Right -wing radicalism – schizofaschism and memate culture

The current debate about the ultra -rights from Trump to Meloni to the AfD is characterized by a conceptual blurring. Many media and politicians continue to use the trivializing terms “populism” and “right -wing extremism”. And if the new fascists are referred to as such, they simply turn the tables and claim that their critics are dictatorial and wanted nothing other than people impose their opinion!

If you are not politically active, it seems as if two sides are facing each other and accommodate each other of “fascism”. Therefore, it would be better for anti -fascists to use another term: schizofaschism. The American historian Timothy Snyder introduced him to him in 2019 in his book “The way to lack of freedom-Russia, Europe, America”. It describes the tactics of the Russian right to deny the sovereignty of international law and the cultural-historical unity of Ukraine, which was an ideological anticipation of the war of aggression that started by Russia in 2022. Snyder sees Russia a clear line from the statements of right -wing sociologist Alexander Dugin to Vladimir Putin’s definition of history, which appeals to Ukraine any political and cultural independence.

This thinking figure simply broke down like this: “Factic fascists call their opponents ‘fascists’, blame the Jews to the Holocaust and treat the Second World War as an argument for more violence,” Snyder writes. If the political opponent is to be a fascist and authoritarian regime, then every means is justified against him. If you ask Putin about his invasion contrary to international law, he will answer that Ukraine is infected by “Nazis”! If you ask the AfD why the media are to be brought to a German-national line, their politicians will assure that the public media are in the process of transforming Germany into a “dictatorship”! If you ask the Trump government why the people who are not Trumpists in the ministries and authorities should be released, you can hear that the state in the United States has been enforced by “cultural marxists” and western civilization must be protected from their “Bolshevik influences”!

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The schizo fascists deny their own reactionary ideology and instead fantasize a dictatorial world as an opponent to justify the authoritarian approach. This propaganda is supported on the Internet by right -wing memefication. Since the 2010s, fascist, sexist and racist content has been shared massively, often without consequences. In order to avoid the content regulation of the respective platforms, reactionary content is transported “ironically”, they become Memes in order to present them as harmless or at least meant as humorous.

The Canadian social media influencer Steven Crowder gained celebrity by led so-called debates with unprepared university students, which he bombarded with false “facts”. His content also includes openly racist content, such as the contemptuous imitation of a “blaccess”, of speaking methods that are particularly common in black communities in the USA. Also, he did not miss the opportunity to appear in an “Asian” costume, including rabbit and glasses. Crowder sent the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis “Satirisch” to “prove” that Floyd was not suffocated by a police officer who knelt on his neck, but had died from overdose fentanyl. Crowder uses comedy stylistic devices to openly reactivously appear and to escape every political responsibility. In this sense, he acts self -denial.

Nick Fuentes is more extreme. He is an American Neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier, who received an audience from Donald Trump in 2022 together with the rapper Kanye West. In one of his most famous clips, Fuentes denies the Holocaust by talking about the production of cookies. What sounds absurd at first quickly turns out to be a perfidious strategy. Fuentes claims that with a certain number of biscuit factories (concentration camps), no six million cookies could be baked in a certain period of time (duration of the war) (Jewish people killed). Here, too, Fuentes presents a “plausible deniaffination”, that is, a plausible denial of the fact that he operates Holocaust denial.

For such representations and appearances, the name “Schrödinger’s asshole” developed in the online community: if the audience reacts to the reactionary content, the joke was no joke and the meme was not a meme. If the audience reacts outraged, it is only said to have been “a misunderstood joke”. Of course, however, the political outrage is then rated by the schizo fascists as a sign of the “totalitarian ideology” of the audience. It is a fascism that denies himself to suggest that it would be none and to apply the political opponent’s allegations.

Elon Musk sees himself as a personified meme: “I am Become Meme!” He is the poster boy of schizofaschism. Each of his actions is a meme. The name of the parasta-based advisory organization he led, with which the authorities and ministries of “bureaucracy”, i.e., should be cleaned by politically unspeakable employees, gaining access to the data from millions of US citizens: Doge is the abbreviation for “Department of Government Efficiency” and an allusion to a dog with a dog depicted a sly look. Even when Musk showed the Hitler salute several times after Trump’s re -election, this was of course only a “misunderstanding”. A joke that was supposed to show that liberals would only see fascists everywhere, but at the same time it was also a gesture for his knowledgeable followers.

After Musk was able to show the Hitler salute without greater aftershock, Steve Bannon did it. Trump’s ex-consultant and pioneer of the digital old right movement could also be carried away at the CPAC, a conference of the conservative republicans, to show the Hitler salute. The memefication of the new rights has thus risen in schizofaschism.