At this conjuncture, taking to Twitter to assert one’s antifascist bona-fides is just as futile as studying Sanskrit in resistance to authoritarian communism. Just as futile, and a lot less interesting.

In 1995, environmental historian William Cronon published “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In it, he critiques the Western concept of “wilderness” as nothing but a fantasy that prevents us from meaningfully engaging with ecological systems. He argues that the idea of wilderness is beset by a central paradox: It supplies the “ultimate landscape of authenticity,” allowing for the purest expression of a human self, and yet it excludes human presence by definition (wilderness is wherever other humans are not). Wilderness thus remains a “profoundly human creation” — charged with individualism — in which we perceive not “nature,” but “the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.”

The Secret Life of “Political Correctness” In his campaign speeches, including Trump’s New Hampshire speech following the June 2016 massacre of 49 people at an Orlando, Florida nightclub, Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked “political correctness”. “I refuse to be politically correct”, Trump told his New Hampshire audience. “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap,” he complained to South Carolina business leaders back in September 2015. “This country, political correctness is killing us,” Trump charged in a February 2016 interview on NBC’s Today show. Throughout the primary season Donald Trump has attacked “political correctness” so much, it might have raised the question – was he aware of the dark new conspiracy theory association that the term “political correctness” has taken on, over the past decade and a half, for many on the American right ? If he wasn’t, he probably is now.

In his new book, Lazzarato deals, among other things, with the differences of the old and the new fascism. Adorno already suggested that the new fascism does not have to come with uniforms, boots and Nazi symbols. For Lazzarato, too, it is clear that after 40 years of neoliberal politics, what announces itself as a new fascism will not be a simple repetition of the interwar experience. For him, neo-fascism results from a twofold mutation, namely, on the one hand, from historical fascism and, on the other, from the organization of counter-revolutionary political violence. The historical fascism, after the revolutionary forces were destroyed, was quite an agent of the process of „modernization“, which, „integrated“ socialism and eliminated by force any manifestation of the conflict. In Italy, he restructured traditional industry and created the film industry, reformed the school system and the civil code, and, like the Nazis, established a kind of welfare state. Adam Tooze points out that the history of the intimate relationship between capital and fascism was rewritten and distorted during the Cold War, omitting, for example, the fact that as early as 1935 important banks such as JP Morgan collaborated closely with people who were later treated as fascist criminals.

Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.