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1. The linked article by @ebruenig is characteristically thoughtful, and should provoke a conversation about how Nazism and trolling aren't mutually exclusive. In fact Nazism has always had a large element of half-joking.
2. This is something Sartre noticed in 1944: Nazis rhetoric often includes absurd jokey flourishes, to better destabilize reality. From Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew": 
3. Lately I've been reading (in my madness) a fair bit of Wyndham Lewis, who was both a very funny writer and also, for a spell in the early 1930s, a Nazi fellow traveller. Those two facts are connected.
4. In the 1920s, Lewis styled himself "The Enemy" and was in fact a master troll whose insults managed to get under the skin of everyone from James Joyce to Virginia Woolf to Ernest Hemingway.
5. Lewis called Hemingway "the Dumb Ox." Hemingway remembered and in his posthumously published autobiography said Lewis had the "eyes of an unsuccessful rapist."
6. Lewis' reflexive oppositionalism, his esprit de contradiction fused with reactionary politics. His core argument in 1920s was that "Western Man" (i.e straight white men) were being victimized by feminists, "homos" and celebrators of non-white culture.
7. Lewis' book "Hitler" (1931 and I believe the first full length on Hitler) is interesting on a number of counts: it shows the strong homophobic undercurrent of Nazism (Lewis thought Hitler would clean up decadent Berlin) & also as portraying Hitler as a good natured joker.
8. Lewis liked Nazis because he thought they were pranksters, like himself: "The Welanschauung of the Hitlerist...is laughing and gay compared to that of his opponents, the Communist."
9. This passage from Lewis' Hitler captures his avuncular, jokey Nazism and can usefully be compared to the manifesto of the Christchurch alleged shooter (in content and trolly intent).
10. Lewis, as I was suggesting the other day, is a real precursor to the contemporary far right. His trajectory from 1920s troll (using excuse of "free speech" & provocation as well as mask of anti-anti-racism) let to brief 1930s Nazi fellow travelling
11. The whole "joking/not joking" thing is a crucial part of Nazi rhetorical strategy: a way of getting people to acclimatize to shocking and vile ideas. Daily Stormer: "The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not." theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
12. I have some longer thoughts on jokey, trollish Nazis here: newrepublic.com/article/139004…
