Fascism and Bad Faith

It's One Long Joke

"[Fascists] are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."

For them it’s fun, this hate stripped bare of pretense, these reckless words, this callous mockery of serious people and serious issues and human suffering.

It started online, only it didn’t. It started a long time ago, with men who proudly proclaimed to be fascists, not as a political statement, but as an anti-political statement. They were done with politics – had no use for them – just as today’s fascists are done with politics, because politics is something you do when you believe in human dignity. This menacing worldview festered on the internet for a while, men fantasizing about the horrors they would wrought if they ever had power, breaking free into the Real World here and there. Today we are ruled by these people, so unserious about the stakes of their long game, their big, long joke.

We live under a dictatorship of memes, as The Defector's David Roth says, and those supportive of the meme-fueled dictatorship could not laugh any harder. They're having a good time.

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Maybe you’ve seen the videos of liberal/left writers and podcasters torturing themselves in debates with dozens of right-wing dipshits whose idea of intellectualism is listening to Ben Shapiro whine about Superman being nice to people. It’s a Thing online now: Surrounding yourself with fascists who think they’re smart and debating them, trying to shame the shameless.

Mehdi Hasan, a former cable news host and CEO and editor for Zeteo, is the latest to put himself through this masochistic exercise. Videos like Hasan’s are either worthless and maybe even harmful, or revealing in all the worst ways, depending on how you see it. While these I Took On 20 Idiot Fascists Who Have Never Read A Book often platform hideous people and views for an audience of millions of content consumers, they also show how deranged and vile these people are.

These are not conservatives the way you grew up to understand conservatives. These are not the people you spent your teen years and twenties finger wagging for wanting to blow holes in the country’s social safety net. These are people who have never once thought of the country’s social safety net because they are too busy imagining and reveling in new ways to inflict pain on others just for the fuck of it. Even worse, somehow, they've pretended to support social safety net programs to gain power, then immediately nuke those live-saving programs.

Fascists are warped and aggressively ignorant. Hasan’s video – and others like it – make that abundantly clear. It’s like shining a spotlight on maggots, and instead of scurrying away, the maggots look up and smile a twisted smile.

If you must...

One of the losers who “debated” Hasan during his podcast was a guy named Connor, who apparently runs a far-right account on the official platform for international fascism known as X and pals around with fascist influencer Nick Fuentes. He starts by telling Hasan he doesn’t care if Trump is defying the constitution because he is against democracy and favors what he calls autocracy, though later it becomes clear he just heard some incel fascist podcaster say the word once and doesn’t really know what it means because he is defined by his incuriosity and in constant search for concepts that validate the ugliness in his soul and his roaring self loathing.

The autocrat, in Connor's telling, would be elected, selected from the aristocracy, another word he recently learned.

This Connor guy – looking like the Joker if the Joker had ever written a 4,000-word essay on why the lady M&M should have wider hips – tells Hasan he’s a fan of the Second Amendment but doesn’t care if Trump violates every other constitutional amendment. So he does care about something: The right to arm yourself and maybe shoot people you don’t like. That this man-child’s favorite amendment is the one that makes everyone less free makes terrible sense.

“Quite frankly,” says Connor, a guy who looks like he’s called the Statue of Liberty a slut, “if Trump is anti-constitution, good, and I think he should go further.”

Connor, looking like a guy who read Mein Kampf because he's "interested in German history," claims to have not voted for Trump in 2024. He says he thinks he wrote in something called John Pork, a brain rot meme from the nihilism generator we call YouTube. Here's the thing about someone who says they think they cast their presidential ballot for John Pork: They definitely did not vote. One would have to care to vote.

Connor plays the bad-faith game well. He feigns concern about porn – certainly never having consumed porn himself – as something that should be banned under the constitution. He pretends to care about blasphemy because he appears to be an adult Catholic convert. He exists in a tightly-knit unreality in which American liberals punish their enemies when in power, leaving conservatives no choice but to mete out the same punishment when they seize control. I suspect the punishment doled out by the left, for a guy like Connor, looks like people of indeterminate gender appearing on national TV ad campaigns, the president using a person’s preferred pronouns, and black people performing during the Super Bowl halftime show. This, for him, is intolerable. The only answer to such monstrous behavior is brutal fascist assault, according to Connor, who looks like a guy who was asked by his mother not to talk about the size of Lola Bunny’s breasts around the Thanksgiving dinner table.

The entire Hasan video is one fascist after another telling Hasan they don’t care about anything or anyone, and mocking Hasan for having principles and ideals that create a functional society.

Some of them support the teachings of Jesus Christ insofar as those teachings can be used to validate their backward beliefs and subjugate and exploit those they deem unworthy or unequal. Some of them are irony-poisoned beyond hope or redemption, done in by a nihilist online culture that has made its way to the height of American power in the form of Stephen Miller, the worst millennial. None of them are supportive of democracy, and certainly not the multicultural variety in which their supremacy is at all challenged.

