The day after “Red Scare Pod and the Crypto Nexus” was published, I received an email from someone named Leonard Evans. The email said, “Photographs of Dasha Nekrasova with imperialist mercenary Brace Belden in which she is seen drawing on a woman’s face and posing with an SS flag.”

It was an apt description of the attached photos.

I added them to the original post and tweeted about it. The photos bolstered the case I had made in several important ways. It also caused an influx of traffic to the post; a lot more people read it than otherwise would have.

The next day something surprising happened. Dasha posted on Twitter that she herself had sent the photos under an alias as a ‘prank.’

Not only was Dasha not ashamed of a photo of her with an SS flag, she had willfully circulated it to the largest possible audience. Dasha knew that this photo would be attached to her name and follow her for the rest of her life, and decided in a span of less than a day that she was cool with that.

She later deleted the Tweet. When asked why she deleted it, she responded, “My CIA handler told me to.”

Actions and Reactions

So far, none of the evidence presented in “Red Scare Pod and the Crypto Nexus” has been disputed or refuted. There has, however, been a wide variety of attempts at distraction and deflection, and many other, uh, interesting responses. Here’s a quick survey:

Two people, including an apparent old friend of Dasha’s, thought that criticizing someone for using Nazi imagery was callous and lacked nuance.

One person waded in to assert that Nazi imagery is a part of their family heritage that they have every right to “honor”:

Multiple people, including an apparent Socialist group, explained that it was mocking or sarcasm. One person seemed to suggest that using Nazi imagery is simply part of a long, cherished art tradition. I would ask why that tradition exists.

A few people insisted that this work was personal, jealous ‘hating.’ Now, I’m no social expert, but this sure seems like a difficult and backwards way of getting invited to parties with these extremely cool, enviable people. (Note: it’s unclear if the account pictured is actually run by AK).

Jeff Bezos propagandist Liz Bruenig responded to the revelation of her compatriot circulating a photo of herself with an SS flag the same way any of us normal people would, with no denouncement or distancing whatsoever, and a light joke:

Yep, extremely normal stuff. Nothing to worry about.

Most of the boring irony shitposters responded exactly the way you’d expect, doing their jobs shutting down discourse and debate by joining with ‘ironic’ fascists to dismiss or mock me and others as ‘crazy’:

“Commie Cadet” Spenser Rapone, the U$ soldier who made a remarkably sheepdip-like ‘exit’ from the military and immediate launch into a ‘Left’ media career, made an entrance to joke around with Dasha, and made his own tweet deriding me as ‘unhinged.’ Apparently his mission to obliterate any internal movement against U.$. imperialism by making us all sympathetic to the military isn’t enough fascist entryism for him, so he’s got to pile on with the ‘irony’ fascists to defend SS flags, too. (archived)

Many people on Twitter responded to Dasha’s revelation that she had emailed the pictures by following her lead and insisting that I had been tricked or one-upped. That doesn’t make sense, but knowing this crowd, it doesn’t have to. I would’ve shared the picture regardless of who sent it; it’s a picture of her with an SS flag. Sadly, her followers’ response to this only reveals how locked into irony-poisoning and groupthink they are, blindly following, no longer capable of seeing events for what they really are.

Context Matters

A few people defended this stunt on the grounds that Jewish people could reclaim the SS flag. Unfortunately, available context doesn’t favor that as an excuse. As blog commenter Homer wrote:

sure maybe dasha owning an ss flag is some kind of extremely sophisticated attempt to grapple with her own intergenerational trauma, as somebody asserted on twitter in her defense, but when you look at the people who hang out [in] her mentions on twitter or on reddit that’s not what they’re getting out of it. they just like that she’s created a space for them to use the r-word or indulge in whatever gross white-supremacist, bourgeois bad habits they don’t want to let go of.

Well stated. But does it hold up? Well, several days after it all went down, I checked in on the Red Scare subreddit. Someone had shared a homemade spoof of Red Scare guest Angela Nagle’s book cover to make it about Angela being able to say the n-word, and featuring a picture of watermelon, which is a racist trope. So they have a single bad fan, right? If only. The post had received 71 upvotes. That means a net 71 people on the Red Scare subreddit thought that this horrible racist joke was funny (the original image does not censor the n-word).

If you had any remaining doubt that ‘ironic’ fascist media just attracts and organizes fascists, I hope this will remove that doubt.

The Impact

As discussed in the original post, all of this acts as a kind of infiltration or entryism. How can such a sizable group of ‘Socialists’ be entertained by a racist joke and want to express that? How can people tell when something is just ‘ironically’ fascist or actually fascist? Why does it feel like the whole point is to make it impossible and undesirable to distinguish that? Again – where does the ‘ironic’ fascism end and the Socialism begin? How can we ever believe anything that these people say when their whole game relies on it never being clear whether they’re being serious or ‘just ironic’?

As my Twitter mutual John noted pithily,

“it’s incredibly telling how they could ‘ironically’ goose-step through the Auschwitz museum and their followers would march right along with them.”

‘Ironic’ fascist imagery desensitizes us to the severity of the topics at hand. It can change our mentality and behavior without us realizing. Studies show that a joke is never just a joke. What happens when the fanbases of these ‘ironically’ fascist media ventures gather around together, make racist jokes together, start getting ideas? If you are following all of this and don’t see a problem here, it might be time to take a step back and reassess.