Coined as a term by Italian fascist Julius Evola in his own defense in 1951, the concept of "superfascism" is useful to understand QAnon beliefs and the ideological projects of people like Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer.
↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓
https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Check out Liv's podcast: http://soundcloud.com/livagar // http://patreon.com/livagar
QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com
Episode music by Doom Chakra Tapes (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com)
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 129 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the superfascism episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Liv Agar, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we plunge further into our intellectual exploration of QAnon by picking apart its connections to fascism and extreme right ideologies.
Specifically, we'll be looking at the post-WWII concept of superfascism, first coined by Julius Evola, an Italian fascist who was on trial for a series of post-war bombings in 1951 and managed to get himself acquitted.
His name would later grace the lips of such degenerate ghouls as Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer.
But before we explore these edgelord superfascists and analyze their strain of thinking with Liv Agar, QAnon News!
First up, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene stripped of her congressional committee assignments.
Last Thursday, the House voted to kick Representative Greene off of both of her committee assignments.
That was the education and the budget committees.
Now, all Democrats voted for the resolution, plus 11 Republicans.
This was an unprecedented move, and it was punishment for Greene's history of promoting bizarre conspiracy theories, endorsing violence against elected officials, and making baseless allegations of election fraud.
Before the vote, Green made a 10-minute floor speech in which she mischaracterized her history of promoting baseless conspiracy theories as merely liking some Facebook posts back in 2018.
This is not the case.
She was deep in the shit.
And like I repeatedly mentioned, she has promoted a pro-QAnon article in December of 2020, just a couple months ago.
Later in 2018, when I started finding misinformation, lies, things that were not true in these QAnon posts, I stopped believing it.
And I want to tell you, any source—and I say this to everyone—any source of information that is a mix of truth and a mix of lies is dangerous, no matter what it is saying, what party it is helping, anything or any country it's about.
It's dangerous.
And these are the things that happen on the left and the right.
And it's it is a true problem in our country.
So I walked away from those things and I decided I'm going to do what I've done all my life.
I'm going to work hard and try to solve the problems that I'm upset about.
Marjorie Taylor Greene responded to being stripped of committee assignments by sending tweets that sound like they came from a comic book supervillain.
Like, this is one of the tweets.
I woke up early this morning, literally laughing, thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats, plus 11, are for giving someone like me free time.
In this Democrat tyrannical government, conservative Republicans have no say on committees anyways.
Oh, this is going to be fun.
I'm not mad.
I'm not mad.
Please don't put it in the newspaper that I'm mad.
I honestly think she's actually not mad.
I mean, when she's on the house floor, it's like, I'm just a Georgia bomb exploring the world.
Sometimes I get things wrong.
Who cares?
But when on Twitter, it's like, you fools!
You have struck me, but that has only made me stronger.
She also boasted about the hundreds of thousands of dollars she was raising off of all the attention and drama.
And I mean, I mean, she is, of course, one of a sort, I think, part of a class of like postmodern members of Congress where the office itself is really not important and not as important as the platform it provides her.
All the offices a stage for my next story Democrats roll out new messaging strategy to troll the GOP
with QAnon the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee is unveiling its first major TV and
digital campaign of the 2022 cycle is focusing on Republicans who have refused to stand up to QAnon this
$500,000 ad campaign ties eight Republicans to QAnon and Marjorie Taylor Greene
For example, here's a 30-second ad targeting Nebraska Congressman Don Bacon.
QAnon, a conspiracy theory born online, took over the Republican Party, sent followers to Congress, and with Donald Trump, incited a mob that attacked the Capitol and murdered a cop.
Then Republicans like Don Bacon voted to protect Trump, letting the QAnon mob win.
Congressman Don Bacon should have stood with us, but he was a coward.
He stood with Trump and the lies.
Congressman Don Bacon.
He stood with Q, not you.
DCCC is responsible for the content of this advertising.
Oh, thank you Ubisoft for doing the production on that.
Oh, God!
What the fuck?
This is so stupid.
Hey, let's kick off the year of Democrats by just sitting down and eating our own turds.
Hey Dems, yeah, let's make the GOP QAnon.
Also, by the way, that cop that you're like, they killed a cop, that cop followed QAnon accounts.
Yo, I've never ran a major congressional campaign before, so I can't judge this.
You should!
You're hired!
Yeah, this is weird.
I don't know.
When I think of QAnon, I think of a cancerous tragedy that is sucking everything that is possibly hypothetically decent about the country and sort of ushering in the new wave of fascism.
But they're like, Oh, a good way to stick it to these specific eight members of Congress.
I don't know.
These people basically took what 4chan first kind of started, which is like, let's run an op, let's run this dramatic bullshit and try to push it, and this macro environment.
