Fascism wears a very different face than it did 50 or 100 years ago, according to author and activist Laurie Penny.
“This new kind of villainy, it looks like the people in your street, it looks like your neighbour’s son,” she tells Jesse Mulligan.
Laurie Penny Photo: Wiki Commons: publica/Jan Zappner CC BY 2.0
'Why are we so concerned with putting the feelings of young, white men above the safety and survival of everyone else?'
The extreme far-right movement does not operate through the democratic political system, she says.
Its members are dispersed and do their networking mainly, but not exclusively, on the internet.
“It’s about recruiting via insidious networks and online forums and people acting independently with the support of all these friends they’ve met online.”
The fascism of today has a more commonplace, everyday appearance than ever before, Penny says.
“When you say somebody is on the far right, or a fascist, what people’s brains go to are the aesthetics of Nazism … but the aesthetics are different now, it’s not the cartoon villains of old.
“This new kind of villainy, it looks like the people in your street, it looks like your neighbour’s son.”
The far right actively uses misogyny and sexism as recruiting tools, she says.
“Often how these people drift into this arena is via things like the [misogynist-far right] Incel movement, if you can call it a movement, forums where people just like to beat up on women online.”
Penny first noticed the shoots of this misogynist-far right nexus during Gamergate in 2014.
“People looked at that, clever people within the new far right looked at these people and thought wow, we’ve got a potential army here. We’ve got people who are fully prepared to be vicious and to howl down their enemies and they resent the way the world is going, they hate women in this very weaponised way.
“I’ve watched them over the years progress from ‘we’re gonna destroy your life if you try and take away the boobs in my video games’ to ‘we’re gonna destroy your life if you don’t look like me’.”
When Gamergate happened in 2014, Penny says that she and other women who were targeted warned that the situation was more dangerous than sad, young men venting in their bedrooms.
“Women, particularly women of colour and trans women, were targeted by these people, and when I say targeted I mean bomb threats, death threats, they had to move several times, their families were threatened, they had SWAT teams sent to their houses.
“We were saying... as I was one of the people targeted by this, we were saying please 'take this seriously'. When you say 'little boys in bedrooms', they’re young men, they don’t know what they’re doing.
“We’re in serious physical danger here and you’re saying they are just stupid young men doing what stupid young men do.”
Zoë Quinn became the target of one of the most vicious online harassment campaigns in history – GamerGate – after her ex-boyfriend posted a hateful blog entry. Now she helps others on the receiving end of online abuse. Photo: supplied
And what of these young men? What makes them this way? It is a question that we ponder too much, Penny says.
“Why are we so concerned with putting the feelings of young, white men above the safety and survival of everyone else?
“I’ve gone and spoken to a lot of these young men and have tried to understand. Understanding is useful, but the entire world seems to regard the emotional comfort of young white men, particularly white men, as more important than everybody else’s daily survival.”
Such attempts at understanding are not extended to radicalised young men who are not white, she says.
“Nobody is going around asking what are the young men being recruited into Isis, what are they really feeling? Are they afraid? Is it hate?
“And yes, young white men may feel lost, angry, confused. They may feel that their lives are not what they once were, they can’t be the heroes they were always taught to expect to be, but you know what, those feelings are not facts.
“And the fact they have these feelings does not entitle them to act in violent ways.”
Penny refuses to share a platform with alt-right figures such as Steve Bannon.
“I believe that giving official public space to figures like that makes it seem that those ideas are OK, it makes it seem that this is within the Overton window of public opinion.
“I think these ideas have been debated long enough. It is time to take a stand. The brave thing, people think they are brave for going against the grain, people think themselves as rebels for having these ideas about Muslims and immigrants and women and I see those ideas everywhere. It’s not brave to say that kind of thing, it’s cowardly.”
'“If you wait around to see what you’ll do when the real Nazis show up … well, guess what? They are here, they’ve been here for some time."