#racist conspiracy theorist

[butchdykeorpheus]

tbh "[insert book here] is a published [fandom] fic with the serial numbers filed off" is no longer really enough for me to like. side-eye an author / their book. like obviously context matters so depending on the situation/book/fandom/fic/author/whatever it might be a valid criticism and imo there are some structural and stylistic differences between what's acceptable in fic vs what makes a good book that you should be mindful of when adapting a fic into original work but i've read some genuinely good fics that are au enough to easily stand on their own if you tweak them a little and ctrl+F / replace character names

[bitofaditz]

You can usually tell how someone genuinely feels about mentally ill people by how they talk about conspiracy theorists, homeless people, or their mothers

[creature-wizard]

Friendly reminder that:

The concept of starseeds promotes ableism by minimizing or denying ADHD and autism.

The ancient astronaut hypothesis promotes spiritual colonialism and destruction of other cultures by twisting other people's mythologies and sacred texts to fit their narratives.

The reptilian alien mythology is based on conspiracy theories historically used to justify oppressing and murdering real people. Loosh/blood/adrenochrome harvesting is just repackaged blood libel.

New Age mythology is chock full of repackaged right wing conspiracy theories, the same kind pushed by QAnon.

It's also full of repackaged racist pseudoscience about genetic superiority/inferiority and the function of evolution.

Ascension to 5D was supposed to have happened back in 2012, and the prediction failed.

New Agers are recycling their predictions over and over to catch new waves of people who don't know the movement's history.

Belief in Atlantis is strongly motivated by white supremacy.

For more info, see:

Looks like it's time to talk about starseeds and the New Age movement again.

How the mythology of starseeds, indigo children, crystal children, rainbow children, etc. harms kids

New Age YouTube channel caught recycling claims of imminent "first contact" for three years

Is the spiritual person a conspiracy theorist? A list of red flags

What is spiritual eugenics?

New Age beliefs that derive from racist pseudoscience

[theonion]

Remarking at the social media user’s ability to immediately cut to the chase, sources confirmed Monday that a conspiracy theory posted on Reddit wasted absolutely no time getting racist. “Man, this guy didn’t even spend a complete sentence describing the cabal of globalists controlling world affairs before going full-tilt with this stuff about ‘Jew bankers’ and ‘intellectual inferiority,’” reported sources, noting that conspiracy theorists usually have the decency to make you read between the lines with references to George Soros or bankers, but this one just jumped warp-speed into calling out the “mongrelization” of the United States genetic pool.

Full Story

[menlove]

honestly i think a HUGE part of the issue is that most of the left doesn't really understand antisemitism

after wwii it became wildly Unpopular to be blatantly antisemitic. obviously, it still happened. but the result of this is that instead of antisemitism being studied as a historical and pervasive form of oppression that has been around for thousands of years & has many many precedents BEFORE the holocaust.... it became:

something just simply Rude to say or do. if you're a polite liberal/conservative or a leftist, it's just something that is socially unacceptable. there is no real weight to this.

something when FIRMLY believed is ONLY held by people like nazis and white supremacists. who, as we know, are The Enemy and none of us can ever be like them at all ever by the virtue of... not being them. no need to watch your own behaviors, bc you are not a nazi! only nazis could ever be Actually antisemitic

something that erupted out of the ground in germany in the early 20th century, culminated with the holocaust, and ended after. antisemitism did not exist before that and it was solved after when the saving grace of the united states and england liberated the jews from the nazis out of the goodness of their hearts

however absolutely none of this is true. antisemitism stretches back thousands of years and it has not, for the most part, been only "fringe" conspiracy theorists and white supremacists who perpetuate it

antisemitism has been, by and large, presented as very logical. throughout, again, the thousands of years of history of antisemitism, very regular people have been antisemites. and most of them had reasons they felt were perfectly logical and understandable and most of all just. jews were trying to kill their children, of course they hated them! jews were purposefully trying to keep them poor, of course they hated them! jews believed Wrong Things and were morally and spiritually corrupt, of course there was something wrong with them. jews betrayed their country, lost them a war that ended with their husbands and brothers and sons dead, and now were living among them and taking advantage of social benefits out of the goodness of the hearts of the german people, of COURSE they hated them! and the nazis themselves were backed up by science at the time. scientific racism was THE science at the time. charles darwin was a scientific racist. it was all very logical.

