Concluding one of America’s more infamous obscenity trials in 1964, Justice Potter Stewart absolved a controversial French motion picture with an opinion that has since passed into common parlance: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” The opinion was celebrated at the time as a victory for freedom of expression, and paved the way for a later deluge of Western cultural degradation. Of greater significance, however, is the fact that almost 60 years later “I know it when I see it” has become a political philosophy in its own right, adopted and pursued by a radical Left intent on curtailing that very same freedom by claiming an exclusive and unaccountable ability to define Fascism. This was the starkest message from The Burkean’s unprecedented recent Irish Antifa Project, which was designed to infiltrate and expose self-styled Antifa networks in mainstream Irish academia and politics.

In my view, the most predictable revelation from the Irish Antifa Project was the extent of historical and cultural ignorance among the profiled activists. None of the intellectually and professionally mediocre individuals exposed by The Burkean appeared capable of articulating what Fascism was, or is alleged to be today. Fascism instead seems to have been adopted by these non-entities as a vague catch-all for anything touching upon capitalism, conservatism, religion, or tradition. Equally vague are the proposed activist methodologies of these individuals, which range from the compiling of databases with the names of those deemed to be Fascists, to tentative but deniable support for violence. With the exception of a small number of fanatical Jews like Trinity College student Jacob Woolf, “anti-Fascism” has evidently been adopted by the majority of those concerned as a kind of half-hearted virtue signaling hobby or political side gig, albeit one with sinister potential.

Unfortunately, the problems posed by an uninformed, unaccountable, and unhinged “anti-Fascist” radical Left aren’t helped by the fact confusion about the nature of Fascism is endemic in society as a whole. There are essentially three traditions when it comes to explaining Fascism. One can be found within Fascism itself, and demonstrates how self-defined Fascists see themselves. This material is overwhelmingly historical. Another tradition can be found in contemporary mainstream academia and, although biased, it is at least academic in style, serious, and relatively comprehensive. The work of the late Roger Griffin is perhaps the best available in the English language in terms of this tradition, and is also largely concerned with history. The third tradition, on the other hand, is popular, highly politicised, always concerned with contemporary politics, and is abridged to the point of being a pop-Left caricature of serious studies of Fascism. It is particularly problematic because it has tremendous traction among the masses and, despite being propaganda for extremist politics of its own sort, always presents itself as objective and neutral.

The individuals profiled by The Burkean are unquestionably disciples of the latter tradition, a recent example of which is Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018). Stanley, a Jewish professor at Yale whose background is in language and epistemology and not history or politics, hasn’t published any peer-reviewed material on Fascism or anti-Fascism, but his 2018 book proved a moderate publishing sensation because it represented a thinly veiled attack on the Trump administration. The same administration provoked similar ill-conceived and unhelpful monographs on Fascism from Cass Sunstein (Can it Happen Here?), Madeleine Albright (Fascism: A Warning), and Harvard duo Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die). All of these individuals are Jews, and this is not a coincidence. In fact, since the production of Leon Trotsky’s Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It (compiled between 1922 and 1933) and the Frankfurt School’s project on the “Authoritarian Personality,” Jews have been at the forefront of paving the cultural, as well as political, path to Antifa activity. They do so by bastardising public understanding of the nature of Fascist politics, thereby shaping “anti-Fascism” as a vehicle for the undermining of the White nation. When it comes to Fascism, “Jews know it when they see it,” a pronouncement we are all encouraged to accept without question.

Jewish Definitions of Fascism

A common theme in influential books like Stanley’s, destined for a modicum of success in the paperback mass market thanks to dramatic titles and relentless marketing, is their incredibly—and deliberately—vague definition of Fascism. These Jewish activists know this, of course, but they push ahead regardless. Stanley, for example, excuses the gaps and logical leaps inherent in his dubious study by arguing that “generalization is necessary in the current moment.” But if he is defining the “current moment” as Fascist under his generalized definition, isn’t he simply using generalization to excuse the same generalization? Isn’t this tantamount to saying to his readers: “The present moment is so obviously Fascist that we really don’t need to define Fascism”? Such considerations don’t slow Stanley down for a second, and this celebrated Yale professor slips off the hook to pronounce, even more unhelpfully, “I have chosen the label “Fascism” for ultranationalism of some variety.” What variety? What’s his definition of “ultranationalism”? It doesn’t matter. What is clear in texts like Stanley’s is that you aren’t here to be encouraged to think or ask questions, but to absorb a discourse and accept a dogma. The authority behind such demands stems predominantly from emotional blackmail — Stanley cashes in his card as the son of “Holocaust survivors,” and explains that “My family background has saddled me with difficult emotional baggage. But it also, crucially, prepared me to write this book.” His lack of education and reading in the subject is therefore apparently more than compensated for in the fact he is emotionally distressed by it. Right.

