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Jack Z. Bratich, "On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death" (Common Notions, 2022)
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
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John Armenta
They see us.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
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John Armenta
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. My name is John Armenta and I'll be your host for this episode. What do COVID lockdown protests, interwar, German paramilitaries, Gamergate, the Lost Cause myth and mass shooters all have in common. No, this isn't the setup for a bad joke. These are all examples of microfascism as explained in the book on gender, War and Death by Dr. Jack Z. Braditch, published in 2022 by Common Notions. In this book, Dr. Braditch explores the cultural elements in our society that support fascism by looking at the specifically gendered formations of fascism and microfascism. Braddish chose the misogyny at the core of the fascist project. I'll say. While reading this book, I found it to be both incredibly illuminating and deeply unsettling. As I started to recognize micro fascism in many different places, I found it helpful in understand and minor moments in popular culture and politics in the US and how they're connected. For example, I'm beginning to see the connections between the current attempts to push women out of the military under an idea of warrior ethos and military actions in the Caribbean being defended as masculine and therefore appropriate, which are also related to seemingly inconsequential matters such as President Trump's desire for federal buildings to use so called classical architecture. Dr. Bradich is a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He's also the author of Conspiracy Panics, Political Rationality and Popular Culture, in addition to dozens of articles and book chapters. Jack, welcome to New Books Network.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Thanks for having me, John.
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John Armenta
So can you please start us off by telling us a bit about your research and what led you to write on microfascism?
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Yeah, so it was kind of a turning point in some of my work. So I'm a cultural studies scholar, specifically of media and culture, and I've been writing over the years on phenomena like from reality TV to cultures of secrecy to conspiracy theories. And you know, for the 2010s, I was mostly writing about social movements, but those are progressive social movements, things like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter. And then, you know, a shift happened in the world as well as then my research, because as cultural studies scholars, we tend to try to make sense of the conjuncture that in the middle of the 2010s, seeing a rise of a social movement or at least a kind of, yeah, a cultural phenomenon in force that was right wing oriented but really tied to popular culture. And so my emphasis shifted there. And so, yeah, I mean, I initially saw this, my moment of trying to make sense of this world was when I saw protesters or really kind of election era. First time election for the Trump got in. So 2015, 2016 street protests by these kind of young Internet based, almost right wingers who are dressing up in cosplay, almost of these kind of ruined empires where they were Romans, they were Spartans, they were Nazis, and all this kind of putting that together and assembling in the streets. And I thought this is something that needs a kind of attention, not as a kind of humorous curiosity, but it might be saying something when the digital world goes online through these kind of figures. And so that led me into thinking about the importance of culture, not just the emergent far right, but maybe to fascism more generally.
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John Armenta
Thank you. And let's stick on that for a moment and talk about a little bit about cultural studies. Why is culture a place or maybe even the place to study fascism, but also like, how is culture political?
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Right. So this is the kind of opening gambit I think of a lot of cultural studies from the Birmingham School onwards, is the idea that like culture is not just a place where either like ideologies play themselves out and reinforce things that happen elsewhere, but there's themselves sites of struggle and contestation for meaning, for value, for visions, for. For social formations. But what for me. So that was just a given for me, however, what made me pay more attention to culture when it came to this was the fact that people like Steve Bannon and others would talk about meta politics, that is that politics is downstream from culture. Right? So if you shape the culture first, right. The politics will follow. And so I at least understood that they had a sense of the kind of classic Gramscian notion of like, culture as the site where you also struggle and then politics emanates from there. But for me, it was even more important than just saying, you know, politics is downstream from culture or the kind of stepping stone which has seemed to be the way that people were talking about it, were like, oh, if you just work on the culture, then you can get the, you know, the fully formed fascism. I'm like, well, there's maybe something, not just about like the gateway to it, but there's something inherently political in the sense of, you know, the formation of subjects that are, you know, about dominating others as a kind of ontology, historical ontology that might be happening there. So, yeah, so culture became important both because it's already a starting point for me, but then seeing the right actually be very explicit about how they thought culture was important.
