By umair haque
Apr 29 · Medium.com
We’re All Becoming Targets for the Far Right Now, Thanks to Figures Like Elon Musk
In the last few essays, I’ve tried to warn that the far right is taking over our societies — one institution, one norm, one office at a time. This is not a drill. It is a social collapse, in which democracy itself is under brutal and sustained assault. But what does the far right want?
There’s an easy way to answer that question — which is also an unsatisfying one. An abstract way. It wants a fascist society, a regressive one, a repressive one. It captures offices and perverts norms in order to bring about a change in society — a restoration of a cosmic moral order, in which the genetically and divinely ordained superior, true of faith and pure in blood, reign supreme again.
True — but not nearly personal enough to really help you understand. In a visceral way. So let’s try again.
What does the far right want? It wants the rest of us not to exist as people. Only as scapegoats.
Does that sound chilling? It should. But maybe not enough, to really convey the weight of my warning. So let me fill in the picture I’ve sketched out now.
The far right has a certain set of grievances. Its position in society has fallen, as downward mobility has become the norm. That’s true for more or less all of society, these days — our social contracts are not working anymore. Our institutions are broken. A better life seems totally out of reach — and just making ends meet it is a constant, heart-pounding struggle. What makes the far right different is that instead of seeking solutions — based on real causes — it just seeks scapegoats.
What’s alarming is how much, how fast, and how intensely this search for scapegoats has grown. Now, all of the rest of us who aren’t on the far right are scapegoats.
What was once normal to express and believe in — democratic values and norms — is now considered extreme. And what was once extreme — anti-democratic values and norms, hate, violence, bigotry, rage, intimidation — is now acceptable. The Overton Window hasn’t just “shifted” — it’s shattered, and been rebuilt inside out and upside down.
What do I mean by “now all of the rest of us are scapegoats”? Think of the evolution of this wave of far rightism. I’ll use America as an example, but you can chart it in your own context. It began with Trumpism — and Trumpism was simple. America had fallen into disrepair. It had to be made Great Again. How to do that? Eliminate the impurity, the source of the problems. Who was that? Immigrants, especially Latinos. Trumpism was focused on this problem above all — hence, little Mexican kids were torn apart from their parents, and put in cages in camps. I’m oversimplifying for brevity’s sake — but only a bit.
Today, the scapegoats have expanded. Immensely. Who are they? They’re teachers, who read banned books to kids. They’re math professors, who write forbidden textbooks. They’re members of Congress, who are sent death threats. They’re gay people, who are smeared as pedophiles. They’re women, who pursue their own bodily autonomy. And even more chillingly, they’re anyone who helps all these people — “aiding and abetting” them. This is the goal of the new wave of laws the far right is passing, modelled under the Fugitive Slave Act — to create a society of vigilante-informants.
But a society of vigilante-informants also needs scapegoats. A lot of them. It must have people to hunt down, and satisfy its dumb, mindless rage. Hence, all of the rest of us are becoming scapegoats. Who among us — that’s sane — hasn’t “aided and abetted” a gay person or woman? Read a banned book? Taught our kids that being gay or different is OK? That women should have bodily autonomy? That refugees need help, not hate?
We all have. And in that way, we are all scapegoats of the far right now. That is why even expressing democratic views is now becoming something considered extreme — and expressing anti-democratic views, in anti-democratic ways, perfectly acceptable.
If you believe in the basic values of democracy — equality, truth, freedom, justice, goodness — increasingly, you’re painted as the extremist, the fanatic, the fascist. Think about how many people get attacked now for simply wearing masks, or being gay, or being women, or what have you. Those numbers have gone up, dramatically, as the far right has taken hold. They have seized control of our social and cultural institutions — and portrayed believing in democracy as fascism and extremism.
But how can that be? It’s obviously absurd. The reason they’re doing it is to gaslight everyone else. And the gaslighting works.
Think about where we really are these days. Saying the word gay is now a crime. Women are being hunted down for pursuing autonomy. Tip lines have been set up to report teachers. Anyone the far right — a public official, a teacher, a celebrity, an average person, whomever — doesn’t like is almost instantly attacked in the most vicious ways — smeared as a pedophile, mobbed, sent death and rape threats, relentlessly hounded, in concerted waves of brutality meant to literally drain away not just their sanity, but their personhood.
And all this has become normal, because the gaslighting works. Think of a place like Florida. People are foolish enough to believe in all the scapegoats. Florida’s real threats? Climate change, inequality, mass extinction — it’s a bellwether for the planet, a state of the extreme rich, and an underclass, of sinking cities and political capture. And instead of addressing any of this, Floridians are stupid enough to believe that the real enemy is…gay people….gay teachers…women…kids’ books…kids. They became that way because they were bombarded with Big Lies over and over again, until their minds broke. And those Big Lies told them that all of these people were the scapegoats responsible for their woes.
The gaslighting works.
Worse, our side — the centre left — doesn’t fight back. It doesn’t say, often enough, or strongly enough, “Hey! This search for scapegoats is wrong. It is persecution and hate. The real problems are these. Our societies are democracies. And in them, we don’t scapegoat anyone, much less everyone.”
Mallory McMorrow said that — and caused a brief stir…and then nobody cared. Joe Biden’s focused on Ukraine — which is fair. Kamala Harris is harder to find than Waldo. Barack Obama’s busy, stupidly, making movies with celebrities.
And so the far right is winning. It is absolutely demolishing society like a wrecking ball through a sagging building. And they don’t even have to be “in power” to do it. Because our side, let me say it again, is not fighting back. The entire leadership of our side has basically accepted hate, intimidation, brutality, and violence as normal. They have let it become legitimised as a perfectly acceptable way to pursue social change. No, a committee moving at a glacial pace isn’t enough. A nation’s leaders have to speak out against all this — and ours don’t do it.