Jason Stanley: Bravely struggling with his emotional baggage

Not only are Jewish definitions of Fascism deliberately inadequate and disingenuous, they’re often completely wrongheaded. Stanley in his first chapter “The Mythic Past,” for example, describes Fascist propaganda as relying on a unique blend of mythic, romanticised, and normally rural evocations of the past, and that the same propaganda offers a future return to this idyll. It goes without saying that this provides an extremely convenient way for Jewish and Leftist activists to attack almost all genuine conservatives as Fascists. But is such propaganda even inherently Fascist or even right-wing? We might consider the following quote from a well-known historical figure: “The position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to 1780, with regard to his food and dwelling, as well as to his self-respect, amusements etc., is an ideal never attained again since that time.” The ideologue behind this quote proposed a future in which the national community of citizens enjoyed something like a return to this pastoral idyll, filling their days with productive work, music, and leisure (“hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise [literature] in the evening”). It really is quite a vision. But the problem is that these proposals aren’t from the works of Sir Oswald Mosley, but from Karl Marx’s Capital and The German Ideology, and they were a key aspect of the early promotion of Communism. The idea that Fascism uniquely appeals to notions of making one’s country “great again” is an unsophisticated trope and, ultimately, a political weapon.

The truth of the matter is that politicised nostalgia and visions of national rebirth are common to ideologies of all stripes, and are useless as tools for examining the specific nature of genuine political and cultural manifestations of Fascism. The only possible exception is Roger Griffin’s highly nuanced theory of palingenetic ultrationationalism, which is corrupted and glossed in Jewish treatments of the subject in order to indict all expressions of White discontent in modernity. Presentations of ideal pasts and futures are quite obviously utilised by all political actors keen to exploit the public instinct to reject the status quo. Barack Obama’s campaigns based on “Hope,” “Change,” and “Progress,” and Trump’s “MAGA” are not substantially different in style or method, the only significant dissimilarity being the demonising of the latter and the feverish and irrational presentation of its ethos as an early symptom of an impending Fascist takeover. The preoccupation of Cultural Marxist anthropologists with describing putatively utopian modes of life in primitive societies can also clearly be seen as a call to “make society great again” by demolishing capitalism, the family, etc. The oldest and most profound political expression of resurrecting a glorious past rooted in the land is, of course, not even to be found in European Fascism at all, but in the quintessential palingenetic ultranationalism of Zionism, a subject strangely never covered by our Jewish authors, presumably because of other “difficult emotional baggage.”

Similar definitions of Fascism, this time refracted through a lens of Leftist pop-culture garbage, can be found in Cass Sunstein’s 2018 Can It Happen Here? Sunstein’s expertise is ostensibly law, though his most successful work is apparently The World According to Star Wars (2016). In another time and context, someone like Sunstein would cut a ridiculous figure, in much the same way that the Romans found it hilarious that the people squatting in the hovel that was 1st century Judea regarded themselves as a superior nation. Sunstein has shaped his career as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School around such efforts as inaugurating a “celebrate tax day” and ending all government recognition of marriage. But Star Wars books and outlandish schemes aside, Sunstein is a deeply sinister individual. He is particularly concerned by “conspiracy theories,” and has developed policy suggestions that governments engage in the “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups” by entering “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.” In other words, Sunstein is a major contributor to the concept of “thought crime” and a high-profile advocate for the same kind of law enforcement online disinformation and entrapment activity that regularly snares exuberant White teenage gamers and presents them to the media as right-wing terrorists.