and did jews actually do these things? no. but these people saw enough proof that aligned well enough with their morals and their beliefs and their fears & so to them it was completely logical and justified. it wasn't a fringe theory that only an insane person would believe in, or something impolite. it was true to them. to their morals, to their fears, to their core beliefs. it was true.

and so now we see a LOT. a lot of leftists being dragged ass first into antisemitism. because they don't even think they CAN be antisemitic. THEY aren't nazis and THEY aren't white supremacists, of COURSE they aren't antisemitic. but... well. the jews are doing things that go against their morals. they're doing things that validate their fears. the jews are violating things that go against their core beliefs! so of COURSE it is LOGICAL that they should hate them. of course, it is still rude to say "the jews are evil" so it gets replaced with "zionist". (and before you ask yes i am anti-zionism and do deeply believe what israel is doing is unjust and cruel) but even that is slipping.

it is getting all the more popular to go that one step further and instead of just making posts like "spam the hanukkah tag because the Zionists need to learn what their religion stands for" that are blatantly just replacing "jews" with "zionists", they are logically moving to being mask off. if zionism is wrong and half the world's remaining jewish population lives in israel, what about the rest? aren't they suspect? would they not ALL commit atrocities if given the chance? aren't they all racist for believing they're an ethnicity? aren't they all complicit? aren't they all threatening our deeply held leftist beliefs? it's a little weird and everyone has been too quiet for too long bc it's been rude to say but now you can get 300k notes for posting blood libel so why would you keep quiet anymore?

why WOULDN'T you just say "thank god someone finally said it i was worried about stepping on toes" when someone makes a post full of antisemitic conspiracy theory. why WOULDN'T you say "i don't care if all of israel gets bombed and every single person dies after this lmfao they deserve it"? (which would wipe out, again, half the world's population of jews- many of whom living there are anti-zionist and actively protesting their government. or. you know. children.) why WOULDN'T you make posts about how jewish identity is just nazi aryanism? why wouldn't you make posts about how the jews are privileged in america bc they run hollywood and the economy? why WOULDN'T you say the star of david is a hate symbol to you now and that you mistrust anyone using it? or that you find anyone speaking hebrew suspect?

these are all perfectly logical. to you. and YOU are not a nazi or a white supremacist. so it can't be antisemitic.

[mesetacadre]

So, like, have any of you actually ever had a conversation with a fascist offline about what they believe? I have.

To be clear, this wasn't a sit-down-let's-talk conversation. He (the only one) tried to start shit, and we (me + 2 comrades) confronted him in the act and regrettably got into a 30-minute "conversation".

Fascists, individually, are very mentally feeble. They are cowards who always seek to start conflict while trying to make themselves out to be the victims. This is, of course, until they gain enough popularity and canon fodder to throw 20 unstable fascists at anyone they don't like. But until this exaltation occurs¹ and their organizations enter a relatively stable cycle (in contemporary liberal democracies, they last between 2 and 7 years before disintegrating), there remains a contradiction between their aggressive desire to seek confrontation and their individual and collective insecurities. Fascist ideology is mostly not rooted in reality (more on this later), and it also has an important component of self-hate. They are an inferior specimen, unable to achieve what the fascist martyrs before them achieved (in Spain, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera usually occupies this position), and to add injury to insult, it's those who they perceive as weak and undeserving who rule over them. They ignore this perceived inferiority by joking about being chads, the superior race, or non-degenerates. But behind their rhetoric and "humor" there is usually a tinge of insecurity and hate against anyone who doesn't fit their increasingly narrow standard, including themselves.

This fascist we talked with kept referring to Jewish conspiracies, to the freemasons in every position of power, to old Falangists, to fascist "theorists", to some kind of esoteric spiritualism within the bounds of Christianity, somehow, and hyperborea. He talked about communists, how they were already in the government (referring to the social-democratic PSOE), how we were degenerates, how the day will come, etc. He attempted to scare us by saying that he was an ex-member of this more notorious fascist party and that they were looking for him to beat him up, which isn't something you admit to people you're trying to start conflicts with. After a while of his ramblings, one of my comrades couldn't help but laugh at him. It was all very ridiculous; I don't remember exactly what he said that made my comrade laugh. He got slightly more agitated, and the conversation ended in ~5 minutes.

