Imiss the old-school neo-Nazis. You know, the skinheads with the swastika tattoos and the big Nazi flags on the walls of their living rooms. The Aryan Brotherhood-type neo-Nazis.
You don’t get neo-Nazis like that anymore.
These days, it’s all about the crypto-fascism.
Are you not familiar with crypto-fascism? All right, let me bring you up to speed.
Crypto-fascists are a particularly pernicious and pussified species of neo-Nazi. Unlike the old-school neo-Nazis, who at least had the courtesy to go around hollering Nazi slogans and heiling Hitler in public so that everyone knew that they were neo-Nazis, crypto-fascists are sneaky little cowards who pretend they aren’t neo-Nazis and hide behind pseudonyms and coded rhetoric.
Their natural habitat is the Internet, but they can adapt to almost any environment, creepy little chameleon-like cravens that they are.
They are generally more intelligent than your Aryan Brotherhood-type of neo-Nazis. They do not tend to festoon themselves with swastika- and SS bolt-tattoos or display any other kind of Nazi insignia, as doing that would negatively affect their ability to furtively slink around fomenting racial hatred like a cunning little weasels.
Of course, your more prominent crypto-fascists don’t hide behind pseudonyms and anonymous X accounts like a bunch of snickering little adolescent trolls. You might recognize the names of some of them, “alt right” creeps like Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Andrew Anglin (although Anglin’s neo-Nazism isn’t exactly “crypto”), and European “Identitarians” like Martin Sellner and his wife Brittany, or Björn Höcke of the Alternativ für Deutschland party.
You can read up on all those creeps on your own. This isn’t an in-depth investigative piece about crypto-fascism and its creepy adherents. There are more than enough of those articles on the Internet.
No, the main reason I was moved to write about these creeps is that I have to believe that there is still a large number of my conservative readers who are not neo-fascists, and who do not want to be lumped in with neo-fascists, whether of the old-school or crypto-fascist variety. Despite the fact that I’m an old hippie-looking lefty, I am fond of my conservative readers. I respect them. And thus I hate to see them being preyed upon by crypto-fascists.
Which is exactly what is happening currently.
Now, before I go any further with this, I need to clarify a few points. Because I have written scores of satirical columns mercilessly skewering the mainstream media and paranoid liberals for fomenting mass hysteria over “the crypto-fascist menace.”
This mass hysteria was particularly pervasive during 2016-2020, when the Powers That Be were desperately trying to convince everybody that Trump was “Literally Hitler,” and that he was organizing an underground army of Russian-backed American neo-Nazis who were going to frontally assault the United States military and annihilate Western democracy, and so on.
This “Trump is the Return of Hitler” nonsense is just as silly now as it was back then. What we are witnessing, not just in the USA, but throughout much of the West, is not the return of fascism. It is the death throes of neo-nationalism.
The “populist” rebellion that began with Brexit and the rise of neo-nationalist parties in Europe, and that led to Trump’s election in 2016, and that continues to date, is like the violent thrashing of a swordfish on the deck of fishing trawler. The battle is over, but the swordfish doesn’t know it. So it’s going to keep thrashing around on the deck until it suffocates or someone puts a spike through its head.
I confess, I was a fan of that “populist” rebellion, or at least a sympathetic spectator. The neo-nationalist rebels were never going to stop or reverse the advance of global capitalism, but they were causing a ruckus, which was (a) not boring, and (b) waking some people up.
That “populist” rebellion is over. It isn’t dead, but it might as well be. Its energy and focus has been deftly captured and redirected away from the global-capitalist system that it could never accept that it was actually fighting … the system that is dissolving national borders and sovereignty, dissolving cultures, globalizing the labor force, and otherwise transforming the entire planet into one big valueless global marketplace in which everything and everyone is an interchangeable commodity.
What’s left of it, i.e., that “populist” rebellion, has been captured by Crypto-Fascism, Inc., an agglomeration of organized and unorganized forces—MAGA, the Musk Cult, the AfD, other far-right parties, online influencers, faux-libertarians, fake free-speech defenders, remigrationists, Holocaust revisionists, garden-variety bigots, and so on—which is redirecting people’s legitimate rage at the global-capitalist system into racial hatred.
Which, of course, is one of the oldest tricks in the book, i.e., capturing and refocusing the rage of an angry mob onto a convenient scapegoat. Mounting a rebellion against a totally decentralized globally-hegemonic power system, or any other power system for that matter, is hard. It requires a lot of work. It isn’t instantly gratifying. It is so much easier to take your anger out on whichever official scapegoat the system has provided for you, the Jews, the Muslims, the communists, the terrorists, the Covid-deniers, the illegal immigrants, or whoever.
And that’s where the crypto-fascists come in. Their mission is to harness and redirect the remaining life-force of that “populist” rebellion into reactionary pipe dreams and racial hatred, where it can’t do the system any actual damage. The “crypto” aspect is crucial to this effort, because the old-school neo-Nazis are out of fashion these days. It’s tough to get a decent-paying job with “the 14 words” tattooed on your neck, and your romantic prospects are extremely limited. Here in Germany, and in most of the rest of Western Europe, that old-school Nazi shit will get you arrested.
I want to leave you with a concrete example of what I mean by “crypto-fascism.” I’m going to use my old Internet “friend” Eugyppius. If you are not already familiar with Eugyppius, he is an anonymous German crypto-fascist and a frequent contributor to The Daily Sceptic. I am going to use Eugyppius as an example because (a) he is one of the more intelligent crypto-fascists, and (b) I was taken in by his shtick, and actually recommended him to my readers, which is kind of embarrassing, but there it is.
The way his crypto-fascist shtick works is that he publishes right-wing but normal-sounding commentary on German politics on his popular Substack and in The Daily Sceptic, much of which is highly intelligent and funny. He claims that he is a former professor who taught for some time at a US university. Whoever he really is, he’s an excellent writer, and his Substack and Daily Sceptic columns contain no sign of neo-fascism.
Here is what he sounds like on X.
Apparently, X is where Eugyppius feels comfortable expressing his personal deeply felt feelings about the “migroids” who are “desecrating” Germany’s “intimate rural areas.”
I was rather confused when I saw that tweet, as it didn’t sound like the Eugyppius I thought I had come to know from his Substack columns. It sounded like a textbook neo-Nazi. Which is a standard crypto-fascist tactic, i.e., the classic bait-and-switch.
Here’s another tweet, posted a few days later, likening non-Aryan immigrants to an “invasive species” of “insects” that need to be “eradicated.”
Or maybe I just misinterpreted Eugyppius’ enthusiasm for, you know, “gardening.”
That’s definitely a possibility. As Eugyppius and some of his fans have noted, I’m a paranoid old pearl-clutching boomer who is irrationally obsessed with Eugyppius.
Plus, there’s no such thing as “crypto-fascism.” Not really. It’s just a made-up word (like “neo-Nazism,” “racism,” and “anti-Semitism”) that leftoids use to try to cancel innocent non-neo-Nazi Aryan gardeners.
If you doubt that, well, just take it from Eugyppius, who has published this lengthy academic-sounding obfuscatory treatise on free-speech X.
As I said, I miss the old-school neo-Nazis.
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