Of course, because it's the macro environment and we're dealing with the DCCC at this point, we're looking at them being like, what if it was a bit more like an email forward, too?
And it's just like really, it's very low quality, but it's also very counterproductive in my opinion.
This is going to just fuel more and more ops.
Everything's an op.
You're going to, everything's going to be like this, kind of like looking digital.
And like, you know, like the, the image, like, uh, the image kind of interrupts like with, with movie static and they shift to the next scene.
And it's like, how is this helping us come back down to reality?
How is this helping us understand what's happening at all?
It's also, it's making Q real.
It's saying he stood with Q. He stood with Q.
Yeah, Q. A real, powerful, amazing thing that makes sense.
Yeah, it's like they're making it real.
And there's going to be thousands and thousands of Republicans who goes, well hell yeah, I want to stand with Q too.
You know, not just, not actually saying that this is not real.
We're just going to be running Metal Gear Solid cutscenes at each other until the end of time.
We're in Kojima's world now.
That's right, baby.
If the content of this was changed, it would just be like a Dan Crenshaw ad.
The same sounds and effects, etc.
It's fucking identical.
For my next story, General Michael Flynn says that there is no plan.
So this was a surprising development.
You know, Michael Flynn, massive hero in QAnon lore.
But he surprised many when he contradicted a few popular QAnon conspiracy theories on the radio show The Right Side with Doug Billings.
When Flynn was asked about the claim that Trump signed the Insurrection Act, he dismissed it as nonsense.
Even more confusingly, he said that there is no plan.
So I'm going to play a clip of that interview.
But bear in mind that his connection in the interview was pretty bad.
So his audio cuts in and out.
So that's him.
That's not the podcast.
There's a lot of people out there that look to you for a sign of hope that things may continue as they were prior to, as I call him, Administrator Biden showing up on the scene.
I'm just going to ask you some questions, and I want you to just tell me if it's nonsense or if there is anything to it at all.
Number one, did President Trump ever sign into action the Insurrection Act?
No.
Nonsense.
Nonsense.
Is the United States military running the country, or is that nonsense as well?
More nonsense.
Good to hear.
More nonsense.
There's no plan.
There's so many people out there.
Is the plan happening?
We have what we have, and we have to accept the situation as it is.
But now we have to do something about it.
So I'll get into more questions.
I love that we get a little peek into Flynn's life.
He apparently has people coming up to him and they're like, hey, is the plan working?
Is the plan going through?
What's the next step in the plan?
And he's like, well, I don't know, man.
I don't know.
People keep coming up to me on the street talking about some sort of plan.
There is, I mean, I do have a plan to go to the grocery store with my boys.
And get some beers.
But beyond that, I don't know what they're talking about.
Also, you took the pledge.
That's right.
You took the pledge, now people are asking you what the plan is.
Seems pretty logical to me.
Yeah, I love to sow, but I hate to reap.
For our next story, QAnon followers and other conspiracy theorists eagerly await Trump's inauguration on March 4th.
The 19th president!
Yeah, that's right.
We've mentioned this before on the Great Disappointment episode.
But there's this whole host of QAnon followers and pro-Trump people who are borrowing some sovereign citizen arguments to claim that Trump is going to be inaugurated the 19th president on March 4th.
All totally absurd, but this delusion apparently is having a real-life impact.
Coincidentally, Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
is hiking up the prices of suites around that period.
Now, I have had people write in and say, I've worked in this sector and this is probably just, you know, the website's kind of algorithm just responding to demand.
Same thing.
Oh, they automated their hiking?
Okay.
They're hiking their prices.
Oh, yeah.
This is the actual hospitality industry economy reacting to a total fantasy.
It rocks.
Goddammit.
Just more evidence that the economy isn't real.
I think we're getting a lot these days.
It seems like a deluge.
Dogecoin to the moon!
Yeah, I'm using my Dogecoin profits to buy a hotel for the March 4th inauguration.
Well, that's stupid.
You should be reserving a hotel room on the moon.
That's what it's gonna be used for.
That's where Doge is gonna get you somewhere.
That's where Trump's gonna get inaugurated.
Yes!
If we could just convince Elon and Trump to just move the whole op to the moon and then
maybe beyond to Mars, wouldn't be bad, right?
It's like, they think they're doing exploring, but we know we're exiling them.
I mean, it would just, our reality would just turn into, like, total recall.
There would just be, like, a mining planet.
You know, a mining operation on fucking the moon, yeah.
That rocks.
In 1951, a racist far-right ideologue, Julius Evola, stood trial in Italy for being connected to neo-fascist groups that were responsible for a series of attempted bombings in post-war Italy.
In his defense, Evola argued that he was not a fascist, but was instead a super-fascist and could therefore not be meaningfully connected to these groups and their crimes.
This is like the Metal Gear Solid box technique.
I am not here.
