Thread by @bengidley

This is a thread about the Buffalo shooter, who slaughtered 10 people and injured three in a horrific racist attack last Sunday. I’ve read large chunks of the killer’s so-called manifesto and dipped into his diaries and Discord logs, and these are some observations.

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A quick ethical note: I will not name the shooter or link to or even screenshot any of this material.

The killer’s texts illustrate four of the features of today’s international far right scene that I think are especially important.👇🏼

1/ Anti-black & anti-Jewish racisms are intertwined and cannot be understood separately.
2/ We need to left-right convergence.
3/ Gender-related ideologies are key to current fascist formations.
4/ Authoritarian state disinformation networks both feed & use far right radicalism.

So here goes:

1/ Anti-black and anti-Jewish racisms are completely intertwined here and cannot be understood separately.

The killer…

The killer targeted African-Americans and devoted pages of his “manifesto” to anti-black hatred — while his primary animus was for Jews, to whom he devotes a huge percentage of his ranting.

Every single type of contemporary antisemitism is drawn on in his texts:

He quotes & screenshots raciological, classic Nazi, Holocaust denialist, alt-right, Christian, Afrocentric, anti-Zionist & New Age sources.

This great thread gives a taste of some of the materials, and how they circulate & find their way into the mix:

https://twitter.com/drmjcwarren/status/1527030951779393539

Racial pseudoscience, largely discredited since the Holocaust, has been a resurgent influence for today’s far right terrorists, including this shooter, via messageboard infographics, pop genetics and “post-liberal” pseudo-academic defences of race science.

But how can we think about the relationship between his African-American targets and Jewish figures of hate? 👇🏼

Michael Billig in his classic 1978 analysis of the British NF, “Fascists”, showed that, while the “exoteric” rhetoric of the NF targeted Asians & migrants (appealing to mainstream British bigotry in the Enoch Powell era), the esoteric core of the ideology was antisemitism.

…Everyday racism brought recruits into the movement, but then their radicalisation involved a training in antisemitism, a conspiracy theory about Jews which “explained” everything wrong with the world.

As Chip Berlet @cberlet notes, fascism is essentially parasitic: it can draw on ideologically divergent ideas (today that may be racism, conspiracy theories, anti-Zionism, ecological fears, etc) and makes them coherent, binds them, via antisemitism, the meta-conspiracy theory…

The Great Replacement Theory (GRT) follows this pattern. It’s not just a racist fantasy about non-white “invaders/replacers”; it’s also a conspiracy theory about Jews being responsible…

We saw how the Pittsburgh killer targeted Jews for bringing Syrian refugees to America while the Christchurch killer targeted the Muslims he saw as the replacers. Or how the Halle shooter turning to a kebab shop when he couldn’t get into a synagogue.

*This means analysis of the Buffalo shooter can’t stop at anti-black racism, but must foreground contemporary fascism’s esoteric antisemitic core. Meanwhile, we can’t understand today’s antisemitism without recognising how it’s synchronised with anti-black & anti-Muslim racism.*

(Self-promotional aside: The need for this relational understanding of antisemitism and other racisms is the main argument of my work with @RentonJE on Islamophobia 171bus.wordpress.com/antisemitism-a…

and a key argument of my work with @BrendanMcGeever and David Feldman on left antisemitism onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11… )

I’ll try to speed up now…

2/ We need to pay attention to left-right convergence.

Conservative tweeters claimed the shooter was left-wing coz of a couple throwaway remarks in his rantings. His views are incoherent, but by any measure solidly on the fascist right. This incoherence, tho, is key:

As noted above, fascism is essentially parasitic and syncretic, drawing magpie-like on different sources. The shooter’s half-plagiarised, collage style “manifesto” is a good exemplar of this. The “leftist” sources are worth attending to. They include:

-Stuff from alt-left conspiracy sites, e.g. Whitney Webb in MintPress
-Unz Review, a far-right site that is widely shared in pseudo-left scenes
-Deep ecology, such as the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski
-The ex-Trotskyist LaRouche movement and its front the Schiller Institute

As anti-fascist researcher Spencer Sunshine @transform6789 has long argued, these “unorthodox” forms of fascism are no longer peripheral to it, but increasingly crucial to fascism’s eco-system.

And this is why we need to ensure these ideas and the voices that promote them have no place in left-wing spaces, but that’s an increasingly uphill struggle.

3/ Gender-related ideologies are central to current fascist formations.

Among the threads running through the text are opposition to trans rights, hatred of trans people, backlash against feminism.

The shooter says he doesn’t mind “LGB” people, but sees a “slippery slope” from gay marriage to the nefarious imposition of trans ideology. The language he uses directly echoes mainstream anti-“woke” right, showing how gender focused culture wars can embolden for right violence.

He sees women as the racial property of men: white women are “our” women, and blamed for falling birth rates and race mixing. He sees his job as protecting them from the “invaders” and from themselves, for the sake of the race.

Of course these themes aren’t new: fascism’s always been foundationally anti-feminist/gender-reactionary.

What’s new is the angry, revanchist urgency, based on a sense of dispossession, plus the role of the revanchist Manosphere as one of biggest gateways to far right activism.

4/ Authoritarian state disinformation networks both feed and weaponise far right (and red-brown) radicalism.

For example:

Pro-Putin voices on the pseudo-left have made a big deal of the shooter’s use of a “black sun” logo, also used by Ukrainian nationalists such as the Azov movement & also by myriad far right formations, to posit a totally made-up connection with Azov…

In fact, the shooter said Ukraine has a Jewish government, Azov’s an Israeli puppet, NATO should be fractured, & Russia’s enemies need removing. These talking points circulate in the pro-Kremlin media ecosystem, to feed the global far right & undermine Putin’s enemies.

Overlapping narratives promoted by Orban’s authoritarian machine are also in the manifesto, particularly an obsessive hate of George Soros and anything connected to him. (The scholar @i_kalmar is the best analyst of this issue.)

But as well as feeding the far right, the Azov lie illustrates how these networks also weaponise it, including apparently anti-fascist responses to it. They used the same lie about the Christchurch shooter…

The Kremlin has crafted a totally fake narrative that appeals to anti-fascist audiences to legitimise Putin’s geopolitical ambitions. Until we have the disinformation literacy to block this, they’ll keep on playing us.

Ok, that was too long. For a more articulate take on these issues, read this @Routledge_Socio chapter taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/… and this @bbkpolitics blogpost 10-gower-street.com/2019/10/24/wha…

I somehow messed up this thread. It continues from the above tweet to this one:

https://twitter.com/bengidley/status/1528007274970726401