Taking the Far-Right Seriously
- Thom Jupp
- Jul 15, 2021
- 7 min read
Between the Unite the Right rally in 2017, the Stop the Steal riot in 2021, and the murder of Jo Cox in 2016, it has been made abundantly clear that the far right are a deadly and increasingly emboldened force. Of course, Queer people, Black people, immigrants, and all sorts of other marginalised communities in Britain, the US, and across the world have known of their terror for decades. So, too, have relatively privileged allies such as my mother, who, when Black Lives Matter marches swept the UK in the summer of 2020, warned me of what it’s like to come face to face with violent far right ‘counter protestors’. Such horrific incidents of far right violence make one feel like things are getting a lot worse, that things have never been this bad. That feeling isn’t true though. It’s a false perception rooted in the arrogance and ignorance of the young and privileged. Violent reactionaries, throughout the entirety of American history and the modern era, have always terrorised marginalised peoples. Nevertheless, far right hatred, as well as the downplaying of said hatred by the mainstream media, has been ever-present in my entire teenage and adult life. Shit’s fucked, man.
As well as being a genuine source of fear, a violent scourge sweeping the world to the benefit of the corporate elite and neoliberal fascists, the far right are also wholly pathetic and quite absurd. They are ridiculous, but should we be making fun of legitimately dangerous fascists?
In 2020, The Atlantic released a documentary called White Noise. This was the product of four years of work from filmmaker Daniel Lombroso as he followed three far right personalities - Lauren Southern, Richard Spencer, and Mike Cernovich - documenting their political activism and personal lives. While this trio have done and said some horrendous things, Lombroso does a good job of showing the complex thoughts and feelings they have about their own actions and the wider state of American politics. By the end, you feel kind of bad for Southern, despite her anti-feminist, White nationalist leanings, as she experiences some disturbing misogyny and displays glimmers of geniune empathy. Cernovich, too, comes across as a glum grifter, a tragic troll, rather than a malicious extremist as he charges hundreds for motivational talks, private dinners, and snake oil (nootropics). Spencer, however, is a total cunt. Not only is he a pathetic man who threw a tantrum and ran away when protestors drowned him out at a university speaking engagement (it’s just free speech, Dicky boy) but he advocates for an ethnostate while relying on worn out fascist tropes. He’s like if Ed Norton’s character in American History X had a wealthy family, never worked out, and was too scared to get a tattoo. If you want to know more about them, go and watch the documentary - you can rent it on YouTube - or just give them a quick Googs.
One section of White Noise follows serial migrant harasser Lauren Southern as she goes on a date with George Hutcheson, leader of Students for Western Civilisation and a true Huh-wite Nationalist: a hateful hunk that looks like Nazi propaganda come to life. As you might expect, he has the personality of a particularly boring geography teacher, but, like, a really bigoted one who is weirdly obsessed with birthrates. You know the type. The conversation is strange to the uninitiated, but pretty mundane stuff, really. Lombroso mainly shows the couple discussing family, with Southern explaining she wants to be a mother for reasons of personal fulfilment while Hutcheson explains that having a family may be difficult, and doing it for personal reasons is “not nationalist” so having kids would be a duty for him. It’s very romantic.
While awkward dates are funny enough, the laughable part of this truly exhilarating event was cut from the film, by the look of things. As I was reading different interviews Lombroso did around the time White Noise was released, I came across a bizarre, revealing fact about Hutcheson’s ideology. Writing about Southern’s hiatus from politics and his experience with her making the film, Lombroso writes:
“Hutcheson refuses to eat food originally from nonwhite countries, such as ketchup, whose origins are in China, so the two, facing limited restaurant options, chose the British-style Oxley Public House in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood.” - Daniel Lombroso, ‘Why the Alt-Right’s Most Famous Woman Disappeared’, The Atlantic, 16 October 2020, <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/alt-right-star-racist-propagandist-has-no-regrets/616725/>
When I first read this I was months deep into researching my BA dissertation about how the far right use antisemitism, so, naturally, I had read some pretty horrific, pretty batshit stuff about demographic changes, Jewish conspiracies, and racial nationalism. This was the first time I was genuinely stunned by a far right belief, though. I mean...what?! How on Earth does this help the White nationalist cause? Sure, I could wrap my head around only patronising White-owned businesses and avoiding, say, Asian restaurants. But not eating food that originates in non-White countries sounds like having the most boring diet in the world for no real reason. I don’t eat meat for environmental purposes. I wholly recognise that lamb and duck are delicious, but it’s just not worth the environmental and ethical cost for me. You can draw a pretty clean line between the meat industry and climate change, but it takes some true mental gymnastics and moon logic to think you’re fighting the Great Replacement by not eating Heinz. Hilarious stuff.