Individually, fascists are also not the brightest people you'll encounter. For somebody to internalize fascist beliefs, they have to be unconsciously willing to never dig deeper about their beliefs, to contrast them with one another, or to contrast them with other fascists. They'll read a text (they may be stupid, but a lot of them do read more than you'd expect) about, say, the concept of race, and never really address the fact that it contradicts their own beliefs, or a fellow fascist's beliefs about the nation or about Europe.

And a really interesting thing is that fascism is far from a monolith. It's more akin to an entelechy². The specific contradictions of fascism manifest themselves much more between individual fascists than within a single individual. Like I mentioned before, there are contradictions when it comes to race (racialists like the nazis vs anti-racists like Falange Auténtica), to Europe (the idea of a Great Europe vs every idea of Nationality/Empire, which generally coexist poorly), to the nation (its intersection with race and/or Europe and how it interacts with these), to the reaction against progress (a conception of fascism as progressive, reactionary, or neither³), to science (a realist position based on scientificism such as race science and Kameradschaftrecht (nazi feminism) vs metaphysical conceptions, such as esotericism or the Thule society, reliant on aesthetics and mysticism), or to the economic policy (bourgeois positions, corporatism, vs workerist positions such as Strasser or Bombacci).

These contradictions aren't unique to the contemporary fascist situation of fragmentation and the peculiarities of social media either. Back in the 30s and 40s, there was a lot of disagreement on who counted as fascists. On one end, during the rise of the NSDAP, there was a small cadre of orthodox fascists who narrowed fascism "a la Italiana", and did not consider nazi-fascism to be fascism because of its differences on the scientificist conceptions of race. The Nazi party repressed this small wing. On the other end, it was a prevailing position in the USSR to not consider fascism to start with Italy's fascii di combatimento, but rather in Russia's Black Hundreds, having a broader conception of fascism.

This fascist we talked with considers himself a Carlist⁴, while another member of his groupuscule considers himself a national-socialist, while being Moroccan, and a third is a run-of-the-mill reactionary concerned with the 2030 agenda, globalism, immigrant invasions, the great replacement, that sort of thing. When fascist groups are relatively small and lack any form of inertia and/or formalized structure, their activity is extremely sporadic. There is no discipline to be found, no real planning or broad strategy, they are, rather, a group of similarly-enough-minded friends who sometimes like to do some vandalism or threaten/agitate leftists of any stripe. Their only method of growth is to generate controversies, fights, have a provocative tweet go semi-viral, to generate noise. When it comes to agitation for the fascist, concrete ideology is not relevant. They appeal to both rage and the satisfaction of, for example, seeing x annoying leftist org get their posters ripped off. Discussions of fascist theory rarely, if ever, influence their pragmatic activity, sometimes it's more similar to a circlejerk to see who has the most esoteric, exaggerated and offensive positions.

This is not to say fascist infighting is irrelevant, far from it. Fascists have their own petty disputes between groups, periods of extreme fractionarism, inter-fascist and intra-fascist violence. But when it comes to the philosophy of action, to how they apply all these beliefs, you'll be pressed to find meaningful, material differences. Some might be more or less aggressive, more or less esoteric, more or less contrarian, more or less effective. But they all rely on building that momentum, that controversy -> confrontation -> growth -> controversy cycle. The moment fascist groups lose that momentum, or one too many campaigns fall flat and fail to garner attention, they'll start to turn against themselves, to deteriorate their own structures in the permanent search for conflict that their beliefs demand. There is no way to hold the belief that, for example, race is a scientific category that makes the white/national/aryan/european/whatever race constantly threatened to disappear without exhorting you to seek conflict, whether it's against immigrants or other fascists who don't place as much importance on race.