Cass Sunstein: “We need a cognitive infiltration of extremist groups”

Sunstein edited, and contributed to, Can It Happen Here?, along with a motley of other Jews, including Eric Posner, Jack Balkin, Tyler Cowen, Jack Goldsmith, Tom Ginsburg, Noah Feldman, Jonathan Haidt, Bruce Ackerman, Jon Elster, Martha Minow, David Strauss, and Geoffrey R. Stone. In fact, of the 17 essays comprising the volume, 13 are written by Jews. One of the non-Jews is Sunstein’s Irish-American wife, the shabbos goy and ADL darling Samantha Power, and two are Muslims. Can It Happen Here?, subtitled Authoritarianism in America, is therefore little more than an exercise in Jewish paranoia and a glaring example of the way in which Jews invoke vague caricatures of Fascism in order to attack the traditional structures of White nations. Posner, for example, cites Trump’s hostility to elements of the press and the fact his initial success occurred somewhat outside the two-party structure of American politics as sufficient evidence of a Fascist threat. In other words, Jews, who dominate the press and have very significant financial interests in the trajectories of both major parties, regard anything not fully within their control as tantamount to Fascism.

The same fearmongering yet vague template is followed by Levitsky and Ziblatt in How Democracies Die (2018), which opens with the authors declaring that authoritarianism has been for them an “occupational obsession.” Levitsky and Ziblatt “feel dread … We worry.” What has them most worried is “intimidation of the press” and the fact some politicians “view their rivals as enemies.” Trump terrifies due to his “clear authoritarian tendencies.” He is said to follow in an American tradition of “extremist demagogues” that includes “Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace.” America “failed the test” when it elected Trump in November 2016. Like Sunstein and Posner, Levitsky and Ziblatt are especially concerned by “extreme partisan polarization,” which is another way of saying that they are very worried that the two main political parties may actually diverge in a meaningful way from one another and therefore run the risk of engaging in a genuine politics. Since the same complaint is made by Stanley and Sunstein, we might assume that Jews are most comfortable with two-party systems in which the parties and their policies are almost indistinguishable and in which there is a high level of ideological consensus. Anything outside this comfort zone is Fascism.

Levitsky and Ziblatt: “We feel dread … We worry.”

Equally terrified is Madeleine Albright, whose Fascism: A Warning (2018) is derived from an identical playbook to that employed by Stanley, Sunstein, Levitsky, and Ziblatt. Albright opens the 2019 edition of her book with a new preface in which she poses as a benevolent granny, writing with detachment and objectivity, she claims, at her “farm” in Virginia. Granny Albright, who once declared the Serbs to be “disgusting” and opined that starving half a million Iraqi children via UN sanctions was “worth it,” now spends her days tending to her tomatoes and pondering with great bemusement why a reporter recently branded her a “war mongering ghoul.” As she observes the serenity of the evergreens around her, it is quite the mystery why multicultural America seems to be “at each other’s throats.” We might think that Granny Albright could answer such a question by leaving rural Virginia and moving to America’s multicultural heartlands. But no, from her safe and isolated vantage point she has it all figured out. Her answer is simple, and has nothing to do with the fact multiculturalism is itself a poisonous doctrine — multiculturalism isn’t working because Donald Trump and Fascism are on the verge of a devastating takeover. But what is Fascism? This is never clear anywhere in the book. Albright vaguely explains that Fascism is a “spread of anti-democratic trends.” [Translation: “The controlled two-party system has been weakened”] Fascist “attitudes” develop when “the perception grows that everybody lies.” [Translation: “The goyim know”] Fascism is “a doctrine of anger and fear.” [Translation: “I’m worried. Shut it down.”]

Andrew Rawnsley, Guardian journalist, aware of the this glaring weakness in the book, interviewed Albright prior to writing his review : “I suggest to her that the book struggles to offer a satisfactory definition of fascism. ‘Defining fascism is difficult,’ she responds. ‘First of all, I don’t think fascism is an ideology. I think it is a method, it’s a system’.” In other words, Fascism is a label that can be applied to any kind of politics that unsettles Jews and offers authentic alternative political methodologies. By refusing to acknowledge Fascism as a specific historical political ideology with identifiable and fixed traits, Albright and the other Jewish activists mentioned here can free it up as a system of mere “methods” that can then be interpreted in general terms in order to attack those elements of White society deemed oppositional to Jewish interests. So-called Antifascism, which draws all of its cultural power from this kind of Jewish propaganda, is therefore not against Fascism at all, but against any “methods” or “trends” that aren’t conducive to Jews.

Madeleine Albright: Wrote a book about something she can’t define

Stanley’s book is an excellent guide to Jewish paranoia about the “methods” hinted at by Albright. His text is divided into chapters titled “The Mythic Past,” “Propaganda,” “Anti-Intellectual,” “Unreality,” “Hierarchy,” “Victimhood,” “Law and Order,” “Sexual Anxiety,” “Sodom and Gomorrah,” and, since Jews inevitably view all dissent from their interests as leading ultimately to outlandish forms of mass murder, the final chapter is headed “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Each of these chapters deals with entirely subjective material and ideas, and there is no serious engagement with any scholarly literature on historical Fascism.