White Noise also features Richard Spencer having a temper tantrum and storming out of a university speaking engagement because protestors weren’t letting him speak. Most of the crowd were seemingly there to protest, with a small group of men in the front rows looking like they attended to support the dapper, White nationalist cherub. He starts speaking, is drowned out by the protestors, and then screams something, voice cracking, about how he’s a maverick with dangerous ideas that’s being silenced because they’re right. Terrible people having public freakouts is never not funny, and considering Spencer is one of the worst of the worst I think we should make fun of him for running away from people using the First Amendment rights he loves so much.
Consider another example. After the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, troublesome twink Milo Yiannopolous leaked a clip of Spencer on a slur-laden tirade. It was another entitled tantrum, with Spencer whining: “I am so fucking mad at these people. They don’t do this to fucking me.” He sounds like a toddler, somebody who doesn’t understand that the world doesn’t revolve around him, and any adult that says shit like that should have the piss taken out of them. Yet, Spencer goes on to scream: “Little fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octoroons...Those pieces of fucking shit get ruled by people like me.” This truly abhorrent language - language that genuinely upsets me as it should any decent person - shows that under Spencer’s composed facade of rational White nationalism is a twisted, narcissistic ideology of fascist White supremacy. He is not just a spoiled man-child who flies into an incoherent fit of rage when he isn’t listened to. Spencer is a man with hateful, genocidal beliefs. Though his use of such nasty slurs is absurd, it is in no way something to be laughed at.
For a fantastic example of how to make fun of far right hatemongers, look to Josh Pieters and Archie Manners. Not too long ago, they got Katie Hopkins, hater of Muslims, Queers, Black people, Asians, fat people, young people, poor people, and Palestinians, to name a few, to fly from LA to Prague to accept the inaugural Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy. Basically, Pieters and Manners played on Hopkins’ extraordinary ego to get her to pose in front of the word ‘CUNT’. By tricking her into believing she was being given an award by a free speech organization, they also filmed her saying such things as “epileptics are all weirdos, they’re up there with the Asians”, “I guess Muslims are different”, and calling Greta Thunberg (who was a child at the time) an “autistic fucking wench”. Pieters and Manners’ ten minute video documenting this stunt works so well because they quickly show you how Hopkins is a terrible person and then make her look ridiculous, completely undermining her ideology. They don’t debate her like her views are legitimate, they don’t attack her, they just let her do her thing and that’s enough.
So, should we make fun of the far right? Yeah, I think we should. Cultural leaders of the far right, like Spencer and Hopkins, have some truly bonkers ideas (and I haven’t even mentioned the guy who believes Jews sponsored the idea that homosexuality is a sin so they could replace a pagan, homosexual elite). The leaders are grifters and their followers are morons, believing in some bullshit cause of racial and cultural purity that ultimately enriches very few people, themselves not included. However, as ridiculous as the far right can be, we cannot lose sight of how dangerous they are. Hopkins saying Sadiq Khan is part of a “Muslim mafia” who run “Londonistan” is obviously linked to the the murder of Jo Cox, a Labour MP whose killer saw the White left as race traitors. Spencer’s White nationalism and fascist inclination is easily linked to the murder of Heather Heyer, the 2019 El Paso shooting, and the Capitol riot. I believe we need to make fun of these people for two main reasons. The first is that mocking them can undermine the images and ideologies they want to present to the world: of radicals and revolutionaries speaking some silenced truths to fight against the shadowy forces destroying the White West. They’re sad, narcissistic people regurgitating arguments that have been around for decades, if not centuries, whose entire worldviews are built on despicable delusions. The second reason is that it can help us. The things these people believe are truly dark; horrors that are hard to process in the minds of decent people. Humour is a great coping mechanism for us weary travellers who have to deal with these fascists, and I’m not gonna judge you too harshly for doing whatever helps you get through the day. But I ask you, as you point and laugh at the Aryan supersoldier who is terrified of tomato sauce and the pudgy White man scared of people being mean to him, to understand the grave menace posed by the far right.
Thomas Jupp returns with a hilariously insightful opinion piece on the Far-Right, exploring these terrifying White Nationalists in their ridiculousness as he witnesses a lack of toys left in the proverbial pram.
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