If you find yourself in the context of a few small fascist groups festering and seeking conflict, it is a strategic error to confront them outright. Unless you're willing to downright kill them or injure them severely enough (with the bigger threat of legal repercussions that entails), fascists will be able to turn your explicit opposition against them into ammunition to attract more reactionaries to their own ranks. The best you, as an organized communist, can do in the period before exaltation, is to quietly collect information about them, study their patterns, and exert as much opposition as is possible without letting them turn it into a visible confrontation. If you're going to cover up their symbols and posters, do it when they can't film you or try to start a fight. If they're threatening someone to provoke them to then cry and hue about the rabid leftists, use the fact that they have low numbers, record them, and intimidate them without physical violence. Even if you can leave them writhing on the floor in a fight, they can use that as ammunition, but they can't use a video of them putting their tails between their legs and running off. You can't debate with fascists, this much is clear. You also can't just use violence to scare them away, because they'll use that violence to gain momentum, and then you can end up with an actually decently-sized and consistent fascist organization.

This is how we have been opposing these small groups of fascists attempting to grow through controversy. We opposed them non-visibly, effectively and professionally. When this group of about 15 fascists total (they never appear with more than 4 at a time because of their inconsistency) encountered this, they were at one point scared enough to stop all activity for about 2 months, and after that have yet to appear again. Meanwhile, other, more infantile orgs, overreacted by opposing them with full force and very publicly, which only encouraged the fascists to keep going and wasted energy in a futile back-and-forth, as well as putting their members in unnecessary risk by engaging in unplanned situations.

¹ Throughout this entire post, all analysis of the behavior of fascists offline assumes this exaltation has not occured

² Entelechy here means an impossible ideal, built entirely in the imagination, or with an unstable and shoddy manifestation.

³ Fascism often positions itself as a revolutionary movement, while other times it places more importance on the opposition against progress.

⁴ Carlism is a Spanish political current originating in the rejection of Isabel II as a legitimate heir to Fernando VII, it became very intertwined with Franco's dictatorship and the Falange during the Civil War

[doccywhomst]

elon musk made two extremely obvious Hitler salutes on live television, and today (jan 25 2025) he praised Germany’s nationalist mythos while declaring his continued support for the AfD (Germany’s far-right political party). the richest man on Earth is an actual neo-Nazi bent on influencing world government éminence grise style and the conspiracy theorists are still busy *checks phone* … being racist? doomed society

[marisatomay]

not from the us, whats going on with the speaker?

So back in January when the new Congress was sworn in it the republicans had a very slight majority in the House so by majority votes they get to confirm the Speaker—who is the leader of the House of Representatives and third in the Presidential line of succession—but a small-ish faction of those Rs are wacko nutjob conspiracy theorists because of course (those will be the wackos you see bloviating on TV) and they wanted their own idiot in charge or at least to get assurances from R leadership that they would bend to their will and they wouldn’t give it in so many words so it took the (now former) Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy FIFTEEN (15) votes for people to fall in line and finally confirm him as Speaker (deeply embarrassing—usually it takes 2 votes at most to confirm a Speaker).

Anyway his Speakership lasted for pretty much exactly 9 months until yesterday when, in a bunch of things coming to head—McCarthy’s refusal to impeach Biden for some reason at the request of the wackos, the currently-delayed shutdown of the government over a refusal to pass a new budget, his former ass-kissing to Trump even at the near-cost of his own life, his general unpleasantness—one of the wacko republicans (who may or may not be a sex trafficker but that’s for another time) put forth a motion to remove McCarthy as Speaker which, for the reasons listed above, found enough votes on both sides of the aisle to pass.

So, currently, we have an Acting Speaker of the House (which essentially means the person in charge only exists to bring order to the chamber and can’t be counted in the line of succession or anything), we still don’t have a new government budget, Biden is NOT being impeached but the wackos don’t seem to understand that, and the wackos ALSO don’t seem to understand that as much as we all hate McCarthy they have just shot themselves in the foot for no reason. But, on the bright side, Kevin McCarthy—an absolutely odious, slimy man who spent the Obama years doing racist dog whistles and the Trump years kissing his ass until it, quite literally, almost got him killed upon which he had a brief moment of moral fiber before once again bending to Trump’s demands despite, again, almost being murdered by an angry mob that stormed the Capitol—had the shortest Speakership since 1876. A fetus spends more time in the womb than Kevin McCarthy spent as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He has been completely humiliated. You can see it in his eyes. Delicious.

[notaplaceofhonour]

Understanding Alex Jones’s place in the Bush-era anti-war scene would do the left a lot of good in understanding (and not repeating) similar mistakes that the current anti-war scene is making today.