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John Armenta
Now, before we can really talk about micro fascism, we first need to understand what is fascism. So give us a brief definition, explanation of fascism, and then explain the micro to micro fascism.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Right? Well, yeah, I know. I mean, there's an entire fascism studies and so it's a debate concept for sure, I think for me, and I'll mention the people that I think define it well, but then I also want to go push them a little bit. So Roger Griffin is one of these key fascism studies historians, and he considers it a formation around what he calls palingenetic ultra nationalism. That is a kind of deep seated nationalism. But the palingenetic part is the thing that constantly needs to be renewed. Right? So it's a process. It's a kind of what people call fascistization. Not just a kind of state, a final kind of like totalitarian state or an organization that has taken over the state. But there's something less sort of formal that's involved. So that was one definition. What I pushed in the book around this is that in addition to being about nationalism, it might be something even beyond that. Right. It's something that goes back before nations. And the reason for that, I know I'm kind of going around this, but, like, because I think it's not an easy thing to just state the definition. But what I wanted to go at was something also that people like David Neewert and others have looked at, which is the idea that there's an eliminationist impulse in this thing called fascism, that it's not just about taking something over or imposing order, but it's actually reducing the other, whatever that other might be. Historically, in the interwar period in Europe, those tended to be mostly around ethnic and racial components, but it's not always that. But the idea that you have to eliminate the other who you consider an enemy or a threat to the human. So it's this eliminationism that I think was also important. So the concept that I work out in the book is this idea of palingenetic eliminationism. That is the idea that to be oneself, to be a subject, to be something, one has to eliminate something else. And that kind of principle, it's not the only way to think about fascism, but I think that kind of process and principle of self and othering, I think, gets at, to me, what is kind of inherent in fascism. And so we see that most obviously when it takes the form of, you know, Mussolini's Italy or Nazi Germany, in the kind of systematic approach to that principle or that logic. But I think for me, it's important to then extend it beyond those moments when we see it most visibly in a state form. And that's what gets it to micro fascism then, which is, I would say it's not my term. I'm taking this concept from, in a scattered way. It was in the works of Felix Guattari, sometimes with Deleuze, sometimes mostly on own. And so. And they're trying to figure out how to think about this kind of fascist desire, the desire to, again, like, control others for them. Right. And to police others and how to take that into the everyday life. And what they say is part of the family, it's part of, like the neighborhood cop mentality, right? Of the. So that it's happening in our everyday lives. So I found that to be an important way to start this idea of micro fascism. And I wanted to elaborate it, to again, move it to this idea a. Of culture, which we just talked about.
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John Armenta
Right.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
The idea that. Because culture for me is not just also like in cultural studies, it's not just the sphere of representation, certainly not the sphere of high art, but everyday life, everyday relationships, everyday meaning making. So micro Fascism allowed me to take that concept of moving it outside of, again, a kind of fully formed, organized model to not just smaller interactions. And this is what I want to make it clear that micro isn't just the scale of the small in the sense of just little actions, because it actually names a sphere, it names a layer. Or I think of it as. I mean, the closest thing I would say sometimes is like, microaggressions. Yes, they're each individual acts, but it's the ecology that is formed through a series of those actions. The hostile environment we even talk about when we talk about microaggressions. Right. So I would say that. But the other one I have is like the. It's not just about microbes, it's about the microbiome. Right. So it's not just a unit, a small unit, but it's, again, a kind of a layer or sphere of life that's permeated with these. And so understanding the diffusion of this in everyday life matters too.
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John Armenta
Thank you. And you mentioned several times in the book that microfascism is both a reaction to liberalism and modernism. Also predates it. Can you pull this apart a little bit? And maybe one of the examples you used was how settler colonialism is in many ways a form of this micro fascism.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Right, Right. So I'm just sort of riding the tale of folks who have been thinking about how to remove the notion of fascism outside of the very specific historical context of interwar Europe in the 20th century. Right. So. So, for instance. Yeah. When you mentioned settler colonialism. Yeah. I mean, even contemporaries at the time, like Aime Cesar was writing about this, you know, as well, and necropolitics later, the idea that, you know, what we saw in Europe at the time was a kind of, you know, almost like the return of some of these techniques of domination, of extermination that were now being brought to Europe from the periphery after the Europeans were sort of experimenting with them and inventing them in colonial settings. These forms of subjugation, these forms of humiliation, even in the kind of cultural sense. Right. Not just pure brute force, but the ways that the kind of feelings of sovereignty and the subjective sovereignty that was needed to go into spaces like that and claim its domain, often through, you know, the Catholic Church's blessings and doctrines, even. So, yeah. So I'm working from that lineage around tracing fascism back before that was typically thought of in the last century or less than a century, about its sort of exceptional status and unique emergence in the 20th century. So for me, there are ways it expresses itself as an anti liberal, anti modern force against those. At the same time, I find that both in terms of the colonial, also in terms of, as we'll see, we'll probably talk about the history of patriarchy, but even more so this idea that tradition itself, for so many of these contemporary far right and fascist thinkers, that tradition is something that needs to be restored because the modern interrupted it. Right. So this idea that there was this time where order was in place. Well, and people knew their places, all those things, those kind of principles and actions are pre modern, elements of them are pre modern. And I would say that didn't necessarily ever go away. It's just like they've have kind of been a continuous presence, I mean, even through the modern us. Right. I mean, we've known that around enslavement and various kinds of systems of that. So the thing you're getting at, so just like, you know, pinpoint it, which is. Yes, historically speaking, there are moments where it looks like it's just trying to unravel and it's being anti modern. And that's true. I would also argue that there's a kind of longer history to it that had a moment where it lost out in the modern moment and is sort of coming back with a vengeance. And so that goes to things like Umberto eco's notion of ur fascism or that he wrote about in the 80s. Right. That there's like kind of, you know, longer standing. I mean, I don't know if he used the word archaic, but there's a kind of, you know. You know, what is it, 14 elements that were. That you could find in different societies that coalesce at different moments to erupt and express themselves in a very formalized sense, but that there are kind of typically present in society. So to me, that's. That was. I was drawing a bit from that kind of notion of temporality too.
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John Armenta
Great, thank you. And throughout the book, and you, you do mention this in the book, there's a constant tension between death, suicide and creation restoration. Why is this so?
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Why is this.