The problem is you do not understand my power level.
I mean, this sounds like a sovereign citizen argument, but to get out of war crimes.
Yeah, yeah.
He was then subsequently acquitted on all charges linking him to the bombing, which was far more as a result of the sympathies of post-war Italian courts for the fascists.
They were looking for a reason, but nevertheless.
What Evola exactly meant when he referred to himself as a superfascist is somewhat unclear.
He may have been placing himself beyond the fascist movements of the 30s, as a more evolved version of it, or simply above it.
However, what we do know is precisely what Evola's pipe dream of a superfascist world would look like.
He made it clear in his writings that this world would be dominated by men of tradition who have an aristocratic soul, live an ascetic Spartan warrior life, and have a will that rules as absolute law for those who live under them.
This ideal of Olin's super fascist would be educated in all the classics and exert an exquisite knowledge of philosophy and history.
The gentleman fascist.
Yeah.
It is no surprise that the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic, transphobic, contemporary far-right idolize Evola as an important thinker.
Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer, for instance, citing him as essential for their wretched worldviews.
If anyone is familiar with the reject modernity embrace tradition meme, which at this point is generally used ironically, this is a direct product of Avola's work.
There is a certain sense in which Avola's dream of a world populated by super fascists has come true, yet he could not have imagined how pathetic the individuals who fall under that label truly are.
The super fascist is not a man of exquisite taste and philosophical knowledge who creates a moral code as he pleases to suit his natural tendency to dominate others or whatever nonsense Evola dreamt of.
They are instead little piggies that love to be ruled and slop up any filth given to them by potential fascist demagogues.
The super fascist is not one who creates as they please and takes what they want.
They're one who shows up to a Trump rally in the freezing cold and are taken to the hospital for hypothermia because Trump did not care enough to provide them with a way to get home after the rally, as he had promised to.
Which is a real example, of course.
It is not as if Evola's vision had simply been implemented wrong and the different, correct version of superfascism must be implemented.
There is no such thing.
These are the logical conclusions of the fascist movements of the 20th century and their underlying social causes.
QAnon, a superfascism of our contemporary age, is a logical conclusion of a society which begins to agree more and more with someone like Evola.
Why is that the case?
In this episode, we will go over the underlying causes of fascist movements both in the early fascism of the 1920s and 30s and the superfascism of today.
When I use the term superfascism, I do not wish to mean a super dangerous form of fascism that is even more brutal and scary than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
In a certain sense, the contemporary form of fascism can be understood through what Marx wrote about history in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.
He forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
All of the most truly pathetic, absurd, and disgusting elements of a fascist believer in, say, Nazi Germany, are not only present but amplified in contemporary movements like QAnon, even to the extent that this group is debatably less useful than its older equivalents.
Which is a good thing, of course.
They are fascist to a level of absurdity, even beyond that of traditional fascism.
Avola's dream of heightening the most fascistic elements of, say, Nazi Germany to create a new form of fascism above or beyond that of its traditional manifestations has, ironically for him, taken the most absurd and irrational elements of this traditional fascism and accelerated them.
Avola wished to take a collection of movements that were already unimaginably unstable and accelerate them even more.
It's like driving a car meant to go only 60 mph at 100 and thinking the problem is that you aren't going fast enough.
When I use the term fascism, I'm operating upon Wilhelm Reich and later Deleuze and Guattari's account of the fascism in our heads or the desire to be ruled.
This key element is shared between the fascism of the 1930s and the fascism of QAnon that can allow me to claim that QAnon is more fascist than Nazi Germany.
It is not that these superfascists are an improved, scarier form of fascism, but simply that the average believer in this ideology desires to be ruled, to be crushed by an authoritarian ideology, even more than that of the average Nazi or Italian fascist.
Wilhelm Reich, a Viennese Marxo-Freudian psychoanalyst, attempted to describe the social phenomenon of fascism as he saw it developing in Europe during the rise of Nazi Germany.
He asserts that the German masses who collected around the Nazi Party and supported their brutal, genocidal, destructive regime had, in a certain sense, not been tricked into doing so, even though this brutal regime was against their personal interests.
At some psychological level, those who supported Hitler had genuinely desired to be ruled by him.
This desire is, importantly, primarily in the realm of the unconscious.
Reich follows Freud's account of the libido, which produces all of our desires, being mediated by our unconscious to produce our ego.
Many may scoff at any mention of Freud as a result of some of his more ridiculous theories, yet the idea that our desires are produced by biological urges, our libido, and that these urges work unconsciously are both fairly intuitive concepts that begin with Freud's work.
It is relatively common sense to assert that one can subconsciously want something and be driven by that subconscious desire to develop opinions to justify that want.
This is the basic way that Wilhelm Renck and others conceptualize why people desire a fascist dictatorship.
