that someone will always be a threat to me, that their pleading for mercy is lies, that as soon as I stop attacking they’ll kill my family, then I won’t stop. If I have an insect infestation in my house, I will keep killing them for as long as it takes to solve the problem because of my beliefs about the moral value of their lives relative to my own. And you would too. You—nice, liberal, tolerant, open-minded, respectful—would, in the right circumstances, close the gas chamber doors.

It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s also nothing we didn’t already know. It should caution, but not unduly trouble us. Yes, you could be a Nazi. But that is just to say if you were a different person you would indeed be a different person. The takeaway shouldn’t be abstract angst about the soul of man, but a more mundane realisation that ideas matter. 

The worst fascist crimes can often be framed as a profound mystery: ‘how did ordinary people support such evil?’ Without in any way trivializing the harm done, I find this reaction a little overwrought. What fascists do, or attempt to do, follows clearly and straightforwardly from their beliefs.

Put differently, imagine if the above key narratives were actually true. What actions, in that hypothetical, would become necessary?

The consequences of fascist beliefs 

In the history of fascism we see, again and again, not wild emotion overriding reason, but people reasoning from their key narratives to override their feelings of sympathy for others.

Heinrich Himmler, in a speech to SS officers in 1943, said of the mass killing of Jews, “Each of us shuddered and yet each of us knew clearly that the next time he would do it again if it were an order, and if it were necessary.” And it had been necessary, he said; even if they lost the war this was a great thing they had done; “we have carried out this most difficult of tasks in a spirit of love for our people.”

Oskar Gröning, who had worked at Auschwitz, explained in an interview after the war that he had found it difficult, and asked for a transfer (which was refused), but “we had been convinced by our worldview that we had been betrayed by the entire world and that there was a great conspiracy of the Jews against us.” What about children, asked his interviewer. Surely they couldn’t have done anything to you? “They’re not the enemy at the moment,” he replied. “The enemy is the blood inside them. The enemy is the growing up to be a Jew that could become dangerous.”

The same logic that drove Matthew Coleman to murder his own children—a collective self-defense claim, wrapped in fantastical nonsense. 

We have been considering Hitler as a political writer thus far in this essay, but he would of course go on to lead a regime that intentionally murdered 17 million people—Jews, Eastern Europeans, Roma, LGBT individuals, prisoners of war, the disabled, and others deemed unworthy of life—in the space of a few years.

A full detailing of the decision making that led to the Holocaust is well beyond the scope of this essay, but we may note a few things. First, that decision making was both top-down and middle-out: Hitler made plain he wanted extermination, but much of the impetus also came from senior officers innovating. The Nazis experimented and adapted in order to achieve their vision. Like neofascists, they started by pressuring the purportedly racially inferior to leave by themselves, then moved to floating large population transfers (such as sending Europe’s Jews to Madagascar). Then they moved to mass murder after these were found to be infeasible at scale. Finally, Nazi leadership would prioritize the Holocaust over other goals, including, in the final resort, the survival of the state. From the Führer to the rank and file putting victims on trains, people were generally ideologically bought in—often fanatically so.

We in the 21st century are no different. Imagine you believe—actually believe—that your life and the lives of those around you are in immediate danger. That you are experiencing something like a home invasion at the national level. That your wife and daughters will be raped and your society destroyed unless you act. What would you do? 

Well, you would act, wouldn’t you?

If those were the stakes, you’d empower any political faction willing to protect you and your society. If some sort of regime change had to happen, then it would have to happen. You might well be willing to take action yourself, to kill even, because people generally are willing to kill to protect themselves and their families. And today, people are being told, again and again, on social media and in mainstream media, that they are in this position, and some number are coming to believe it. 

Imagine you think—as Elon Musk clearly does—that all of human civilization is dependent on maintaining pure-blooded white people as a significant portion of the world’s population, and keeping them in charge of, and the overwhelming majority within, its most powerful states. What political agenda would follow from that? Well, if that were true, then a demographic purge of those states would be desirable. Ethnic cleansing of that scale is not possible with our existing political systems, so those systems would need to be done away with.

This is what Musk wants—and is very overtly telling us he wants. In the UK he supports Rupert Lowe’s breakaway party, Restore UK—something of an umbrella for the openly fascist/neo-Nazi elements of UK society. Their platform calls for, as one might suspect, the deportation of all illegal migrants. But Lowe goes much further. His catchphrase—oft repeated on X and in his party’s policy documents—is “millions must go.” Estimates of irregular migration in the UK vary, but the total number here without authorisation is likely somewhere in the mid-hundred thousands. Does Lowe (and with him Musk) mean to deport yet larger numbers of legal residents?

Yes. Quite openly so. This is one area where the British right is now arguably more extreme than the American right. Trump ran on mass deportations of undocumented Americans and then expanded that, for instance by attempting to destroy birthright citizenship. In the UK, both Reform, and even the purportedly mainline Tories, are already at the next step: proposing deportations of legal residents at scale. 