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John Armenta
Why is this so central to the fascist worldview? Both these concepts on their own, but also that tension between them. Yeah.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
It'S a puzzle that even, I think the Fascist scholars debate over about. On the one hand, there's all this talk about vitality. This is in Mussolini's Italy, right. The new man, the vitality of it. At the same time, there was the kind of idea of winning by dying.
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John Armenta
And.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
The principles of sacrifice and. And depthliness that were even present there Nazi Germany is even other story. But these are not even like, I don't want to again fixate on those examples. These are just what, when scholars were examining it, they tend to focus on those examples, as does Mbembe in Necropolitics. So for me, I was trying to look at, at the same time, what is at the core of the idea of restoring something that's lost and what is the kind of animating principle there. What that got me into is looking at ways in a number of different cultural settings where, how do I say, I guess I'll start with an example of initiation rights, a long standing history of initiation rights and also contemporary ones. This idea that one is reborn into a group. The very activity of eliminating or just sort of refusing and escaping from one's natural birth, one's given kinship to something like a fictive kinship that is also about a kind of, again, a death moment, right? There's always a kind of. In many of these rituals, one dies symbolically in order to be reborn. And so to me, that was like an interesting, not just, you know, a play of death and life, but like, what is actually, what are they fleeing from? What is this idea that they're trying to simulate or replace birth, their material birth with one that is focused on, you know, either some kind, some form of abstraction. Abstraction could be honor and glory. It could be, you know, you know, a religious initiation, right, in which one is doing something for the divine. These principles that are transcendent from the earth, things that are. So. So this. So by looking at that was one example, I mean, the broader process in the chapter on necrotics, right, Is is this idea that there is something potentially inherent in a contemporary slash modern, maybe long standing notion of masculinity or construction of masculinity that is about flight, that is about fleeing the sensuous, fleeing the material, which often gets coded as woman or feminine into all of these other domains. But in order to do that, it simulates life, it replaces it, but at the same time it also is trafficking both in death oriented symbology, but then also by ignoring life and fleeing life itself, one is doing a kind of almost necropolitics by neglect, let's just say, right? A kind of. So even the idea of like a musk constantly trying to flee to go to Mars, right? Meanwhile, you know, the earth falls apart. This idea of, oh, let's just, you know, especially a kind of, you know, military model or belligerent model that says, like, let's just go and engage in some killing somewhere as A kind of refreshing of the national identity. Meanwhile, the economy is falling apart in that same nation. I mean, so there are moments of that the kind of lethality of the homa suicidal is still built upon a non recognition of what it needs to keep life going. Right. And so there's still a kind of, you know, suicidal component to it. And I mean, yeah, so I would. But that again is not my own insight. I've seen that insight by others about the kind of homicuicidal impulse that was infusing classic fascism. And so I was trying to make sense of it in the contemporary setting. Meet the computer you can talk to.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
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John Armenta
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- [22:13]
John Armenta
Yeah, I guess we can also see that in the way a lot of the AI boosters talk about how it's going. This abstract notion of intelligence is going to free us from material constraints and allow us to reach colonize Mars. Exactly.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
And the idea of like unfettered AI, I mean unregulated AI, you know, production and circulation. I mean so the same administration. Yeah. Which is, you know, going out and doing this kind of national renewal there outside, you know, through warfare is also creating this like allowing a fully simulated thing that actually might destroy the fabric, certainly destroying the fabric of society already, but even potentially the. The kind of ability to materially reproduce itself. So. Yeah, exactly. I think those two things, they don't just happen to take place at the same time, right. These things are tied together as desires in some ways to flee the messiness. It's a fear based. It's a social organization of fear of many things. Again, could be finitude, materiality, again often coded as women. The ability to, you know, to sort of just like be in a sensual world. And that's, you know, often an embodiment of thing anyway. So I can go on and on about that, but yes, exactly. The AI component is not just coincidence.
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John Armenta
Thank you. So let's turn to the first chapter in the book is like what is autogenetic sovereignty? And explain how it is a part of this microfascism.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Yeah, so I think that's the second concept that I think I've actually sort of generated in the book. Although again, it's built on others. The first one being palingenetic eliminationism that we just talked about. Autogenetic sovereignty is the idea that one becomes a self acting subject by almost authorizing oneself to do it with this idea that one can just create oneself. Right. So it just sounds like a loop on a loop. It is built around folks like Susan Buck Morris, who looks at in her article Aesthetics and anesthetics the history of modern subjectivity. And she notes this kind of autogenesis. So feminist work has done this too. Judith Butler this idea that men often think they're just creating themselves, right. The self made man is the most obvious one that we can think about as a commonplace kind of ideological figure. But it's even more than just like the one the pulling up of the bootstraps and the self made and the kind of success model. It's the idea that somehow men literally can sort of create the world or at least create a simulated world and authorize themselves to do it because they can. Right? So it's that kind of like. It's almost like a mystical foundation of subjectivity that the idea that like your power comes because you're self created. And by self creating you've obviously demonstrated your power to do so. And therefore you do have power. Right? So, so it, I mean again, it probably sounds like it's loopy in that way, but it's precisely, it is a kind of circuit or a loop that then authorizes all kinds of actions, right? It can authorize, you know, if you're if self created subject who has a special relationship to the divine Then you can show up in a land and take. Because you've been authorized, right. And because you have a special relationship that you have that authorizes you to. So this idea that it enables all sorts of actions over time. So I wanted to pinpoint that subject, that autogenetic sovereignty and self creation, to look at what again, to go back to. What might that self be fleeing? What is the other to that self creation? And what does that tell us about how power might work? Specifically a kind of fascist power that wants to, in everyday life, eliminate all those things that it came from in order to self make itself. And again, that's why gender is so central to this project.