One may think of a stereotypical Freudian psychoanalyst listening to their patient vent their frustrations to them about their temper, their shitty job, their failing relationships, their financial problems, etc.
After they've done this, the psychoanalyst says, They're actually all your subconscious sexual desire towards your mother.
While this is an exaggerated critique of Freud, of course, one can think of a similar logic as to why the fascist jumps through hoops to pledge allegiance to an authoritarian demagogue.
One can think of me as their psychoanalyst saying, I figured out the cause of your problems.
They're all actually your subconscious desire to be ruled.
The fascism within our heads is primarily an unconscious or subconscious desire, and therefore operates outside of the fascist conscious intellect.
This is how an anon can claim that they want an entirely unrepressed and free society, yet still simultaneously desire the most repressive and unfree society imaginable.
We can think of the Marx quote about capitalist ideology that, They do not consciously know what they truly want, yet this want, desire, drives them to believe that QAnon is real.
You may be asking how this conceptualization can reconcile with the idea that these people are not being tricked into fascism.
The primary point of Wilhelm Reich's account of fascism is that they do not have to be tricked into it because what they truly desire is full-on fascism.
The propaganda that works to mask many of the more brutal elements of fascism simply allows their conscious ego to pretend like what they truly desire deep down isn't full-on authoritarianism.
In a certain sense, we can imagine that the fascist ego is being tricked, yet there is far more to the self than simply the ego.
To explain this, I will use a Q believer as an example.
You might claim that they are generally being duped into their beliefs.
Yet I think the main reason people have such a difficult time explaining why anons believe
such ridiculous theories about Trump is because they assume that the anons are being tricked
into it.
A far simpler interpretation of many of these people's worldviews is that they already
had a desire to support a fascist movement and were desperately searching for a confirmation
They were so desperate, in fact, that they got their worldview from an anonymous Chan poster who claims to be military intelligence and whose predictions have all clearly not come true.
Occam's Razor actually confirms my account of why Anons believe what they do.
To claim that they believe these ridiculous things because they truly desired their own rule is a far simpler explanation than that they have been tricked into it.
Deleuze and Guattari take Wilhelm Reich's idea of the fascism within our heads, or the desire to be ruled, and expand on it, viewing the individual as a multiplicity of desires and drives, and critiquing the concept of the ego itself.
When D and G, which is just a shorthand for Deleuze and Guattari, say that we are a multiplicity of desires, they mean that there is essentially a bundle of different, potentially contradictory desires produced within us all that create our comprehensive self.
They use the fundamental assertion within Freud and Reich that desire is produced by the libido and that we have unconscious desires but discard the ego as a legible concept.
Our ego and sense of self is just the strongest set of desires that usually manage to satiate themselves.
To provide an anachronistic comparison, one can think of the critique of the concept of the self and the ego within Buddhism as somewhat similar to D&G's position.
We invent the concept of the ego to navigate the world easier.
It is far less of a stable and absolute concept than many think it is.
All of the desires and drives within us do not necessarily flow through the ego for DNG.
To illustrate this, one can also compare this account of a smoker with what Travis said in episode 127 when conceptualizing cognitive dissonance.
The smoker may say, I really have to quit smoking cigarettes, right as they're taking a drag of one.
How could they possibly do this?
We like to conceive of ourselves as having a consistent and coherent direction in terms of our beliefs and desires.
This is one of the reasons why a situation such as this, which indicates this is not the case, is so disheartening.
What is truly going on with the smoker is that the contradictory desires to smoke and to quit smoking both attempt to manifest themselves the strongest, and the desire to smoke obviously wins out.
In this view, the reason for cognitive dissonance, or the physical pain associated with it, is simply the struggle between these contradictory desires.
One's ego has very little to do with this battle, even if one likes to think otherwise.
The ego attaches itself to a desire that commonly wins out and says, this is me.
When in reality, this desire does not always win.
When a desire that the ego does not think is representative of itself wins, there is physical discomfort and it must be reconciled with somehow.
The smoker's ego, or conscious intellect, may attach itself to a desire related to feeling disgust for smoking.
Yet if they continue to smoke, and the desire to smoke continues to win in particular instances, the physical discomfort in the struggle between these drives will continually reawaken.
This is why the smoker may adopt a perspective that, actually, smoking isn't that bad for you, or that it's worth it.
They think they come to this conclusion because of some presentation of new evidence.
They believe that their ego is the captain of the ship.
The real reason they developed this new opinion that smoking is fine is because of the libidinal desire to smoke winning out so often.
The ego is essentially a slave to these desires, or drives, and specifically to which ones win out.
And the ego cannot last long, typically, holding a view of its nature that is contradictory to the actions and drives that are the strongest within it.
Now, of course, you may ask the question, Why is it the case that the desire to smoke wins out so often?
