By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

There’s a storm brewing, dearest motherfuckers, or so I’m told. And I’m not talking about climate change. The wild wild world of the world wide web is ablaze with rumors, dark rumors, rumors told of a Fourth Reich, more than seventy years since the last one ran out of gas in the mucklands of Stalingrad. Fash is back and this time it’s coming through the left door. There are reams of hysterical chatter across the mucklands of social media speaking of a diabolical collaboration between the far right and the far left. From Julian Assange robbing Hillary of her throne for Donald Trump, to Steve Bannon and George Galloway exchanging bro-hugs at a Eurasianist summit in Kazakhstan, to Glenn Greenwald getting chummy with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. It’s a deep, dark, twisted, incestuous collaboration built on a shared comradery among crypto-Baathist Russophiles goosestepping their way to overthrowing the blessed post-war order of the Atlanticist brand of globalism we all know and love. And naturally that dastardly Kremlin puppet master, Vladimir Putin, is behind it all with his army of trolls and bots and other assorted shadow people. It’s a dementedly elaborate conspiracy to lynch liberal democracy and here’s the Shyamalan twist, apparently I’m the token tranny holding the noose.

For those of you who are less than familiar with my jagged, lip-smacking brand of drag queen satire, that first paragraph was a joke and so is this whole tired conspiracy theory of a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Some call it Horseshoe Theory, some call it the Red-Brown or Red-Green-Brown Alliance (Just add Islamaphobia!), but that old feverish canard about a grand plot by the fascist right to infiltrate the far-left or vice versa has long been a favorite scare tactic of neoliberal centrists seeking to keep dissidents separated across their manufactured left-right divide. The desired result of this campaign is to keep conservatives and leftists too frightened of “infiltrators” to think outside of the ideological box while also keeping them dependent on the radical center to protect them from the ominous “other”. Nothing scares the establishment more than working class unity, so the establishment turns this unity into a Polanskiesque horror story. Any leftist open to working with the right (like myself) is in danger of being linked to the worst excesses of white nationalism, while any conservative who refuses to spit on a hippie is blackballed as a dreaded National Bolshevik.

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