I would say that the thrust of my view is that even from within the assumption that there is indeed such a thing, the current way that literary fiction is being policed is excessive and overly constrictive.
You mention violence against elderly Asians as a kind of example of fascism in America. My recollection is that these crimes were perpetrated by shirtless lunatics, many of whom were black and in the Bay Area. Further, I recall the “boba liberal” AAPI advocacy complex attempting to frame the 2021 Atlanta Spa shooting as an example of fascistic white violence against Asians when it was clearly the work of a man struggling with sex addiction and psychotic guilt. Even then, two months after the storming of the Capitol, this lowbrow attempt at assigning blame to Trump and his influence didn’t fly.
If Trump is elected, and I am selected from the Project 2025 HR database, I will advocate for reparations to Asian Americans in the form of something approximating the following missive.
I wouldn't say violence against elderly Asians is an example of fascism in America - in the context of this piece, I was saying something more constrained - that racial violence doesn't actually *require* any kind of fascist project in the American context in order to occur (therefore worrying so much about literary fiction on the margins is not useful even in a purely practical way). What the New York Times consistently messages about Chinese people is orders of magnitude more impactful than what marginal far right literary figures say over the internet or through KDP books.
In fact, we've always had anti-Asian racial violence, and America has never been fascist in the conventional sense of the term, so it's obvious that the latter is not necessary for the former to occur.
My mental model of this recent spate of violence is that, like before, it's the convergence of top-down (prestige media) and bottom-up (anarcho-tyranny, baseline crime levels increasing, and so on) phenomena, and it's not fundamentally driven by one administration, although I do think there's evidence that pandemic-related rhetoric from Trump exacerbated the core trend. We can agree to disagree on the latter, of course, but I broadly agree that monocausal models ("it's all Trump's fault") are ridiculous and evade the much harder questions of inter-minority violence, which the progressive coalition is structurally incapable of adequately addressing for political reasons.
Re: the Atlanta spa shooting - I wouldn't characterize this as fascistic in any way, and it's naturally difficult to "prove" psychological motivation in any kind of mass shooting because proving mental causation *in general* is actually trickier than it seems. Of course, this received more media attention than other attacks since it mapped onto the preferred meta-narrative about racial violence in America and you're right that 'boba liberals' jumped on the opportunity because of the right victim/perpetrator meta-narrative.
That said, I do think the conventional interpretation of the attack as being *partly* racially motivated does hold when you consider (a) the attacker's racialized dehumanization of Asian sex workers as 'temptations', (b) the broader historical context of that same pattern of dehumanization happening in America and through American colonialism and neo-colonialism abroad e.g. during the Vietnam & Korean wars, and (c) the races of the victims being primarily Asians. I've seen some notable figures like Glenn Greenwald make the same point you're making here but I do think the argument that it was at least *latently* racially motivated are reasonably solid. To make an analogy, if someone shot up a black barbershop and even if they did this while raving about 'evil haircuts' or something, we would have similar intuitions about at least a partially racial motivation.
Holy shit the intro just made me laugh out loud.
Yes, Kermit the Frog did the opening
Too good. Gonna go wash my penis and clean my room now.
‘wash your penis’ is the 13th and final rule, ser
Very cool.
I'll listen at work tomorrow
I’d be interested to hear your understanding of what fascism is—and why anyone should be afraid of it today.
I would say that the thrust of my view is that even from within the assumption that there is indeed such a thing, the current way that literary fiction is being policed is excessive and overly constrictive.
You mention violence against elderly Asians as a kind of example of fascism in America. My recollection is that these crimes were perpetrated by shirtless lunatics, many of whom were black and in the Bay Area. Further, I recall the “boba liberal” AAPI advocacy complex attempting to frame the 2021 Atlanta Spa shooting as an example of fascistic white violence against Asians when it was clearly the work of a man struggling with sex addiction and psychotic guilt. Even then, two months after the storming of the Capitol, this lowbrow attempt at assigning blame to Trump and his influence didn’t fly.
Roughly agree on all points.
If Trump is elected, and I am selected from the Project 2025 HR database, I will advocate for reparations to Asian Americans in the form of something approximating the following missive.
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/728297587418247168?lang=en
I lot of interesting points to jump off on here -
I wouldn't say violence against elderly Asians is an example of fascism in America - in the context of this piece, I was saying something more constrained - that racial violence doesn't actually *require* any kind of fascist project in the American context in order to occur (therefore worrying so much about literary fiction on the margins is not useful even in a purely practical way). What the New York Times consistently messages about Chinese people is orders of magnitude more impactful than what marginal far right literary figures say over the internet or through KDP books.
In fact, we've always had anti-Asian racial violence, and America has never been fascist in the conventional sense of the term, so it's obvious that the latter is not necessary for the former to occur.
My mental model of this recent spate of violence is that, like before, it's the convergence of top-down (prestige media) and bottom-up (anarcho-tyranny, baseline crime levels increasing, and so on) phenomena, and it's not fundamentally driven by one administration, although I do think there's evidence that pandemic-related rhetoric from Trump exacerbated the core trend. We can agree to disagree on the latter, of course, but I broadly agree that monocausal models ("it's all Trump's fault") are ridiculous and evade the much harder questions of inter-minority violence, which the progressive coalition is structurally incapable of adequately addressing for political reasons.
Re: the Atlanta spa shooting - I wouldn't characterize this as fascistic in any way, and it's naturally difficult to "prove" psychological motivation in any kind of mass shooting because proving mental causation *in general* is actually trickier than it seems. Of course, this received more media attention than other attacks since it mapped onto the preferred meta-narrative about racial violence in America and you're right that 'boba liberals' jumped on the opportunity because of the right victim/perpetrator meta-narrative.
That said, I do think the conventional interpretation of the attack as being *partly* racially motivated does hold when you consider (a) the attacker's racialized dehumanization of Asian sex workers as 'temptations', (b) the broader historical context of that same pattern of dehumanization happening in America and through American colonialism and neo-colonialism abroad e.g. during the Vietnam & Korean wars, and (c) the races of the victims being primarily Asians. I've seen some notable figures like Glenn Greenwald make the same point you're making here but I do think the argument that it was at least *latently* racially motivated are reasonably solid. To make an analogy, if someone shot up a black barbershop and even if they did this while raving about 'evil haircuts' or something, we would have similar intuitions about at least a partially racial motivation.
Let’s go! Pumped to listen.