This is usually because of a nicotine addiction.
For D&G, our desires and the subsequent views of the world carried in them play out at the biological, libidinal level.
There is no higher rational order that structures our beliefs, our actions, views on morality, etc.
It's all part of the natural, biological world, and we are no different than non-human animals.
This is a very Freudian view, of course, and one can imagine that many psychologists would also subscribe to this position about what drives humans to do things, that it is the same fundamental mechanism present in many non-human animals.
The reason why, in general, we may do contradictory things to what our ego understands as our self is related to the multiplicity of drives within us.
The ego may attempt to shape these desires at some level, but it is, for the most part, at the whim of these desires, and which ones are generally the strongest.
Using this general framework, D&G attempt to understand why fascism is desired, or why desire desires its own repression.
They wish to do away with the concept of the ego and the self, and help us understand how the desires that are produced by us all are molded by our social world.
It is the social world of the fascist that shapes and affects their libido and causes them to desire to be ruled.
The fascist desire to be ruled leads their ego towards specific opinions and beliefs that can support their unconscious desires, not the other way around.
In most cases, they do not even recognize it as such, and their desires function primarily on the unconscious level.
yet they still desire their own repression, which can clearly be seen in their actions.
In a certain sense, desire is intentional but non-subjective.
By this I mean that you can analyze desire not by asking the individual subjects what
they desire, but instead by looking at these individuals' actions. What this means
practically is, that to truly understand something like QAnon, you look at the larger effects of
their desires in society, not necessarily which crazy conspiracies they believe. Like who
JFK Jr. is.
is, whether John Titor is Donald Trump's uncle, etc.
The desires of an individual certainly have intentions that intimately affect their actions, yet the individual's conscious intellect does not necessarily know what these intentions are.
Following this, superfascism is simply the desire to be ruled at an increasingly intense magnitude compared to regular fascism.
These contemporary superfascists are not an aristocratic spiritual elite who will revolt against modernity and bring back a traditional form of life, as Evola may have imagined them, but simply a group who desires their own rule to such an extent that their political beliefs and actions are even more fascist than those who supported Nazi Germany 80 years ago.
These superfascists desire their own repression to such a degree that they will make up a competent strongman who will swoop in to lead them by the arm to their own repression.
They desire their own rule to such an extent that they look at the world as it exists around them, that contains increasingly militarized borders, overreaching police forces, mass surveillance, and decide that this is not repressive enough for them.
The superfascist desires repression beyond what is currently politically feasible.
This is why so many believe in Q.
QAnon is, in fact, the best example of superfascism manifested in our contemporary world.
What other reason could there be that so many began to believe that a senile ex-reality TV game show host has an eighth-dimensional plan to destroy all of the bad guys and turn the world into paradise?
What other reason could this insane world's view have gained any prominence not simply within America, but outside its borders as well?
The international nature of QAnon also certainly demonstrates that the social causes of superfascism are not bound by borders.
Even if a system predicated on militarized borders is what this disease grows out of.
QAnon believers project onto Trump a competency that is potentially the most absurd of all the different type of Trump supporters.
This is because they are the most fascist of all of them.
Many Trump supporters simply cynically latched onto him as a means to continue Republican-style economic austerity, expansion of the military, police, the surveillance apparatus, and increasing xenophobia and deportation of immigrants.
These individuals are surely also fascist, but far more in the traditional sense of the word.
Their support of Trump is nevertheless an affirmation of their own repression and the taking away of their own rights, but it is one based on some actual social reality and set of material interests that Trump represents that they also benefit from.
These cynical and wealthy white Trump supporters still desire their own repression, but mainly because it may also align with their material interests.
Importantly, it is desire itself that determines one's material interests, and it is one's material interests that make one desire something.
So, a wealthy business owner desires a tax cut that comes from Trump, above a desire to help those less fortunate, or a desire to help limit racism, because their social world shapes their desires.
So, desire affects the political world, and the political world affects desire.
They're intertwined.
Importantly, most of these regular fascists, who are becoming increasingly less common, had already ditched Trump after the election, and certainly had ditched him after January 6th, and would not ever think about doing a revolution for his sake.
They recognize that their material interests align with market stability, which could not happen under a Trump dictatorship.
We can see this demonstrated through Coca-Cola, for instance, denouncing the coup attempt on the 6th.
Unlike these regular fascists, who ditched Trump when it became expedient for their material interests, the super-fascist Trump supporter continued to have faith in their god-emperor.
Their desires are even more absurd than the regular fascists, and they are perfectly fine risking their well-being for him.
Trump was not the fascist strongman that they had desired so badly, of course.
He is a smooth-brained reality TV host.
He never had a coherent plan to take over the government.
This is not necessarily because he respects liberal democracy and wishes to keep it intact, but more so because he is simply too stupid to even begin to hatch a plan to place himself as God-Emperor of the United States.