Restore takes this to its logical conclusion. A person who has made a life in the UK, but was born abroad, would be deported if they are “unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime or actively hates our way of life.” This is hopelessly vague but would be stretched to cover most-to-all foreign-born Brits. Does “crime” mean any crime? Apparently. The focus is, naturally, on immigrant sex crimes against British women and girls, but the policy is also explicit that it includes “fly tipping”—illegal dumping of household waste (no, really). And “fails to integrate” simply makes perceived cultural difference a deportable offense.

And that is unusual, even for far-right authoritarians. The closest analogue in the modern era is Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population. The famously insane tyrant forced out 80,000 legal residents in the ’70s. Britain has a foreign-born population of around 13 million. When Lowe says, and Musk shares, “millions must go,” they are calling for an act of ethnic cleansing over 100 times that size. 

What seems to be being envisaged is a fascist coup followed by the imprisonment or execution of the prior political class, then an ethnic cleansing of the British Isles roughly comparable, in absolute terms, to the partition of India. Which involved 12 to 20 million displaced, and up to 2 million killed.

And this, the total harm endured in the bloody separation of a subcontinent, would just be the UK. Remember that Musk also has ambitions for Germany, France, and every ‘white’ nation. Assuming something similar for all of Europe, and we’re easily into or exceeding World War Two-level numbers. Enforced from above by secret police, fueled from below by endless rolling waves of pogroms. Neighbour against neighbour as the entire continent burns. 

“America after 100 million deportations” the Department of Homeland Security posted over a (stolen) image of a peaceful beach. There are not 100 million immigrants of any kind in the US, but the caption clarified: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” Readers should be able to make the appropriate translation: 100 million is around the size of America’s non-white population. 

Words mean different things in different ideologies. Likewise, for ‘deportation’—when neofascist political leaders call for the ‘deportation’ of non-white political opponents I don’t think they’re imagining putting them on a commercial airline to a welcoming homeland. The administration loves to broadcast (and I suspect the principals love to watch) dehumanizing videos of deportees shackled together, en route to a foreign prison notorious for torture and deaths. When neofascists say ‘deport,’ we should probably read something like ‘disappear.’ 

And this is happening. People are being rounded up on the basis of race in America right now. People are dying in ICE detention centers right now, or being disappeared into foreign prisons. Stephen Miller is a crank internet fascist, and he’s also one of the most powerful men in the country. “Miller’s obsession with sheer numbers…borders on pathological,” Greg Sagent wrote. “Miller has repeatedly raged at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for arrest numbers he deems too low.” 

While the Trump administration doesn’t currently have the capacity to do Holocaust-level numbers, that very clearly is the ambition of men like Miller. They are pushing the existing infrastructure to the max, and rapidly increasing its scope. If they are successful in shaking off political and institutional constraints, they will run into the same feasibility ones the Nazis did—where to send 100 million ‘third world’ Americans to—and they will come up with the same solution. Practically, there is no category step from here to there. Deaths already happening from neglect and abuse will increase and transition into something more systematic.

To the extent their plans have stalled or been thwarted it is because they have been opposed. Because Americans gave their time, energy, sanity, and literal lives to stop them. It is a poor repayment for complacent columnists to argue that the fruits of these sacrifices prove no sacrifice was ever needed. That those resisters’ wins mean that we now should stop resisting—or at the very least quiet down. The neofascists have said and shown very clearly what it is they want. They will keep going. 

There is no ulterior motive in doubling down on death and deportations. They sincerely believe that the white race, the bearers of civilization, are under existential threat and must defend themselves. That all of our existing social and political institutions must be destroyed or remade. And they are bringing a large chunk of the electorate with them, with “mass deportation now” going from fringe rhetoric to a rallying cry for the base. 

From home invasion to dehumanisation

These converts are inducted into neofascism through prosaic ‘home invasion’ representations of the world. However its most fundamental beliefs—those that sustain it, that are felt to justify its horrific actions, that motivate men like Miller and Musk—are decidedly on the ‘lizard people’ side. Fascists believe that some races cannot produce higher learning and will invariably violently destroy it. Another way of saying this is that the people of those races are not fully human.

All forms of fascism embrace this conclusion. Trump has regularly called migrants “animals” and “not human.” Portraying purportedly inferior races as vermin was a staple of Nazi propaganda. This follows logically from their core descriptive beliefs about the world, and is functionally useful: by associating some people with animals, fascism’s followers start, implicitly or explicitly, putting those people in a different moral category. One not worthy of our concern. The contemporary British public has been inundated with images of migrants as an infestation, a horde, a swarm. The result? When a story breaks of refugees drowning crossing the Channel, the response, to the deaths of vulnerable people, is laugh emojis. Thousands of laugh emojis. 

People of course are not rats, or lice, or cockroaches. But fascist ideology adapts to that. Matthew Coleman’s children were not actually serpents, but the theory claimed that these reptilians were able to take human form. Dehumanising worldviews make the obvious humanity of their victims a feature, not a bug, by portraying them as both human and animal. This works for the same reason that a werewolf is more frightening than a wolf—it represents both a physical and metaphysical threat. 