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John Armenta
And it is also a very individualistic project too. It's very, very much focused on the self. And throughout the book you talk about a lot of these microfascists and use the term black holes. And they config of black holes, sometimes on their own, sometimes coalescing together. Why that language of black hole? And what does it mean in the bigger project?
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Yeah, yeah. And that is certainly something. Again, I'm borrowing from Guattari, but the idea of the black hole is that as a subjective character, right, As a kind of image of. Of how individuals occupy the world, is that the idea is like it draws others or draws the world into itself and might sort of, how do I say, I mean, to use contemporary language, right. We might see that in something like depression, but a kind of active depression that seeks also to work itself out in the world through action, through hurting others. Right. But it's a kind of implosion that also is not simply like an active agent in the world doing things. It's actually. There's something about the way it sucks the world in and wants to take the world with it wherever it goes. It's that kind of, I think, just if you think about that movement, I think it's something that Guattari wanted to address as well as Gary Jonoisco. I know I'm mentioning a lot of people, but I also want to recognize that even though I write a book, the book is. Is a synthesis of other work that I try to put together to mobilize things that usually disparate, disparate kinds of writing together in order to have it maybe synthetically then begin to make sense of other things in the world. So this is why I keep mentioning people. But I would also say that the network component of the black hole is that this is not just individualism. I mean, it's almost a collective made up of these. What I call like desurgent or down surgent subjects, that is, they are. They in their own kind of disappearance, are finding each other online. This is again, this is where the. Maybe the sections on incels or mass shooters comes into play, right? It's this idea that, like, it's not like they're just alone. In fact, I think the line I have in there is like forever alone together, right? That kind of meme of forever alone together or forever alone, but you add together to it. So what does it mean to have these kind of nihilistic individuals who are finding each other through their nihilism in the sense of denying the world nihilism, wanting to escape from the world. How do they connect and therefore actually form groups? It might be a different kind of bond or fasces, right? In the kind of classic sense of what binds people. The binding element might not be something that's again, about vitality. It might be about a kind of collective disappearance in that flight that also wants to take others with it. And I think that's the kind of the main. Not the main concern, but I don't know. But it's a certain. That's a hard one to sort of confront when if you're dealing with people who actually don't even want to necessarily restore greatness, they would rather die than just have the world as it is. But they want to take others with them. And that's the kind of. That there's never actually an autogenetic subject. Right? So that's why I want to say that that black hole indicates that the autogenetic subject actually, or the sovereign always needs others to enact what it wants to do, even if it's to eliminate them. And so it's that dependence that sort of puts the lie to the autogenetic sovereign. So the image of the black hole drawn from Guattari, I think, you know, is in its own disturbing way gets us at this idea that these are not people who are into like creating and innovating necessarily. They're into, you know, not just eliminating the world, but maybe even simulating it in the way they want it, even if it's at the expense of the rest of the world.
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John Armenta
This is great. Maybe let's take a more concrete example and so explain how these work. Both the. Not just the black hole, but also this autogenetic sovereignty and forming oneself in the term through the idea of the manosphere and red pilling. Because I think we can kind of see how both of those interact with each other using examples that maybe might Be a little more concrete for our listeners.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Sure, sure, I know, yeah. The book is filled with examples, but it tends to. I tend to talk about the kind of conceptual side of these things, but I'm happy to get into the examples, too, the cases, if you will. Yeah, to me. So I have a section on there about red pilling and the red pilling part. What got me interested. Not the first to talk about red pilling, for sure, but there was a way that red pilling seemed to be discussed as more of like just a kind of, you know, people like learning new things, even if they're wrong, about the world opening their eyes to the rise of feminism and the control of men by feminism and the misandry of the world. And so, I mean, for those, again, that's a very truncated version of the red pill. But the idea is that if you hear from others about how the world works, the scales will fall off your eyes. You'll see the world as it really is. And that tends to not just be a general principle, it's very specifically a gendered one. And so the thing we call the manosphere, right, which for many is just like certain kinds of networks and sites on the Internet, which include men's rights activists, incels, pickup artists, forums, all kinds of coaching and technique, bodybuilding. So that world was especially, let's just say, the mid-20s. Well, the mid-20s. Two thousand and tens, yes. Was really starting to form through the circulation of these kind of truths that were being bandied about in the manosphere under the name of the red pill. Okay. So, I mean, I don't know how much they have to explain about what those basic things are. So that's happening for me, though, what's important about how to understand those is that these are not just about information or even misinformation that's circulating online. I trace the red pill to a kind of initiation rite. It's drawn. The whole image itself is drawn from a scene in the Matrix, in the movie the Matrix, right, where Anderson meets up with Morpheus. Morpheus offers him the blue and red pill, asks him which one he wants to take. So for me, what's not important is what the pill is, but the setting and the scene, it's a scene of mentorship. It's a scene of somebody being initiated into something if they take the red pill, but very specifically, they're initiated into something that ends up. Ends up being a battle as well. Right? So it's not just the kind of, you know, they then go to war to try to you know, defend, you know, the human, the humans. So the point here is that, to me, all of those things were also in play when it came to the red pill in the manosphere. These were not just, you know, bits of alleged truths that were out there. These were attempts at recruitment, mentoring, initiating into a war.