You don't think he recruited the best of the best when he got Flynn and fucking Powell up there?
Lynn Wood, these are all- Giuliani melting.
You don't think this is the best fascism can do?
The top minds of America.
This is not what his adoring fans and supporters believed, of course.
When he called for them to march on Capitol Hill, for whatever reason his decaying brain imagined it might do, They had all assumed that he had a plan to take over.
This is why we saw the various radically fascist, tactical white supremacists who brought weapons, IEDs, and zip cuffs to the Capitol.
Most of these individuals were also morons.
The man who brought zip cuffs, for instance, had brought his mom to the coup.
These individuals, nevertheless, could have caused serious physical harm to congresspeople, thinking they were somehow working through Trump's grand plan to take over the government.
Superfascism is still dangerous, not despite of, but because of how untethered it is to reality.
It's not so much that Trump himself had a plan to overtow the government, it is more so that these superfascists had projected onto him the status of a competent, authoritarian strongman who they could help lead to victory.
We can also see, like, the inverse of this.
Were some people who don't like Trump also project onto him this sort of extreme competency?
As we, I guess, as we saw in that ad that we watched that viewed Q as this real thing that Trump was standing with and as his actual plan.
People go further and argue that QAnon is also this completely sensical and, you know, Altogether coherent platform, which is to all of our detriment because it basically stops us from seeing when a competent version of this will come along by obscuring it with this false competent version that has just fallen over itself in every possible fucking way.
And like you said, is actually quite incapable of carrying out their like their biggest dreams.
That's a good point.
If everything is treated on the same level then there's no capacity to identify when like an actual competent strongman comes along because it looks the exact same as someone like Trump.
We can at least be fortunate in the current context that the super fascists have no competent strongman who wants to overthrow the system to attach their desires to be ruled onto.
One may even argue that they are so untethered to reality that a real strongman would have a hard time unanimously gating their favor.
Although this is admittedly wishful thinking and cope.
The only thing more fascist than fighting to instate an authoritarian strongman to take away your rights is fighting for a perceived authoritarian strongman who is actually a moron with no coherent goals.
This is how Dilizan Guattari's account of fascism helps us explain the phenomenon of QAnon perfectly.
Most, including myself, have had a minimal capacity to meaningfully understand exactly why so many people have latched onto such an absurd and obviously wrong far-right ideology.
The easiest explanation for how this movement could have possibly come about is that the people who subscribe to this ridiculous set of beliefs do so because they desire to be ruled.
They want it to be true to such an extent that they will ignore literally every single piece of evidence that obviously proves it is absurd just so they can continue imagining that Daddy Trump is going to guide them by the hand towards an even more repressive police state.
It is their desire itself that helps shape their social reality and distort it towards an entirely virtual understanding of the world that has no reference to the actually unfolding events.
The collection of unconscious drives and desires of Q supporters works towards their own repression.
The specific content of the baking process, whether the deep state is satanic or not, whether Chrissy Teigen has been secretly arrested for sex crimes, etc.
are irrelevant.
In fact, the nature of the baking process is perfect for these super fascists because it allows for an increasingly large flexibility in developing conscious reasons for further pursuing their desire to be ruled.
There is a bizarre autonomy to this particular form of fascism.
Adorno and Horkheimer compared the traditional form of fascism to factory production, in that it is predicated on top-down planning and a rigid structure that's similar to the factory.
This fascism produces its ideology through a central ministry of propaganda that distributes this ideology to the masses.
See the premium QAA episode about astrology for more on this.
Following this, we can compare the contemporary form of fascism to cryptocurrency.
This sort of crypto-fascism still requires a capital estate and market,
yet also functions on entirely autonomous, online, peer-to-peer connections with no
essential hierarchy to the process in which propaganda is produced and disseminated.
To destroy a cryptocurrency, you cannot simply attack the central banking system.
There is not a particular connection within the blockchains that, when severed, destroys the currency.
You must instead sever the entire chain of peer-to-peer connections that form the network which records the transactions.
The baking process, which produces the Q ideology, is not produced by a central ministry of propaganda.
It functions based upon a set of autonomous connections and relationships.
It is the broader social reality and the desires that causes the different points in these connections to act the way that they do that must be dealt with.
The fundamental problem that produces the desire to be ruled must be targeted if this phenomenon is to disappear.
To simply ban and censor Q-believers on whatever website they attempt to amass on is a band-aid solution.
Many Anons, importantly, are so fascist that their ego is no longer playing catch-up with their subconscious desire to be ruled and meets it at face value.
We can see this with the Anons who explicitly desire a military dictatorship and are taking away of their rights for the sake of fighting the Shadow Cabal.