They are victims, one and all, whose opponents are described as vapid and idiotic, yet dominate all world events. It’s quite the trick, to be so powerless and powerful at the same time. But the faith is quite bad, and with that comes the invented reality of an American left lording over millions of aggrieved conservatives, who have every right to fight back against the powers that be with whatever weapon available. It’s a nice arrangement if you can get it.

They Delight In Acting In Bad Faith

French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre knew about these guys and their weird little smiles and their chittering laughter in the face of tremendous suffering. He knew about their nihilism. Sartre is the veritable philosophical mascot for Bad Faith Times: The last time fascism was ascendant worldwide, in the years between the World Wars, Sartre identified the infuriating effectiveness of bad-faith arguments expertly deployed by people who cared about nothing and no one, who yearned desperately for the void, the final destination of all fascist movements.

Sartre wrote far far more elegantly than the CEO of Bad Faith Times about the crushing disadvantage of caring about anything and functioning as the adult trying and failing to corral the careless exploits of the fascist. It is always the fascist who says with a wry smile: It’s you who claims to care about shit. I don’t care about anything. I’m free to adopt any stance at any time, to use any topic as a blood-soaked cudgel against my opponents. I can pretend to care about the sexual exploitation of children to attack my enemies as groomers; I can pretend to care about equal treatment under the law to say white people face systemic discrimination; I can pretend to care about something as niche as bail reform when my right-wing cult heroes start going to prison. I’m a chameleon with an AR-15, they tell us. You’re a sloth with dull pencil. Keep believing in things and see where that gets you.

For the fascist, nothing is fast enough, certainly not the deliberate machinery of democracy as it churns on and on. They are at heart accelerationists. They’d very much like to move beyond the part where we talk about what’s best for humanity and get to the part where those who have crowned themselves superior go ahead and do the damn thing: Disappearances, concentration camps, spying, intimidation, and everything else that comes with the landscape of competitive authoritarianism. It's long past time to stop talking and start doing, they proclaim to applause from crowds that sincerely believe the powerful can handpick who does and does not suffer in their campaign of misery.

Sartre during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the Italian fascists diagnosed the difficulty in countering these movements comprised of stupid, angry men who cared about nothing, and like the people in Hasan's video, were done with deliberation. In the passage below, Sartre refers to the (inherent) fascist hatred of Jewish people and the philosophical and linguistic games they play in legitimizing an illegitimate worldview that is unstoppably incoherent.

"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge,” Sartre said. “But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."

Fascism, as Robert O. Paxton writes in The Anatomy of Fascism, “is an affair of the gut more than of the brain,” a phenomenon of “mobilizing passions” reaching a fever pitch that turns otherwise reasonable people into delusional, dangerous fanatics yearning for the void, for fascist movements – anywhere they are found, or have been found – want nothing more than the end of all things. It is a movement of death and destruction, of all-consuming nihilism. It is a movement that seeks to dismantle love and human connection wherever it is. It is an assault on what it is to be a human being. Nothing about fascism is natural. In fact, Paxton cites a number of intellectuals who in the 1930s dismissed fascism as a most unnatural phenomenon.

The right-wing attention hogs in Hasan’s video tell him time and again that they know he has to use his words responsibly because he believes words matter. They seem to take pleasure in this because, as Satre said a century ago, they can sit back and “play.” Hasan at times appears ridiculous thanks to his debate opponents’ total lack of seriousness and refusal to engage intellectually (they were never taught how to do this, or that it’s even possible). None of these people “seek to persuade” Hasan or any anti-fascist opponents who might stumble upon the video online. They seek only to “disconcert.” In modern parlance, they seek to trigger the libs – the beating heart of their ghastly anti-politics. When the young bro from Texas tells Hasan to leave the country because he was not born in the US, he's not detailing some principled stance on American immigration policy. He's only hoping to upset Hasan, a U.S. citizen who is far more American than the bro from Texas.

Sartre characterized antisemitism and fascism as direct products of "revanchist petit bourgeois rage" emanating from people who see themselves as the rightful inheritors of the nation (in Sartre's case, France) who deserve an eternal spot at the top of the hierarchy of oppression. The furious French bourgeois of Sartre's day, like the deranged freaks featured in Hasan's debate video, are willing to use any approach to secure that seat atop the hierarchy, including – and especially – bad faith.

It is much easier to be a fascist than it is to be a decent person. It's always easier to be bad and thoughtless than it is to be good and thoughtful. Watch Hasan work tirelessly to drive home his points and rattle off facts and wrap his arguments in historical context and rebut the bad faith of his rivals, and watch his guests spew reckless shit without a care for what that shit actually means – the meaning it holds, its consequences, weight it carries.

They are, as Sartre said, amusing themselves. It's one big joke, this fascist thing, and they're all in on it.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.