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John Armenta
War.
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Not just any war, but a very specific one, which I would consider, along with Sylvia Federici and many other feminist analysis analysts, the war on women. Right. This was a very much. You can see that language in the manosphere about how they think about gender wars, how they think about actually engaging in war against women. So to me, once we opened up this very contemporary phenomenon, online circulation of knowledge called the red pill, if we open it up a little more to look at it, what we see are the traces of something a little more archaic. Certain kinds of initiation rights, certain kinds of mobilizations of men as men to separate themselves from women and then wage war on them. And so, to me, this is why, again, I can make the leap from there to something like the witch hunts that sort of helped found modernity, that help, in some of Federici's terms, help found capitalism in the way that in primitive accumulation processes. So the point here is that, yes, that these seemingly very contemporary things which are taking contemporary form, find traces of what I've later called, based on. On other works that people have done, the neoarchaic, the kind of return of the archaic through these new forms that we need to pay attention to, like what they're actually reactivating and reviving if we want to make sense of them, rather than think like, these are just, you know, even, like, subcultures, contemporary subcultures of hate or misinformation. Sure. But actually, there's something deeper if we really want to get at where this is drawing from. It's a deeper. Well.
- [36:10]
John Armenta
Thank you. And let's continue this a bit with one of the other examples you use. And it's going to be perhaps a little more. I don't want. What's the right word for it Visible in people's lives, especially if they're a little too online, is trolling. And I think this is going to bring together a couple threads that you've already spun out. It's part of it, like the numbness that is needed in order to be a successful troll. I think that connects this idea of the flight from the material to the abstract and not having feelings, trying to trigger people. So who are these? I think. What was the phrase you used? The digital numb troops, I think was.
- [36:53]
Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
The phrase you used, Right, right. Instead of shock troops. Right. These are numb troops which also want to shock, obviously this is again, I'm going to switch historical periods at times. Right. So, so how do we get from the 21st century online troll, how do we make sense of it through something that people like Walter Benjamin talked about in the kind of Post World War I era, the kind of the shell shocked troops, but also the kind of the shell shock that happens under a barrage of images that he said, the phantasmagoria of capitalism. He said like people had to become numb to it. So I'm like, okay, well there's something, something about these trolls, these trolls being. I was thinking specifically about the kind of rise of, in the first decade of the 21st century, the rise of 4chan and other kind of image boards whose sort of almost like inherent logic or goal was to outdo each other in terms of either graphicness, gruesomeness, testing other users boundaries. Right. And so what can you actually take? What is your, what is your line of offensiveness? Like what is going to trigger your ability to be offended? Or can you build up a tolerance to almost anything? So to me, and that's the kind of work that was being done by a lot of digital scholars, digital studies scholars back then, understanding trolling. So for me though that trolling was not a kind of again, apolitical transgression thing that they were doing. It was also very much tied to gender based harassment. So it's not that all trolls were only doing gender based harassment nor that they were all necessarily of a single gender. It was more about that at that same moment like the ability, the desire to chase basically women out of the Internet spheres was also happening. So the idea of who you're offending occasionally might be things like uptight moral Christians or something that might be part of the trolls goals. But more often it was, you know, for me, examining the literature on online misogyny, that this was specifically about taking women out of the public and having the Internet be the playground and public sphere for men. So to me that trolling was always at least inflected with a kind of gender based dimension which then leads, leads to the kind of like key moment in the Internet of trolls, which is Gamergate in 2014. Right. So that to me, so Gamergate as the, you know, for those of you who don't know or don't remember. Right. Briefly just say it was. It started as, you know, some basically fraudulent claims about a game designer who's allegedly, who allegedly had a Good review of her game because she was dating a journalist who reviewed the game. Anyway, whatever that initial thing was, it became a cause for a lot of these online trollsters, whatever you want to call them, to basically chase feminist critique and specifically women out of the gaming world. What's important for that is a, the kind of ideas behind it, obviously. But also it was seen even retrospectively as a kind of key moment of understanding the collective power of the Internet. Meaning you could assemble people quickly for a campaign that could. And you didn't need a headquarters for it. You didn't need an organization to say like, hey, let's all go do this. But there was something about that moment of the network being able to kind of, of come together in these kind of formations and in a almost peer to peer level, inspire, agitate and mobilize each other for this kind of common goal. And so I think that was not just because it was sort of the may or may not be the first time, but it did it at such a scale and to such a degree that lessons were learned, learned from it. For this emerging alt right, some of those Gamergate figures ended up going into things like, you know, the great meme war, that self described great meme war that got Trump into Clint, got Trump into office, that became part of his social media meme team. And so this. But the idea is like, wow, you don't need that much central organization to make things move. So the idea that this was a pivotal point for the rest of the alt right and certain kinds of online organizing from the far right. But I also wanted to say, like, it's pivotal also because it gathered together already existing histories of these other minor campaigns of online harassment of women and online misogyny.