For those who aren’t old enough to remember, there was actually a time when Alex Jones had a decent amount of goodwill on the far left. He was obviously always a lunatic conspiracy theorist, and most everyday people saw him as such, but there was a significant enough portion of the anti-war left that liked him, that actually promoted InfoWars, appeared on AJ’s show, and linked arms with him at anti-war protests.

Without the momentum that his Bush-era popularity gave him, Jones would not have become a recognizable or relevant media figure like he did. The model InfoWars pioneered, which helped pave the way for the entire far right griftosphere that sprang up around it—from Breitbart to OAN & the Epoch Times to the sea of smaller Q-fluencers—owes its success in part to this diagonal reach across political lines. The extreme right wing conspiracy theory platform that has all but consumed the GOP would not have been able to gain nearly as much of a foothold if it were not for the years of work InfoWars & outlets like it did to normalize it in the Bush years.

Obviously I am not going so far as to say “The Left Is Solely Responsible For Alex Jones™️”. But much of the anti-war/anti-government left absolutely participated in helping him rise to prominence. They were willing to jump in bed with Jones without paying attention to his work or else were willing to turn a blind eye to who Jones was, all because he was saying things that were convenient to their cause. It didn’t matter that he was a rightwing or grade-A bigot; he opposed the US government & the war.

And I’m fully aware that there’s a common refrain among a lot of that “I used to listen to InfoWars” section of the left that would push back against this and say, “well, yeah, Jones is obviously a fascist now, but back then he wasn’t like that; he was kooky back then, sure, but the pre-Sandy Hook, pre-Gay Frogs Jones wasn’t nearly as bigoted or rightwing as the ‘Hillary For Prison’ Trump-era Jones became”.

To that I say, no, that’s bullshit. If you actually go back and listen to his show from back then… holy shit. He was homophobic as fuck. He was racist as fuck. The entire NWO/Globalist framework that he hangs all his other conspiracy theories on is built around antisemitic tropes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion he regularly hosted & promoted explicit antisemites like his pastor Texe Marrs, who openly espoused that Jews (often named as such) controlled the world politically, financially, and religiously through Zionism, a global banking cartel, and Communism. In some ways, Jones was even more transparent then than he is now.

“Okay, but what does this have to do with the current anti-war movement?” I hear you say. “I never fell for Alex Jones; I’ve always hated that guy.”

To begin with, you should be on the lookout for the internal biases and lack of vetting that lead the left to tolerate Jones in the first place, whether you think you’re liable to or not (arguably, it is all that much more important when you think you aren’t, because you are never more susceptible than when you think you aren’t). But unfortunately much of the anti-war left of today has been making the same mistake, just with different people and organizations.

Take for instance Jackson Hinkle, a tradcath & self-described “MAGA Communist”, who has gotten a lot of traction with the leftwing anti-Zionist crowd (and I would be remiss not to mention, has also been a guest on InfoWars). Or take another AJ, the media outlet Al Jazeera, which says a lot of things that are attractive to the left out one side of its mouth while spewing a bunch of rightwing theocratic garbage out the other, much like Bush-era InfoWars did. Take PSL/ANSWER (Pro-Putin Pro-Assad Pro-Xi atrocity denialists & conspiracy theorists) are one of the most common fixtures of the current protest movement, regularly advertised as organizers by other prominent organizations like JVP & SJP. A lot of people on the left have been embracing figures and organizations that espouse Khazar Theory, Deicide, Media Control, and Blood Libels not at all dissimilar to the accusations you could hear from Jones and his pastor friend Texe Marrs, with the same figleaf of “anti-Zionism” that Marrs frequently used himself.

Whether by sheer ignorance or willfully turning a blind eye, the left keeps making the same mistake of tolerating & even embracing figures & organizations with similarly noxious politics & conspiracy thinking now that was made with Bush-era InfoWars. We need to do better. We need to learn from the past so we can stop repeating its mistakes.

[creature-wizard]

"How can I be a witch/pagan without falling for conspiracy theories/New Age cult stuff?" starter kit

Posts & Articles

Check your conspiracy theory. Does any of it sound like this?

Check your conspiracy theory part two: double, double, boil and trouble.