After the US civil war, the proto-fascist Southern ‘civil religion’ frequently described Black men as demonic, a language that persists in white evangelical Trump supporters to this day. The vampire was a common representation of the Jew in Nazi propaganda. Musk is merely reflecting a very common trope of internet neofascism when he endlessly likens immigrants to orcs from Lord of the Rings. More recently, he’s also shared images of refugees side-by-side with videos of zombies being gunned down. 

Imagine for a second you’re the hero of some supernatural action thriller movie, a Van Helsing fighting off vampires or werewolves. That’s how bought-in fascists see the world. What you’re doing is not just necessary, it’s awesome. You’re the hero for doing it! We white liberals appear to them as the human vampire helpers, pathetically aiding the monsters, not realising we’ll ultimately be eaten. 

Again, a ‘lizard people’-level representation of the world. The hurdle here is getting over the sheer stupidity of it. This is what people like Musk, Trump, Miller, and Lowe are telling us they believe. The logical consequences are what they are telling us they want to do. And they are doing everything they can to move us towards that. 

These guys, really? 

“USAID funding was central to the creation of COVID-19” Musk posted recently, amid a dozens-of-tweets-a-day binge defending his actions in various nonsensical ways and lashing out at critics. Lowe has a long-running feud with the British Dental Association, he posts huge blocks of text about it regularly. JD Vance lectured the Pope about theology as Trump posted memes of himself as Jesus. 

Admit it, you always thought the personification of evil would be cooler and cleverer than this, didn’t you? 

Movie villains are usually more engaging than the hero, or at the very least, they’re intelligent and capable. So we expect the villains of our age to be likewise. One of the most common comments I get is that I’m taking these guys too seriously, getting worked up over the ravings of a “fat ket addict". Daniel Drezner (gently) criticized my work with Greg Sargent on Elon Musk, arguing his Economist interview showed less a confident expression of fascist ideals, and more a man unable to answer basic questions: “I guess I see it differently: the negative feedback that Musk received after the interview caused him to lose it over on his hellsite.”

It’s both. Musk isn’t thinking clearly, but he’s dangerous in many ways precisely because he’s not thinking clearly. The man already has a body count in, at least, the hundreds of thousands. Yes, there were all sorts of gaps and contradictions in his responses, but that doesn’t change the fact that many millions of people believed what he was saying. Him ‘losing it’ on his website could have been a juvenile tantrum, but all of the leading new-right figures backed him. He wasn’t caught out in front of them. They are creating their own reality. 

Think about the people you know who’ve done the most harm to yourself or someone you know. Rapists and abusers are often deeply unimpressive people. We’ve all met that person who just constantly lies, turning friend groups against each other. They’re usually tightly wound up, in their own heads, interacting with a world significantly different to the one you’re in. Someone I knew once recounted to me a case of grooming and pedophilia that had happened in their workplace. When it came to light, what struck them was how incredibly stupid the perpetrator had been. “You expect the Devil to be clever,” she told me. “Then you meet them. And they’re not.”

Some take this further, arguing that because neofascists haven’t accomplished all their goals, this somehow proves they can’t. Or maybe even that these weren’t their goals to begin with. Zachary Karabell, in a response to me, wrote of the contemporary United States “we most certainly still have a nation of laws.” Trump was bad, sure, but couldn’t be a fascist because the midterm elections were still likely to be free and fair. “That is not fascism. That is American democracy.”

A touch optimistic. But even accepting Karabell’s rosy description, we should, I would suggest, be cautious of a criterion for fascism that would rule out the actual Nazis until around 1933. If you can only cry fascist as you’re being dragged to a death camp, is it not a little late at that point? Further, the implication of this argument isn’t just that fascism isn’t real, but that no other belief system is either. That no one really believes anything. If an ideology must achieve all its goals before it can be named, then so much for liberalism, socialism, democratic socialism, feminism, communism, libertarianism, green politics, social justice, mainstream conservativism, and anarchism. 

A big part of such denialism is just conformism—not wanting to be seen as ‘hysterical’—and an instinctive unwillingness to criticize the powerful too hard. For those who do understand that these are evil men, but still find it counter-intuitive that they actually, genuinely believe in the ‘lizard people’ stuff, I think it’s because this reveals an uneasy and unstable world. 

Wake up

Our current circumstance is indeed a strange one. We are fighting a representation of the world that is insane. Hundreds of millions could die because of ideas intellectually and morally equivalent to the ‘lizard people’ conspiracy theory. 

This is not a trick, or a ploy for some other end. There is no one pulling the strings, no mastermind who can be reasoned with, no cynical Moriarty who can call it all off. The leaders are even more deranged than the followers.

Neofascism can be beaten. Its advance relies on our acquiescence. And our acquiescence comes from not having taken its measure. From willfully ignoring the very obvious enemy we are faced with. From assuming they cannot possibly really believe it.

But they do. And the response to their delusions can’t be delusions of our own—of a tamer, saner world where things will go on much as they ever did.

We’re in a new reality now. And we have to face it head on. 

Featured image is Alfred Kubin, "Serpent God" (1902–03).