We’re Watching American Fascism Become Nazism Right Before Our Eyes

What Do You Call an Organized Political Movement Dedicated to…Ending People’s Rights to Exist?

Image Credit: Michael Brochstein

By now, you might have heard what happened over the weekend. A speaker at CPAC — the big conservative conference — said: “for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.” The internet went into an uproar. The speaker threatened to sue publications that reported on it. All this is where we are, my friends. There are now public calls for eradication.

People said, in effect, “this guy wants to annihilate a whole social group. And he’s a speaker at CPAC.” The fellow who said those repugnant words objected, furiously, hilariously, saying he as just aiming at an ideology, not, you know, people. 

Knowles subsequently claimed that “eradicating” “transgenderism” is not a call for eradicating transgender people and demanded retractions from numerous publications, including Rolling Stone.

Let’s think about all this for a second. And not about the flimsy defense of “I was attacking an ideology!” — the subject of this jaw-dropping tirade. Let’s think instead about the key word in it. Eradication.

That word has a subtext. All words do. And increasingly, what’s happening on the right is that language functions as code. The code works because the subtext is implied. You don’t need to say it. Welfare queens. It doesn’t mean what “soccer moms” does, does it? And I hardly have to point out how — you already know, because the subtext is hidden in the phrase itself.

Sometimes, we call this coded language the right uses “dogwhistles.” That means something that many of us have almost forgotten. They can hear it, but we can’t, just like a real dogwhistle. They hear the subtext — and it floats right by us — and that way, phrases and words, ideas, with genuinely troubling meanings, intentions, purposes, aims, enter the public sphere. Because, well, they seem innocuous enough. The hidden subtext is shrouded enough for nobody to be able to say, hey, that thing you’re saying is hateful. It’s dangerous. It’s not OK to say that about people. It’s a slur, bigotry, a call to violence.

This is how the far right has effectively poisoned our discourse, our public spaces — by using coded language whose hateful hidden subtext is all too plain, yet because it’s unsaid, it allows them to go on denying that they’re being hateful at all. Hey, we’re just talking. Joking! We didn’t mean it. Welfare queen doesn’t mean a certain kind of person. We didn’t even say that we wanted to annihilate you!

Now let’s go back to that word “eradicate.” It has a subtext. One that doesn’t really need to said out loud. What is the word “eradicate” used for? When do we use it? What do we eradicate? We eradicate ills and illnesses. So we use the word “eradicate,” for example, in the context of social ills — we say that we intend to “eradicate poverty,” or hunger, or war. Or in the context of disease — we say that we “eradicated smallpox” or “eradicated polio.”

When we use words like that, the subtext is about disease. About illness. About infection, usually, contagion — even for poverty, in the sense that it’s something very much like an intergenerational inheritance. We use the word, especially, in biological contexts. Sometimes, we speak of “eradicating” parasites and insects, who cause crop failures or human diseases.

Maybe you’re beginning to see the problem here. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the Nazis were also great fans of “eradication.” But that, too, was for a reason.

All this hardly comes in a vacuum. Where else do you see intimations of this…perspective, this…subtext? Sometimes, it’s not even a subtext. It’s just the…text. The world’s richest man goes out there and speaks about the “woke mind virus.” Meanwhile, theories of a “Great Replacement” have made a comeback — they, the genetically inferior ones, are replacing us, the ones with pure and true blood. Like a virus. Like a disease.

What is this, exactly? What is this all about? This bizarre biological obsession?

I’m going to tell you, but first let’s go back to the idea that someone is talking about eradication, but only in the context of an ideology, not people. It’s a flimsy defense, for a pretty obvious reason. Pretty much every trans, gay, LGBTQ person will tell you that it’s hardly an ideology. It’s not a choice. You’re born that way, just like I’m born straight. It’s unalterable. There is an inherent difference here. Ideology is something that we choose, for better or worse, and as adults, yes, we can even outgrow our religion, the ideologies we were born into. But that doesn’t make anyone any less a Jew or what have you in the eyes of, well, fascists. It’s not as if saying “I’m not a Jew anymore!!” stopped the Nazis from killing you. Meanwhile, over in the Soviet Union, anyone who wasn’t a patriotic communist wasn’t ideologically pure enough, and got sent to the gulags. So to say that you “just” want to eradicate an ideology is hardly something that’s not problematic either.

Let’s go back to the context. What is all this — this tidal wave of biological essentialism — really about? Mind virus. Eradication. Great Replacement. It hardly takes a genius to see the bizarre biological angle here. This is about fascism becoming Nazism.