QAnon is an old form of anti-Semitism in a new package, experts say

Some antisemitic dogwhistles to watch out for

Eugenicist and bioessentialist beliefs about magic

New Age beliefs that derive from racist pseudoscience

The New Age concept of ascension - what is it?

A quick intro to starseeds

Starseeds: Nazis in Space?

Reminder that the lizard alien conspiracy theory is antisemitism

The Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis is Racist and Harmful

The Truth About Atlantis

Why the Nazis were obsessed with finding the lost city of Atlantis

The Nazis' love affair with the occult

Occultism in Nazism

Red flag names in cult survivor resources/groups (all of them are far right conspiracy theorists/grifters)

The legacy of implanted Satanic abuse ‘memories’ is still causing damage today

Why Satanic Panic never really ended

Dangerous Therapy: The Story of Patricia Burgus and Multiple Personality Disorder

Remember a Previous Life? Maybe You Have a Bad Memory

A Case of Reincarnation - Reexamined

Crash and Burn: James Leininger Story Debunked

Debunking Myths About Easter/Ostara

Just How Pagan is Christmas, Really?

The Origins of the Christmas Tree

No, Santa Claus Is Not Inspired By Odin

Why Did The Patriarchal Greeks And Romans Worship Such Powerful Goddesses?

No, Athena Didn't Turn Medusa Into A Monster To Protect Her

Who Was the First God?

Were Ancient Civilizations Conservative Or Liberal?

How Misogyny, Homophobia, and Antisemitism Influence Transphobia

Podcasts & Videos

BS-Free Witchcraft

Angela's Symposium

ESOTERICA

ReligionForBreakfast

Weird Reads With Emily Louise

It's Probably (not!) Aliens

Conspirituality

Miniminuteman

Behind The Bastards

[contemplatingoutlander]

Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.” In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.” [color emphasis added] —Jill  Lepore , PhD, Harvard Professor of American History & Professor of Law

The historian Jill Lepore demonstrates how there are disturbing parallels between Elon Musk's recent political beliefs and that of his technocrat grandfather Joshua Haldeman.

According to another article by Davi Ottenheimer, Haldeman "fled" Canada to South Africa in 1950:

"Because he was under pressure following his 1940 arrest in Canada for being a part of an illegal political organization to destroy democracy called Technocracy. "Canada outlawed the political party as it had been determined to be a national security risk (anti-semitic, racist, and Nazi-adjacent)."

This is a gift🎁link, so there is no pay wall. It is worth reading, because it explains where many of Musk's peculiar beliefs about the importance of technocrats like himself taking over political systems. It also explains his weird fascination with "X."

Below the cut are some excerpts from the article.

Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy. Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members. Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1. [...]

Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.” In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.” [...] Nevertheless, technocracy endured. Its spectacles grew alarming: Technocrats wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in parades that evoked for concerned observers nothing so much as Italian Fascists. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was a technocracy stalwart. In 1940, when Canada banned Technocracy Incorporated — out of fear that its members were plotting to undermine the government or the war effort — Mr. Haldeman took out an ad in a newspaper, proclaiming technocracy a “national patriotic movement.”

Weeks later, when he tried to enter the United States for a technocracy speaking tour, he was denied entry at the border, possibly because of a new passport regulation that barred travel into the United States to “an alien whose entry would be contrary to the public safety” (something of an irony, given the current administration’s border policies). In Vancouver, British Columbia, he was arrested, convicted and sentenced to a fine or two months in jail. He later joined the antisemitic Social Credit Party, becoming its national chairman.

Mr. Haldeman retired from politics in 1949 and soon began thinking about moving to South Africa, which in 1948 announced the policy of apartheid. In 1950 he moved to Pretoria, where he wrote and distributed typewritten conspiratorial tracts. (Most have disappeared, but in 2023 I discovered several in university and private collections.) In May 1960, for instance, he wrote a pamphlet called “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and Its Menace to South Africa,” a response to the unrest after the Sharpeville massacre. During those protests, Nelson Mandela was among 11,000 people arrested and jailed. Mr. Haldeman suggested the uprising had been staged.

He furthermore believed the West had been the subject of an “intensive mass mind conditioning” experiment, in which ideas he considered ludicrous, like the equality of races and the immorality of apartheid, were being spread by newspapers, magazines, radio, television and especially university professors. Convinced that the government was riddled with waste, he also proposed a finance committee to combat inefficiency, writing in all caps, “A watchdog financial agency is needed.”