- [42:09]
John Armenta
And let's talk more about these, I guess, histories of organizing by going even back further where you talk about the connections between, between microfascism and war through the idea of the war band and the squad. Can you explain, explain those connections and then bring that back to Gamergate?
- [42:31]
Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's, to me what you're bringing up right now, John, I really appreciate it, is the sort of second part of microfascism one was like just the importance of culture generally. But I think what microfascism allowed me to start thinking about was forms of action and mobilization that aren't always so clear cut, like in terms of their organizational form and in terms of their visibility. So yes. So you know, in Mussolini's Italy we had something called squadrismo, right? This is something he talked about right, the idea that like the bond that would happen through these smaller units, again, not necessarily in wartime. In fact some of them were veterans, sometimes they were, but the, a principle of binding men together in order to accomplish certain kinds of terrorizing of the population. You know, beating up communists, you know, in a similar vein, you know, the work that folks like Klaus Steveleit has done around the freikorps in post World War I Germany and these kind of roving sort of bands of veterans who now had, no, no longer had an organizational form to, to, to move them through life. So they, they took it upon themselves to again also terrorize communists and, and beat people up.
- [43:56]
John Armenta
And.
- [43:58]
Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
So, so, so we go from that the idea that like, you know, when we often talk about fascism we think of like the, either the mass rally or you know, the kind of large scale efforts, but there was something about these sort of smaller units, smaller groupings, things that obviously some people paid attention to, but it's not really necessarily part so much of our imagination about an understanding of how classic fascism worked. So what I wanted to do with that is update it with understanding the ways that again, use a word that Roger Griffin borrows from Guattri called the grupuscular, the grupuscule, which is a small, small unit that is barely even a self contained unit. It's very amorphous, it's temporary. It's a temporary kind of assemblage of actors that sort of moves through space and I would say moves through time. But anyway, so that form of gathering, let's just say gathering and mobilization that isn't always easily visible to me said like, okay, well what are the forms of this kind of squad that we might be seeing? And to me thinking like, and I'll mention the manorbund in a second too, the warbund, because I think that's to me pivotal for how the book operates. So things like Gamergate was a kind of ability, a campaign that could bring together this kind of squad based brigade action. You know, we talk about brigading online too, right? This kind of war, not just war metaphor at times, but a certain kind of organization of bodies and actions in space and time to, to eliminate others. That to me is like Gamergate gathered those grupuscular forms and really presented a model for how one can do that. So I think I go through in the book to talk about things like lone wolves and other kinds of smaller units. But I do think that the idea is how do we track things that don't have names? They certainly don't have formal organizations, you can't pinpoint a membership.
- [46:04]
John Armenta
You.
- [46:04]
Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
You can't even pinpoint a leader in a cell. It's not a cell based thing exactly either. There's something else to it. So, yeah, so I think it's important to update the forms of collective action instead of always looking for. When we're thinking about fascism, Remember, the book is also an intervention in fascism studies at the time, which means it's going to come to us fascism again in forms that we don't necessarily recognize. It's not going to be regiments, it's not necessarily going to be of uniforms and conformity and the mass kind of spectacle. There'll be other forms of it. So to me, the return of the squad and the pact and the pack was important. Now to go back to the war band itself. I think that was really pivotal for me because it's, you know, and I don't speak German, but the German version of Manerbund. It is this idea of the men's band, which was primarily a war band band that even like Nazi scholars, they mythologized this band as the foundation of society itself. That somehow it's men gathered in the name and in the objective of war that is again the foundation of the social order. And we see that revive the manorbund. Literally even the word is in the US and people like Jack Donovan and some of these other wolves of Vinland, some of these figures who are writers, they write books, they have online presences and what basically they argue for is a kind of almost return to a tribalism or a small unit specifically of men who band together in order to wage campaigns. And that's the foundation of society. So the Manobund principle though is something that. That was taken up by the fascist philosophers of culture like Julius Evola, who people like Steve Bannon also adore. Right. So there's a way of tracing, I think that anthropologically, but also as a principle, this idea of the war band as the foundation. To me, that is precisely the most kind of, how do I say, the most explicit way to get into these questions about, about. We talked about earlier initiation rites rituals, the pacting of men over against women, the need to flee the social, the material social in order to wage campaigns, in order to then also control. Come back and control the social order. So yeah, I think that there's something to be said for how do we understand the return of something like fascism at a micro level level by looking literally at some of the small things, but these small collectives, which aren't always again, so easily visible. The book is actually a project of changing perception and a kind of lens to also try to look at things that we normally wouldn't look at, but also connect them in ways not just in the contemporary conjuncture, but in the long, long history of it. So I hope that answers.
- [49:09]
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
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Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
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- [50:36]
John Armenta
That's great. And for the listener, there are a great many of these examples. And just to keep, for time's sake, I'm having to skim over a bunch of them. But let's turn to another, more recent example in terms of the COVID lockdown protests. So you call microfascism a death style as distinct from a lifestyle. So. And let's continue with this. This role of death and micro fascism and get. And connect that to the. The COVID lockdown protest. You know, like, was it that Give me Covid or give me. Give me Liberty or give me Covid. I should have.