When the military took over in Myanmar, many Q supporters explicitly stated that this is what they desire to happen in America.
They no longer justify their desire with the belief that Q is leading them towards a perfectly free society for all.
They instead picture the storm simply as involving the destruction and suffering of their enemies.
I would imagine that if the Overton window shifted further right in America than it already has, we would find out that quite a lot more Q believers hold these conscious fascist beliefs than we can objectively observe at the moment.
And of course, the removal of Donald Trump is, for the most part, not going to change that.
If anything, they'll just sort of pivot towards something else, or maybe even continue to believe in Q. Following this analysis, the obvious question is, what is it exactly in the broader social world that causes so many to desire their own rule?
And why has it gotten so much worse in the last 100 years?
The primary answer to this question should be no surprise to anyone upon finding out that Deleuze and Guattari are Marxists.
It is the domination of capitalism in our social formation that causes desire to desire its own repression.
To simplify greatly, D&G believe that the production of libido, or desires, is intimately connected to economic production.
They are inherently intertwined.
This goes back to what I was talking about before in relation to the regular fascist and their material interests.
The way that an economic system orders and arranges production is heavily based on the ordering and arrangement of desires.
It is only because people want to play along with the arrangement of economic production in a particular system that makes this system possible.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, of course.
Let's take the example of the relationship between production and desire in hunter-gatherer societies, as these conditions are what humans have been living in for a great majority of our existence.
In these societies, economic production does not have to repress desire nearly as much as other, newer social formations in order for it to function.
This is obviously because it is the closest social formation to our evolutionary environment, or our natural and unrepressed desires.
In these quote-unquote primitive societies, which is importantly a misnomer because The Losing Atari do not view primitive societies as inferior to other more advanced social formations, But in these societies, one's desires are connected to the entire community, which allows for production to be arranged communally.
Things like food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc.
are produced and arranged for the entire community's well-being.
This can be possible because of the desires of those in the community being arranged for this purpose.
This is why Marx and Engels identified primitive societies as primitive communism, because goods were produced for the sake of the entire community.
When a hunter gave away the food they had just collected, instead of hoarding it himself, to then be distributed based upon the entire community's collective needs, it was because their desire was attached to this collective social formation.
I mean, to simplify it, a project of society.
And when we're looking at capitalism, what we mean is that we've become so atomized and so removed from that greater need, we have a vague understanding of it, like we should quit smoking.
But we have no ability to actually redress all those severed connections, because it is the structure itself that has long ago severed those connections.
Even if you want to care for your village, It wouldn't mean anything because there is no villages.
Interestingly, I think nationalism is also one of those dead ends where you go, well, America first, right?
We're doing great, as opposed to other countries.
You never see the tangible change in your own life.
You're totally atomized, even from the concept of the nation at this point, which was supposed to be the last container that capitalism was going to use to make us somewhat work together.
And that is completely falling apart because we are so atomized.
Yeah, as it sort of, as like, profit dominates, like, just the way our social formations are defined, even these, yeah, these concepts like the nation, or the, the, this collective interest of the nation, start to become less and less legible.
Yeah, if anything, fascists are just saying, well, now that the kind of global economy has been set up and we're basically in just one giant container where it's only individual desire bouncing against each other in this like flat, endless world, they're like, well, it was better when it was the nation.
It's like, what about actual communities?
I mean, they don't obviously want that.
You know, even their desire for the restoration of the national body is basically a false, a dead end and a false interpretation.
But it is very sad that that's where we're at now, you know?
And the idea that globalization is just this very positive and good force doesn't account for the fact of how many people we're actually able to think of as part of our in-group, as in our village, our communities, you know?
It's never gonna be the whole planet.
It's not even working on a national level.
Yeah, like you can see a lot of nationalism, and you know, particularly what caused fascism, what caused Nazi Germany in the first place, it was this sort of hyper-nationalism, that even the use of nationalism, which was sort of a way to vaguely point one towards this sort of communal project, even if it fundamentally didn't do so, even if the nation was predicated on a few people having quite a bit and everyone else not having anything, It's very hard because I think fascists are both lying to themselves and lying to you, and also telling the truth to themselves and telling the truth to you.
all at once.
Instead of producing goods for the sake of the needs of the community, one produces goods
for the sake of selling them on the market.
Labor is done to produce capital, and our desires are arranged around this very basic
economic phenomenon.
There are obviously many perks to this social formation.
I use the money I earn through my labor writing podcast scripts to buy a multitude of commodities
that could not have been produced in these hunter-gatherer societies.
Yeah, no, they didn't have Alienware rigs.
They didn't, yeah, they did not have Escape from Tarkov.
The relationship between libidinal production, or the production of our desires, and economic production has the most complicated and worrying one in the capitalist social formation.
Desire is most radically altered from its unrepressed biological beginning point when it is shaped for production in the capitalist social formation.