That Mr. Musk has come to hold so many of the same beliefs about social engineering and economic planning as his grandfather is a testament to his profound lack of political imagination, to the tenacity of technocracy and to the hubris of Silicon Valley. [...] In 1995, after studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Musk left a Ph.D. program at Stanford to become a tech entrepreneur. He started a company called X.com in 1999. “What we’re going to do is transform the traditional banking industry,” he said. (Technocrats also planned to abolish banks. “We don’t need banks, bandits or bastards,” Joshua Haldeman once wrote.) Mr. Musk made a fortune when eBay acquired PayPal, which had merged with X.com, but in 2017 he bought back the URL, and it was at hand when he purchased Twitter and renamed it X, hoping to kill what he called the “woke mind virus” — echoes of his grandfather’s “mass mind conditioning.” Much that Mr. Musk has attempted to do at DOGE can be found in the technocracy manuals of the early 1930s.

Mr. Musk’s possible departure from Washington will not diminish the influence of Muskism in the United States. His superannuated futurism is Silicon Valley’s reigning ideology. In 2023 the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who helped staff DOGE, wrote “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," predicting the emergence of “technological supermen.” It consists of a list of statements:

We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being. We have the tools, the systems, the ideas. We have the will. … We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars. … We believe in greatness. … We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.

Mr. Andreessen cited, among his inspirations, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1909 wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” which glorified violence and masculine virility and opposed liberalism and democracy. It, too, is a list of statements:

We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. … We want to sing the man at the wheel. … We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. … Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!

Ten years after Mr. Marinetti wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” fists raised to the stars, he co-wrote the founding document of the movement led by Mussolini: “The Fascist Manifesto.”

Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.

That is still true, but unlike his forefathers, Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past. It remains for the living to wrest free of that grip.

[omegaversereloaded]

Last night i tried to watch youtube shorts until it made me racist but it just showed me wilderness cooking/survival videos, black hair care, chemistry videos, and azanabi yelling at zionists on piers morgan. respectfully, youtube, if you want to make me racist or a conspiracy theorist, youre gonna have to try a little harder. Maybe next time

[anti-terf-posts]

Anyway some TERFs pissed me off today, so I'm going to make fun of them a bit if you don't mind.

Alternate acronyms for "TERF" that better reflect reality:

FART: Feminism Appropriating Racist Transphobe (I didn't come up with this but I forgor who did)

CWFTP: Cis White For The Patriarchy (self explanatory)

MTGLLS: Marjorie Taylor Greene's Long Lost Sibling (much like TERFs, Greene is an insane conspiracy theorist and raging bigot)

WIAWA: "What Is A Woman" Asker (they are weirdly obsessed with defining "man" and "woman" like some kind of conservative think tank)

these are absolute GOLD /pos

[victoriadallonfan]

Not to claim Godzilla x Kong was a deep film, but credit where it’s due, it has by far the most respectful portrayal of indigenous people in all of the Kong films.

This is not a high bar and I’m NOT saying it’s the pinnacle of progressive film work, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Spoilers below, of course.

For those of you who haven’t seen any of the older Kong films outside of the Monsterverse, the general plot beat is that a wealthy businessman/philanthropist/greedy asshole goes to Skull Island to find something new to make a lot of money (film for the OG/Peter Jackson and Oil for the 70’s film), and comes across a tribe of “barbarian” natives who kidnap the beautiful white woman whom they sacrifice to Kong, whom they worship.

It’s such a cliche that even Peter Jackson does it in his 2005 film (and it’s possibly even more racist than the older ones):

As you can see, there is a very familiar pattern

The Iwi tribe of the Monsterverse is handled very differently

In Kong: Skull Island, it actually does try to play into previous viewers perceptions; we meet the Iwi as the protags stumble upon their village ruins and are surrounded by. Tension is tight, and it looks like it’ll be a repeat of the previous films… until the character of Hank Marlow arrives and diffuses the tension entirely, revealing that the Iwi have been generous and caring hosts to him.

And yes, while they do worship Kong, it’s not out of fear, but rather that Kong protects them from the hazards of Skull Island. The Iwi are the ones who help the crew get a working ship and aid them in escaping the island.