- [51:18]
Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Yeah, I know. It's a twisted version. Exactly right. It was like, yeah. What was give me liberty or give me Covid? Yeah. But it was a sign that somebody, you know, had one early anti vaxx protests. Yeah. You know, I'm glad you Mentioned death style. I mean, originally the book itself. I mean, for the listener maybe, who's interested in how books are also written. Like the original book was actually called. I really wanted it to be all about the necropolitical and the Hamas suicide. It was called death style fascism instead of lifestyle fascism. Right. It turns out my introduction was so long, long that needed to lay out some of these key terms that my publisher was like, hey, what do you think about just writing and explaining what microfascism is, since you already have spent 40,000 words doing it? And so anyway, so that became the book. So I'm still thinking about whether or not to continue with a book on death style, but in terms of the kind of what the idea there is with COVID And it was a very brief moment, I could only add a little bit of when I was writing it, because it was mostly written in 2020, the book was, and a little in 21. But so, you know, there's a little bit of the, you know, the. The desire that, like, the freedom. This is to me a moment of like, again, another abstraction for many people, this idea of like, freedom as such, that freedom meant, like, I should be able to do what I want, right? Was such that it would. It was eugenics. It was eugenicist in its kind of impulse. Like, if people died, die for my freedom, that's okay because I should be able to walk into a store and not wear a mask. So to me, there were these moments of what, again, the death style is drawing off of Mbembe's necropolitics to understand what is it to be able to put yourself in a position to determine who should die, who should be let to live, who should be let to die, who should be maimed, who should be cared for. And so in that moment, that was just really one sliver, though, because it was about the anti vax protests mostly in the, you know, in the summer to maybe late summer of 2020 around it. But I do think, I mean, there's a whole other thing to talk about, maybe about how collectively we have yet to reckon with that era, just how. How Covid and the pandemic and other forms of dissociation that's happened because of it has still affected us. But I didn't get a chance to do that in the book. But yeah, I think it goes to the bigger principle of the flight or the indifference to life at the core of a lot of the far right, even if we think it might be so geared towards like, biological reproduction, especially eugenicist. Biological reproduction and a kind of life orientation that immersed in that is a willingness to actually not pay attention to the material dimensions of how people are actually living and they might be dying. And instead there's this flight to the mythic and the mythic trad wife, you know, even as it begins to, to as conditions around us deteriorate economically and in people's existential lives as well. So yeah, I think there's something that, you know, I'm trying to make more sense of it now, like in the second Trump term to see. Like what, See how much more of that kind of homicuicidal dynamic and the depth style is there. I mean, it's a different time than it was when I was writing the book, I would say, because I think there's a, it's much more integrated. All the things that I was writing about the kind of micro has been more integrated into, you know, the state form. So even things when I was looking at, you know, Proud Boys or Boogaloo Boys, I don't even know what happened to the Boogaloo Boys, but I think they've all become ice, probably. Right. So, I mean, so to me, it's like there's a different moment of the kind of way that the state has sort of integrated these logics and these impulses that I was considering a kind of homicuicidal dynamics dynamic. And it's still, I haven't quite figured out how to put my finger on the contemporary versions of it, at least right now.
- [55:52]
John Armenta
Yeah, it really does appear that the microfascism or the micro fascists are now part of the state. Like you said, they've become members of ice. So this is the majority of the book. It's kind of a downer. There's a lot of really dreary stuff in here and it can be a little pessimistic. But you do end the book with a great chapter on basically what we can do about this. And so there is a way out, or maybe not out, but at least to help suppress the fascism and micro fascism. So how do anti fascists respond to Microsoft microfascism? And maybe you can talk about some examples of. You call it both anti micro fascism or micro anti fascism.