One of the reasons for this is that the capitalist social formation is predicated on an increased use of force in order to function.
A force that isn't present in, for instance, primitive societies.
The free flow of goods is paradoxically intertwined with militarized borders, police brutality, surveillance, and exploitation.
Desire must desire its own repression.
People must desire to be ruled, at some level, in order for this free flow of goods to continue.
Desire must compensate for the radical differences between its natural, unrepressed form and what is required of it for the capitalist economy to function.
By participating in the process of repression itself.
This is the basic explanation for why we see the phenomenon of fascism or an individual desiring their own repression within capitalism.
The more that our society is arranged for an increase in the generation of capital or the making of money, the more desire will want its own repression to compensate.
This is the underlying reason why we have superfascism today.
Ironically, this superfascism is so absurd that in many cases, like what we saw during the Capitol Hill coup attempt, it actually harms the interests of capital and threatens to instate a political system that is far less stable for markets than what already exists, which is again shown by Coca-Cola denouncing the coup attempt.
Daliz and Guitari are very complicated and elusive thinkers that I myself have trouble understanding, so I've tried to simplify their account of desire's connection to economic production as much as possible.
Even if you think it's a bunch of Pinko Kami bullshit, or whatever other likely more legitimate disagreements you have with it, I still think my general explanation of why Anons choose to believe the absurd theories they do, that they are attempting to justify an inner desire to be ruled, is a much simpler and more likely explanation than that they are simply idiots being tricked.
At a base level, I want people to understand that the only reason something like QAnon appears is a tendency in our society towards an increase in economic and political exploitation for the sake of profits.
That is why this problem is even worse than it was, say, a hundred years ago.
The only way that many individuals can reconcile with this social and political situation is by a maddening drive towards their own repression.
An absurd embracing of the worst of the worst of what these economic tendencies produce.
The reason they do so is beyond their own understanding.
Many of them think they are simply fighting the deep state, or defending the children from satanic pedophiles.
Yet they only want to believe that these are the reasons they act, because the true intentions behind their beliefs and actions are so alien to the natural, unrepressed desires within them, that they cannot bear to look it in the face.
I don't know.
It's an intractable problem.
I see it.
I don't like the conditions that give rise to super fascism, but I really do like two-day delivery with Amazon.
That's a good point.
That's a very good point.
That's it.
That's it.
It's like we're like, well, we would never choose to just be individuals who think of ourselves as totally separate from everybody else and just don't give a fuck about our community.
But every day we have that weird dissonance and we're like, I just ordered something on Amazon.
It's really nice.
I can get anything I want the day after tomorrow.
It's incredible.
We've been trained for this.
It's like Liv was saying earlier in the episode, you know, that capitalism sort of has taught us that this is what we want now and this is how we live.
You want to... What do I want?
You want to have a connection to your loved ones and to live in a community that makes sense.
But you desire so badly to receive Cyberpunk on the day it is released.
that you're actually unconsciously trading those two things for each other.
Well, all we have to look forward to is something like the cyber, you know,
an overhyped game from, you know, seven years ago.
It's the only desire that you will actually have a good shot at fulfilling.
If you have a desire for justice, it ain't coming.
If you have a desire for Cyberpunk, two-day delivery!
But you know what?
If you work hard, if you work hard and fail at most things and then get lucky doing a weird podcast about some weird fucking online conspiracy, then you can, you can be able to get Cyberpunk on the day it comes out and not have to trade in three games at GameStop and get it a couple months later when the price goes down.
He's going to be doing Tony Robbins style speeches across the nation.
I don't have the moral turpitude to even begin to put something like that together.
He means work ethic.
I will rant from behind this microphone until Julian shuts me off.
I'm fine with that.
It's not going to happen.
I'm going to get deported before you can be silenced.
My ultimate move!
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
If you enjoyed this episode, you should definitely also check out Liv Agar's podcast.
Where can we find that?
On most platforms that host podcasts, just search Liv Agar, and then also on Patreon, of course, at Liv Agar.
And you can also go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode of this podcast every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
The next mayor of Myrtle Beach, Gene Oh.
On day one, the first thing I do, and I promise you this, I will go to the City of Myrtle Beach Police Department and I will learn each and every one of their officers' first name.
And then I'm going to learn the first names of their wives, their husbands, and I'm going to know them.
My name is Tracy Bean.
This is my glowing endorsement.
Please vote for Gene Ho for Mayor of Myrtle Beach.
We have to take our beach back because it will be safe.
My name is Juanita Broderick.
You can't do any better than Gene Ho.
Vote for Gene Ho.
Will we have bike through weekend?
I will be downtown with my family and my children and we will feel safe.
And this is a plan that is going to work.
Because it is God's plan and I'm going to prove it to you right now.
