6) And here we come back to Roger Ailes and from Ailes to Carlson to Nagle, and from Nagle to the mass shootings this past weekend. This stochastic terrorism, this nihilistic murderousness is indeed qualitatively different from the more organized party-like Klan or Neo-Nazi movement of the past. Yet this fascism-from-below is merely an appearance, it is being manipulated in time-honored decentralized fashion, through information warfare. And that information warfare is not some Russian plot to destabilize America, though it may well have some connections to the emerging right wing international that certainly has Russian as well as Beltway ties. That information warfare, rather, is against not so much the Left as such but any and all left and even liberal reform, to strip rights that have been won and to repress the population, to defend and continue the programs of international apartheid and concentration camps from Texas to Xinjiang. An intrinsic part of this new model is violence from below precipitated by incitement from above - take what has already happened in Brazil and Honduras, for example. So while it is indeed important for us to understand the changing face of fascist violence, we also need to understand that it is happening for a reason. That old magick, that old hauntin’ spectre.

True believers like Ailes or for that matter Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson may be cynical and fundamentally financially motivated yet they are a foundational part of an emerging right wing international, an emergent fusionist common sense, “beyond left and right” as the saying goes but in truth brutally anti-socialist and anti-communist. Thus the ongoing attacks on socialism, AOC, the “squad’ and so on. And part of the emergent fusionist common sense is precisely the type of terrorism witnessed in El Paso, Dayton and Galway. There are those that point out that the Dayton shooter seemed to be a Democrat, a Warren supporter, even someone who posted left-wing material on his Twitter account. Yet the particular bar he attacked was known to be multi-racial and queer-accepting, perhaps even a gay bar. The presence of queerphobia on the Left is not news, but what it accompanies is instructive. As well, with the continued popularity of the wretched Ben Norton/Max Blumenthal analysis of international affairs (admired by Nagle), a lot of what passes for left “analysis” is pretty damned reactionary – and also essentially indistinguishable from the narratives coming from the likes of Tucker Carlson. The long and short of it is that while detached from the overall pattern of manifesto writing 8Chan and 4Chan posting lul-seekers, the Dayton shooter must be counted as part of this pattern. Indeed a paradigmatic case for an understanding of what is of particular concern to the organized (and disorganized) left.

7) And so with Fox News or with Nagle, or with Nagle on Fox News, I hate the band but the fans are worse. For real, though. As shown in Loudest Voice, Fox News are just a bunch of DC hacks, and there are some incredibly sad stories of idealistic young conservative women destroyed by the rapists Ailes and O’Reilly. But Fox News set in motion an atmosphere, during the first few years of the Bush administration that was as authoritarian and pro-police state as anything ever seen on American media. Successive attempts to dial it down by the sober Rupert Murdoch never succeeded, and later it pioneered vicious and racist attacks on Barack Obama. Make no mistake, Obama is not our friend. But the campaign to delegitimize him as a socialist Muslim who was not really American and was friends with terrorists like Bill Ayers may not have denied him the election, but that was not the point. The point, to Ailes, and his passing the birther information to Trump was to awaken the slumbering beast of American racism and anti-socialist, anti-left thought from below. Top reactionaries genuinely believed their own bullshit about Obama. And it worked, witness the wave of terrorist murder of African Americans by police unanswerable to the federal government increasing exponentially during Obama’s presidency. Witness the terrorist pigs with their “I Can Breathe” T-Shirts. Pig racism is nothing new, but they were empowered by the emergent reaction. As social rights were hard won or gained back during the relative social thaw of Obama, so increased animosity pumped out against people of colour in general and African Americans in particular, Muslims, LGBTQI folks. Anti-Semitism even crept back into the mainstream.. And meanwhile, the apparently “socialist” Obama was not doing a goddamned thing to ameliorate these human catastrophes that got worse under his presidency. To wit, as the “deporter in chief”, he laid Trump’s groundwork at the southern border.

8) Obama, like Bernie Sanders and even some Leftists, not just Nagle, but some sincere (and misguided) Leftists, was for “comprehensive immigration reform” and against open borders. This is not the place or time to rehearse what should not be a debate, especially among socialists. But here is where we find the common ground between Trump, Obama, Carlson and Nagle, and why Nagle’s fans, those denizens of StupidPol on Reddit, given their existence as a coherent stratum of the Left, are the danger that we need to address. Nuance is important when parsing out differences between why person A, person B and person C all have the same political line when abstracting out particularities, yet seem different when those particularities are in place. Engaging all of this within the context of a philosophy of internal relations, or dialectical reason allows us to connect the dots not in a positivist sense but in a sense of affinity and memesis. Of course, a contrarian gadfly, a bowtied preppy fascist and a wonkish Neibuhr fan are different. We can’t go conflating widely divergent political positions as “red/brown” or “social fascist” lightly and we should absolutely avoid the latter term. Obama was not a fascist, obviously, nor were the social democrats of Weimar, who made plenty of errors that led to the rise of fascism but did not deserve that Third Period epithet. But we - do – need to examine the very real emergent fusionist common sense has for years been making overtures to the Left. Recall that Steve Bannon cultivated a relationship with left figures and gave an interview to the Social Democratic American Prospect. And left figures, in particular, “tankies” often appear in right wing media. But this is not about tracing out institutional ties and “fascist creep” as it is about an emergent common sense and how that common sense is being weaponized in the multi-faceted present fascist offensive.