As discussed above, “the mythic past” is only a problem for Jews like Stanley when the past in question isn’t conducive to Jewish goals. Fictional multicultural pasts where ancient “Cheddar Man” Britons had dark skin, Africans lived in England before the English, and Whites demonstrated unique evil, are currently the height of intellectual and cultural fashion. These are the versions of “the mythic past” that Jews celebrate and promote. On the other hand, conceptions of the past as involving mono-ethnic cultures, celebrations of European racial glory, and acknowledgement of White group achievement are branded Fascist and beyond the pale. In the Jewish vision, the histories of Europeans are irredeemably shameful and therefore any attempt to make one’s nation “great again” is both irrational (“they were never great in the first place!”) and threatening. In this reading, all positive reflections on the European past are part of the Fascist methodology and should therefore be ruthlessly opposed. When Jews like Stanley and Albright include references to “the mythic past” in their “warnings” about Fascism they are in fact warning and shaming Whites against asserting their own interests and group pride.

The same framework is employed in discussing the alleged propaganda and “anti-intellectual” qualities of Fascism. Stanley argues that Fascists “attack and devalue education, expertise, and language.” This argument is, at best, entirely subjective and at worst complete nonsense. The idea that Fascists have been against intellectualism in general is simply ridiculous. As John Whittam writes in his Fascist Italy:

Fascism suffered not from the lack of ideas but from too many. Despite their rhetoric and pronounced hostility towards the intellectuals of the old liberal establishment, Futurists, syndicalists, ex-socialists, and even the ras professed an ideology and invariably had access to a newspaper where their views could be expressed. After the conquest of power one of the major problems was the formulation of an ideology from the bewildering array of distinctive ideologies within the Fascist movement. [emphasis added]

Underlying Stanley’s accusatory statement is the simple fact that Fascists oppose liberal, left-wing, and Jewish intellectualism. Jewish activists like Stanley believe, of course, that theirs are the only legitimate and authentic intellectual activities in the public sphere. An attack on their position is therefore seen as an attack on all genuine intellectualism. The accusation that Fascists are anti-intellectual thus speaks of a profound arrogance in the accuser.

Equally revealing are Stanley’s chapters on “Sexual Anxiety” and “Sodom and Gomorrah.” These chapters are more or less an apologetic for Weimar-style sexual degeneracy, and insinuate that all attempts to prevent descent into such an abyss are pathological and Fascist. Some interesting context in this regard can be found back in 2016 when Stanley became embroiled in controversy after a Facebook exchange with fellow Jewish academic Rebecca Kukla, of Georgetown University, was widely disseminated. The pair had been discussing Richard Swinburne, an Orthodox Christian philosopher, and were incensed after Swinburne addressed the Society of Christian Philosophers and lectured on Christian ethics, including the religion’s stance on homosexuality. Swinburne made the argument that homosexuality could be understood as an illness, even a form of disability, since it acted against the otherwise natural imperative to reproduce. Stanley, in a conversation with other Jewish academics, accused Swinburne of “promoting homophobia,” paving the way for another Holocaust, and then finished his tirade with “Fuck those assholes. Seriously.” The charming Dr. Kukla, presumably equally engaged in employing vigorous intellectualism against the Fascist encroachment of Prof. Swinburne, added, “Those douche tankards can suck my giant queer cock.”

Rebecca Kukla: Stunning and brave intellectual fighting against Fascist anti-intellectuals

When the exchange went viral, both Stanley and Kukla scattered like cockroaches under torchlight, hiding under pity narratives and accusations of anti-Semitism. In a remarkable piece worth quoting here at length, Stanley wrote shortly afterwards:

I wanted to address the situation that has arisen from the series of articles in right-wing media outlets about me, and then me and Professor Kukla, that resulted from a private Facebook exchange being published and taken out of context … I was almost always the only Jewish person in my classes growing up. In my high schools in tenth and eleventh grade, I was the first Jewish person to attend. I am very familiar with the isolation that is involved, even when there is no overt discrimination (though I grew up being asked if I had horns and such like, this was ignorance and not malice). It is woven into the tapestry of my existence what it is like to be in a minority faith among a majority … My central concern right now is entirely about our gay colleagues in academia who have been watching this episode in horror, rightly concerned that any complaints about discrimination they may raise, even in private spaces, will result in the kind of incredibly intense retribution that Rebecca Kukla and I have been singled out and subject to over the past week. And those concerns would be legitimate. I need to end with the issue of anti-Semitism. On my public post, someone posted a disturbing comment about Swinburne’s death. I contemplated deleting it but then wanted to wait to see if anyone would ‘like’ it before addressing its horrors (no one did). It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the media discussion starting with the September 28th piece in The American Conservative, and then the Washington Times, is straightforwardly anti-Semitic. How did a non-story about the complexity of communication that results when screenshots from private conversations are made public, become a national story about two leftist Jewish professors and the dangers they pose? At first, the story was solely about me. Then, the other Jewish philosopher who posted on that thread, Rebecca Kukla, was also targeted. What ensued was a terrible anti-Semitic narrative, channeling a virulent 20th century form of anti-Semitism.

When I first read this piece, I have to confess without exaggeration that I laughed so hard I was literally gasping for air. It positively drips with a comic level of Jewish stereotype. Consider the speed with which Stanley morosely explains how he felt as “the only Jew in the class.” Observe the fake worry about the “Other,” in this case his “gay colleagues.” And reflect on the final, truly beautiful, example of the shameless Jewish recourse to the protective embrace of the anti-Semitism accusation — and not just any anti-Semitism but that infamous “virulent” kind. Every ingredient of “crying out as they strike you” is present here in perfect, distilled form. All my differences with him aside, Stanley is to be congratulated on being an excellent student of his people’s craft.

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When we therefore read Stanley’s chapters on “Sexual Anxiety” and “Sodom and Gomorrah” we know precisely the kind of attitudes that our esteemed Yale professor brings to the table. He advances a theory that Fascists merely pretend to be upset about the rape of White women in order to reinforce the patriarchy. Take, for example, his outlandish claim that “The crime of rape is basic to fascist politics because it raises sexual anxiety and an attendant need for protection of the nation’s manhood by the fascist authority.” For Stanley, all rhetoric with the purpose of supporting stable, growing White families is Fascist, along with any attempts to challenge the “liberation” of women into sterility, promiscuity, vacuous careerism, grooming gangs, and abortion. But the deeper problem here is that there is no serious literature on any such fixation on rape within Fascism, and Stanley seems to pluck his concept of rape as “basic to fascist politics” from thin air. In reality, antifascist propaganda has been noted many times in the scholarly literature for its reliance on rape metaphors to attack the psychological appeal of Fascism (e.g. “Fascism rapes the mind of the masses”). We can quite easily surmise that Stanley is probably aware that his argument is nonsense, and that he simply prefers to stigmatise any attempt to protect White women. The same methodology is employed when Stanley proposes that homosexuality and race-mixing are inherently good, being valiant sins “against Fascist ideology.” This is what now passes for an education at Yale.

Conclusion

Stanley, Sunstein, Levitsky, Ziblatt, and Albright have produced quite typical examples of Jewish propaganda disguised as “anti-Fascist” literature. The key features of such works are invariably a vague definition of Fascism, an attempt to relate “warnings” to some aspect of contemporary politics, melodramatic admonitions about a putative future violent catastrophe that must be avoided, and maudlin appeals to personal family history and “emotional baggage.” Underlying the surface veneer, these works are highly focussed efforts to pathologise aspects of White culture and politics deemed oppositional to Jewish interests. These efforts, and their framing, are quite obviously derived from Cultural Marxism, especially Adorno’s work with the Frankfurt School on The Authoritarian Personality, and from earlier forms of Jewish activism witnessed from the end of the 19th century and culminating in Weimar Germany (e.g. the work of Magnus Hirschfeld). The family, the acknowledgement of heterosexuality as culturally and biologically normative and preferential, the desirability of mono-ethnic cultures, and the acknowledgement of inequality among human beings are reframed in this kind of “warning literature” as inherently Fascistic.

It is very worrying that our culture has bequeathed a great deal of respect and legitimacy to Jewish intellectuals, especially in relation to the subject of Fascism. We have allowed them to assert that “they know it when they see it.” The fundamental crisis of our civilization is that they see it everywhere, and they won’t rest until this phantom of their paranoia, and us with it, are abolished.

Notes

J. Whittam, Fascist Italy, (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 81-2.

See, for example, S. Chakotin, The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda (1940).