Why not? They’re afraid of being painted as “woke.” Because being woke these days is a political career-killer. But at some point the centre left has to change that. Because it’s just another smear. Wokeness is irritating and stupid. It goes too far without thinking — like when it renames women “pregnant people,” and that’s offensive to a lot of women. But just because you believe in, say, gay rights, books, teaching kids that being different isn’t wrong, doesn’t mean you’re woke. It just means you’re civilized. Wokeness has come to mean any form of democratic expression at all — and the far right is using it, very effectively, as a cudgel now.
But to say that kids should learn about being gay or people’s bodily autonomy or that women should have rights or that slavery happened isn’t remotely the same as saying that everyone should share the same bathroom or changing room, or that “pregnant people” are women, or all the other extreme postures of wokeness.
The far right has conflated any form of democracy with wokeness, and gaslit the average person to believe in it, and increasingly, they do.
And under that guise, it is doing incredible, shocking damage to our democracy.
How so? What are the basic rights of democracy? Freedom of expression, association, movement, speech, privacy. All of these are under attack — for almost all of us. It’s not just “the woke” who don’t get to read certain books — it’s all of the kids in a given state. Women are losing the rights to even talk about their bodily autonomy — or the right to leave a given state. Minorities of all kinds are under threat. Gay people are worried about losing the hard won rights to marriage and adoption and just existing in the open.
We are all under attack from the far right. Have a gay friend? Know a woman? Know a kid? Work with a minority? Not exactly the world’s greatest church-goer yourself? Don’t believe in the Big Lies? Then you’re under attack too, because in the society the far right wants, these people aren’t human beings. They are just scapegoats. They don’t deserve rights. They just deserve to be punished if they don’t conform, because, pre-emptively, the idea is that society is to blame them for its woes, the woes of the pure and true.
Let’s do the example of kids, because it’s instructive. Why shouldn’t kids be allowed to read a book where two gay unicorns are friends? So what? The idea underlying all this is that kids are to blame for our societies’ woes. If they don’t grow up to be what we want them to be — the far right wants them to be — then they become the corrosion in society, too. Kids. Scapegoats. See how dangerous all this really is?
The far right is excising the basic freedoms of democracy from all of the rest of us with surgical precision. It knows what it’s doing. When it says that women can’t leave a state, that we can’t teach kids the rudimentary values of democracy — equality, justice, truth — when it says that gay people are responsible for our moral corrosion, not corrupt elites, when it says that anyone who believes in the basics of democracy is “woke,” and must want gender neutral bathrooms and all men to be pregnant, when it smears anyone it doesn’t like as a pedophile, when it can send death and rape threats and not even be punished…we are all under attack.
Because all of us who are sane and normal believe those things and want those things. We might not believe in gender free locker rooms and the rest of the extreme positions of wokeness — who really does? — but we all believe in the basics of democracy, that people are equal, that they deserve to be treated with respect, that nobody deserves hate or intimidation.
And the woke don’t help, by the way, by saying that if you don’t agree with them, then you’re part of the far right, too. Wrong. It doesn’t make me part of the far right to say that hey, maybe using the term “pregnant people” isn’t helpful, and many women don’t like it. Because I’m not trying to take anyone’s basic rights away. Conflating these two things — taking people’s rights away and trying to do justice to complex issues — is the woke letting the far right smear everyone else, by painting those of us in the centre as out to get them, too. We are not. We are just thinking through issues which need a lot more thought than the childish approaches wokeness so often deploys. It is not “woke” to just want to stand up for a democracy. It’s just democratic, and there is a big, big difference here.
The far right is winning, my friends, for all these reasons. It is gaslighting our societies into believing that everyone should be a scapegoat. What are women and kids to the fascist project? Just genetic material, “resources,” with no autonomy. What are minorities? Infections, stains. What are teachers? Stewards of a totalitarian project. Sound familair? This is what we are becoming.
Because it has normalised painting everyone else as a scapegoat now — a marked evolution from the Trump years — basic rights are now under sustained, deadly assault. Huge groups in society are now beginning to lose the most basic rights of all. Expression, movement, association, thought. Women. Gay people. Kids. All this is justified by painting any resistance to it as the “really” extreme position, because it’s “woke.”
This context is why people are so upset about Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter. It’s yet another space where this process of scapegoating can grow, be extended to constantly, perpetually include everyone who isn’t the far right. Where smears and intimidation and threats can be thrown at anyone for simply expressing democratic values. Musk is happy to acquire it for the far right to have a playground to rub democracy’s nose in the dirt. But the rest of us are very concerned — and for good reason. The far right is gaslighting democracy when it cries about being banned from social media. The reason for that is eminently simple: they’d erase the rest of us from society, as human beings with full personhood. And democracy as we know it would cease to exist.
All of this is working. Because our side is not fighting back. It is just letting this happen. It isn’t speaking out and saying what it thinks. It isn’t checking its own fanatics, and asking them to calm down, reminding them that not everyone is going to agree with them. It isn’t reminding all of society that democracy is about basic freedoms — and they are being taken away, as we are all made into scapegoats.
We are being dehumanized, and our personhood removed. The excision of rights follows. Between the woke and the far right — and the leaders too cowed to stop this deadly cycle of hate, smears, stupidity, extremism, and lies — the rest of us are caught in a trap. We are all becoming the scapegoats a failed society is searching for. And hunting down.
Umair
April 2022