This is followed up in Godzilla vs Kong, where we tragically learn that a massive tropical storm (I think implied to be due to King Ghidorah hurricanes) sank the entire island and left Jia as the sole survivor of her tribe, saved due to Kong protecting her from the rising floods.

Kong and Jia are then seen as a near inseparable duo, further twisting the “beauty and beast” dynamic of the previous films, making it more about how they are both alone except for each other. Kong even learns sign language from Jia in one of the best movie reveals of the series:

It’s even Jia who is able to give Kong the morale boost to save Godzilla from Mechagodzilla.

And then we get into Godzilla x Kong. Kong and Jia, while having a new home, still feel isolated because of their cultures (or lack thereof) and make excuses to see each other as much as possible. Which is turned on its head as Kong finds other Apes and the Iwi tribe have returned (or at least) an offshoot of them, as the protectors of humanity who calls Godzilla to their aid.

I was a bit wary of making them telepathic, but I liked that they used it more like a separate language than a superpower, with Jia serving as that bridge as she finds her culture, her adoptive mother accepts that Jia may want this life more than one back home (where she felt out of place), and Jia becoming ANOTHER bridge as she helps resurrect Mothra who goes onto make Godzilla and Kong form an alliance!

Ultimately, Jia parts ways with the Iwi on good terms to live with her adoptive mother, happy to know there are people of her culture she can visit and Kong lives on with his people.

But I especially appreciate a moment in the film that pretty much lampshades the older Kong movies.

One of the characters is filming himself and others as they venture into Hollow Earth, desperate to get his fame and fortune in making people realize he was a hero and not a conspiracy theorist (he was a spy for Apex Labs, the ones who built mechagodzilla in the first place). Another character is an animal doctor and naturalist, who points out that, historically, native populations don’t tend to do well when exposed to the modern world.

Add on to the fact that the Iwi are telepathic and know how to use crystals to alter gravity in Hollow Earth, they would absolutely be the target of government operations and experimentation. Aka, a far more grand version of what happens in the older Kong films.

The film ends with the footage not being used and the Iwi living in peace, having Mothra once more to protect them.

Like I said, it’s not groundbreaking stuff, but I appreciate how different it is.

[royal-confessions]

“After all the heat celebrities get for having MAGA friends (or just simply family members) or even being associated with horrible people, it baffles me that people are giving Harry and Meghan a free pass. Meghan and Harry are both close friends with Nacho Figueras (vocally supporting Trump, look at who his wife Delfina follows), Katherine McPhee (registered Republican), Ellen (hangs out with George W. Bush and is a racist bully), Misha Nonoo (invited Ivanka and Jared Kushner to her wedding in 2019 and still hangs out with Ivanka), Tyler Perry (his recent support of Jonathan Major and other awful scandals), Kris Jenner (do we even need to go into this one?), Johnny Mercer (an awful former Tory MP), Genevieve Hillis (who is a conservative lobbyist who has represented pro-fracking group Independent Petroleum Association of America and conservative, anti-abortion governor Scott Walker in his presidential campaign. Public records show that she donated to the campaigns of Walker and former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan) who we all see in in the last episode of "With Love, Meghan" and was with Meghan at Wimbledon years ago, former BFF Jessica Mulroney (who is a racist and who Meghan sent her flowers after her racist scandal), and now Meghan sending a thank you letter and some jam to Amanda Hirsch, who is a conspiracy theorist that denies Sandy Hook happened and a racist. Like why aren't Meghan and Harry getting dragged for their awful choices in friends?” - Submitted by Anonymous

[cryptotheism]

Man those flat earth conspiracy maps are kinda cool, although there is probably untold amounts of racism behind why flat earthers think thats how it looks😔

Stuff as patently insane as pseudo-topology is simultaneously both more and less racist than more overtly political conspiracy theories, precisely because of it's apolitical nature.

It's like astrology in that a flat earth espouses no virtues. It is an empty vessel that the believer can pour themselves into with almost no resistance.

But! Conspiracy theorists are not empty vessels either! They come with pre-held beliefs that they bring to their conspiracy mythology. In the case of the flat earth, they are largely ex-evangelical Christian apocalypticists, people used to reading esoteric, symbolic, "proof" of their beliefs in anything from TV shows to weather patterns.