- [56:50]
Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Yeah, yeah, I, I, I get, I'm not even sure what the differences are there, but I do use both of them. But I think, I think we landed on micro antifascism as the, as the main move. And I will say, I mean, yes, that most of the book is a kind of bleak or at Least the again the kind of lens through which we need to see the forces we're up against. Right. So I think that to me, and that's my typical, my imp. Typically my impulse actually is do more that kind of critical work. And I will, I have to thank you know, my. My friend and publisher, Malav Canuga, who was like when I was proposing a book, he's like, Jack, you got to have. You got to have something that gives us some paths. You have to have a last chapter on it. And I'm like, okay, I will, I will do my best. So, so, but, but for me it is important and I. And I think what I like to do, I will say is like whenever I present the book now because the book, that chapter is filled with examples and some of them I can talk about. But what I like hearing is especially when people are having reading groups around the book, which I know there have been a couple just like in the last few months in the New York area. But I want to hear what other people are seeing in their lives. And they're like, yes, I can see anti microfasism micro antifascism and doing this and doing that in my life. So part of the book is designed to start that conversation. So I just want to say that. So I don't have all the answers. I do have a number of potential lines in it, around it. For one thing, this is kind of a question for the left is like, what are the forms of tradition that the left can also potentially invoke that the left doesn't have to be so modern in its approach. So why seed things like the pre modern to the far right? I mean it's a tricky proposition. But I do think starting with things like the figure of the witch start to talk about in some detail in that chapter. But the histories of crafting, of cunning craft, the ways, if we look at the ways that some of these embodiments bodied material knowledges and practices pre existed the modern infused it and are with us today. I think that's one path to look. What else is there? What else is true about the contemporary condition that we can say is more left oriented? An ancestral tradition. Again, that's probably going to mostly come from things like I've seen like Afrofuturism or other forms of, you know, the Zapatista is. Or very much about that. So that can't always happen everywhere. But I think there's something to be said there. What other kinds of rites of passage might we be thinking about? What other forms of Gathering together. I do have some. This might seem, again, trivial, but trivia actually is an important concept I have in the book too. Trivial things like hashtag squads. What are the other kinds of squads that are permeating society and pop culture that don't have this war model. And I talk about, for instance, the everyday support networks that women have with each other for things like, hey, text me when you get home. Like just little things or their little, you know, hashtag squad goals that are WhatsApp groups or, you know, texting groups that are about building solidarity, about building, you know, new forms of life, new ways of being together. Certainly we see that nowadays more some versions of that in the kind of anti ice, obvious street models of resistance that are going on right now. To say, not just like, we don't want the feds on us. It's like, this is a community defense project. What does it mean to sort of define your community, defend it against the incursions that aren't just always state oriented. It also means about what do we do inside of our households in our own friend networks? How do we call out these misogynistic impulses and expressions that happen in our own everyday lives? So some of it is about basic, like, let's take care of each other by also calling each other out, other principles that are in play. I think there was an interesting moment of the difference. Trying to think about the difference between cancel culture and canceling meaning. Like what? The right things of what's going on. But then also abolition. Abolition. Or to think about the difference between the kind of movements now that we have around abolition. How are those different from the eliminationism that is inherent, as I mentioned, in fascism? So conceptually we can look at not just the terms, but the projects that are going on to see how things are being played out in terms of building resilient communities that also have a pretty severe internal calling each other out. But the goal is to form other kinds of kinship. For instance, queer kinship forms. I mentioned those as well. The understanding of, what was it, the Institute of Queer Ecology. How do we understand metamorphosis and mutation that isn't just turning it into initiation rights in order to have certain kinds of gender binaries. So these all sound like very different things. Things. But to me, these are all efforts at preventing a. The kind of autogenetic sovereign from emerging and then also taking power by rooting it into material relationships. And the other one is so, yeah. And doing that in the kind of collective formations that I've talked about, smaller groups, squads Et cetera. But, but yeah, so I think those were some of the examples in that last week. But the idea is it's already happening and it has been happening. We can also look at certainly the classic anti fascist uprisings and resistances. Very important to invoke those. At the same time, if micro fascism is kind of pervasive, then also the anti microfascism is on that same kind of plane and so therefore can also resist it in all those spaces too, in all those different ways, even if we don't use the term fascism when we're fighting off, you know, the, you know, domestic violence, for instance. But I think it, understanding how those, the, these struggles are connected becomes very important.
- [63:21]
John Armenta
Yeah, and I really appreciate how you tried to create these ways out without having a fascist reaction to them, like getting out of the, you know, the Carshall models. Like we're just not, we're not trying, trying to ban thinking like this. We're trying to form new ways of understanding. So thank you for your time. But I do have one last question. What are you working on now? Any new projects in the pipeline, either books or articles or otherwise?
- [63:52]
Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
Right, yeah, I'm still thinking about whether the death style book, if there's anything there, or if it's just like I've said it all already in the Necrotics chapter. So I'm still kind of thinking about that. But a couple of the projects. Projects. One is actually tracing. I'm a media study scholar, right. So like I'm looking at not just contemporary masculine fitness culture, but there's something about this figure, Barnard McFadden, who's a very little known figure in the history of publishing. But he was a massive publisher. He started this magazine called Physical culture in like 1899 and it went from 1950 to he trained Charles Atlas. He also started all these kind of true story, true detective tabloid magazines. A massive publisher, very little studied. And what he did, the reason it's important to me is because unlike a lot of ways we think about fitness as like some kind of individualized, responsible doing ourselves, he was tying it specifically to nationalism and even then. Anyway, so I don't want to get too far into him because I can get really excited about talking about the things he did. Like he brought over some Italian fascist cadets to the US and took them to Madison Square Garden to watch wrestling. Anyway, so I'm doing a little bit of that more conceptually. I really want to work. I'm not sure. It might be a short book, it might just be a longer article. On the rise of on fratriarchy. Right. It's a little study term it exists but it's a marginal term in anthropology and some gender studies the understanding that we might not be in a world of patriarchy in a classic sense it might be a certain kind of androcracy but that what we're really dealing with mostly is the reign of brothers and not necessarily blood brothers but a certain kind of political kinship structure that comes out of what we just talked about the manorbund the kind of squad prismo but that you know that what we might be seeing is a different kind of masculinism than cultural level than the one that's about the head of a household that we're seeing as something more peer based wine So I think that's the kind of bigger project that that's going to take some time that all.
- [66:06]
John Armenta
Sounds fascinating that great and good luck with it. So Jack, thank you so much for your time.
- [66:13]
Dr. Jack Z. Braditch
John appreciate giving me a chance to talk and thanks for the really helpful questions and insightful questions.