They Make You Sound Crazy

Kristi Noem offers updates on the nation’s ethnic cleansing program from behind a lectern adorned with a Nazi slogan, and in a country with no sense of history and no context through which to process current events, it means nothing. 

Unless it does mean something. For you, the phrase – “One of ours, all of yours” – is brimming with meaning and intent, a threat against the regime’s enemies in six words. You understand that Noem speaking from behind a lectern with these words, waving her hands at various posters of black and brown men she says have made the fatherland a more dangerous place, isn’t subtle at all. It’s in-your-face fascism. It could not be clearer.

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It’s the use of a slogan that originated with Nazi soldiers murdering an entire Czech village after one of the villagers had killed a Nazi officer. One of ours, all of yours.

And if you saw Noem’s use of this genocidal phrase and rightfully got worked up about it and tried to explain all this to someone who has a loose grasp on Nazi-era Germany, you will sound crazy, unhinged, unwell. Making the connection between previous fascist regimes and the current fascist American regime will not make you sound smart of insightful or erudite; it will make you sound like you have lost your entire mind. 

And that is the point.

Maybe if you are among the terminally online – a self-assigned pain eater – you came across the White House and the Department of Homeland Security social media accounts sharing a post using a song called "We'll Have Our Home Again," a white nationalist anthem that's (apparently) popular in neo-nazi and white supremacist corners of the internet, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Maybe if you spend to much time online you know that the fascist little boys who run the Department of Homeland Security account on Elon Musk's CSAM website have used the Moon Man – a sunglasses-wearing character you might remember from 1980s McDonald's ads – in various posts as a wink and a nod to those who know the Moon Man was co-opted by neo-nazi groups before the explosion of the social internet.

Imagine for a moment trying to explain to a relative normie – someone who does not poison their brains with online content as a hobby – that a beloved McDonald's character is being used to promote white nationalism in the US, that the people running official government social media accounts are mining the depths of the racist internet for memes and videos and music designed to signal to other white supremacists that they are on the same team, that blood-and-soil patriots are in charge now.

"The Moon Man isn't who you think he is," you might say. "This is explicit fascist content!" At which point the person to whom you're talking will hand you a tinfoil hat and maybe call the authorities. Because by any definition you sound crazy.

Chris was afraid, and he let his therapist know about why, exactly, he had this fear sitting in his gut, growing all the time, gnawing at his insides, consuming every thought. 

Would vaccines be banned? Would the military be turned on the public? Would elections be canceled? Would he need a gun if the president was going to follow through on his invasion threats against opposition strongholds? Would there be anyone to stop the state-sponsored terrorism that was surely coming? 

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It was fall 2024 and Chris – like you, like me – was fretting about what would have seemed utterly impossible three short years earlier: An insurrectionist former president bulldozing his way back to power with talk of violent retribution dripping from his lips. So Chris talked to his therapist about these worries and fears in the weeks and months before American voters rewarded Donald Trump for his crimes against the nation becuase they thought he might make bread and eggs a little cheaper. 

And the more Chris talked – the more he specified why he was afraid of a fascist strongman occupying the White House – the crazier he felt, the more unhinged and unwell. His therapist never called him crazy, of course, but he didn’t need to. 

“I mentioned at one point, after one of my rants, that I personally felt like an insane person ranting about the end of days on the subway, and how I usually tried to avoid making direct eye contact with that person, and now I was that person and it felt nuts, but it felt like that's where things were headed and I was scared,” Chris, a Massachusetts resident, told me, asking to remain anonymous. 

Chris knew living in a Democratic-majority state made him vulnerable to the coming horrors if Trump took back the White House. He hadn’t heard about Trump’s plans to terrorize blue states from an underground podcaster or a late-night AM radio show host who talks in very serious tones about lizard people and nanobots in vaccines. Chris heard about these nakedly authoritarian plans from Trump himself as the greatest enemy the US has ever known said on the campaign trail that he would not hesitate to use the force of government against those who oppose his anti-constitutional agenda, his agenda of hate and fear and pain. 

Trump's 2024 opponent, Kamala Harris, was clear in saying Trump "intends to use the United States Military against American citizens who simply disagree with him." None of it mattered the the political press or the voting public. Harris was dismissed as crazy.

“[My therapist] didn't assuage my fears, or validate them; rather, he wanted to know how I was coping with them,” Chris said. “After a while, I stopped talking to him. It wasn't helping. I just felt like I was ranting like a lunatic and he was listening politely and then asking me, ‘And is the bad man in the room with you right now?’”

Chris said the widespread use of in-group social media tactics – the Moon Man, for example – puts regime opponents in a tough spot, knowing exactly what they are seeing, and sounding completely unhinged when they describe reality to those who can't process this far-right winking and nodding because they don't spend enough time online or have no grasp of previous fascist movements that serve as a model for those in the federal government largely cosplaying fascism today.

"I get that a lot of us are too online and that normal people aren't looking at their social media posts and going, 'Oh, that's common white supremacist language,'" he said. "It's too difficult to explain to the common person why this is bad. The media isn't doing it, and Democrats know most of their voters have more important things to care about, which is why they ignore these things in favor of 'kitchen table issues' like affordability. How are you supposed to sit down and explain to the average voter that the White House Twitter account used this white supremacist phrase and what it means and why it's bad, and keep their attention? You can't, so you focus on the price of eggs and hope it's enough."

I remain steadfast in my incredibly unpopular opinion that Americans had no idea who they were empowering when they elected Trump in 2024. You read this and you feel your blood begin to boil at a low simmer because you know millions of people saw the MASS DEPORTATION NOW signs people waved at the RNC and you know they heard the candidate and his closest advisers talk about ending immigration for brown and black people and ramping up immigration for white folks, who, they said in bad faith, had been the victims of systemic racism.

What I mean is this: American voters had no fucking idea Elon Musk – an unelected billionaire from a foreign country – would dismantle the U.S. government with a team of hackers who ended constitutional self governance, sometimes at gunpoint; they did not know Stephen Miller would effectively function as the president; they had no idea Laura Loomer would run America's national security apparatus; they were clueless as to the open white supremacists who would be hired to run federal agencies meant to assist and seek justice for the marginalized. They did not know Trump would hire a third-rate Fox News host to run the military, and that this Fox News host would boot high-ranking women from the service and oversee the re-segregation of the Armed Forces.

The normie who voted for Trump in November 2024 did not know his murderous paramilitary force would be taking orders from right-wing influencers on the X platform. They had not the first clue that deeply-online regime officials would scroll the official social media platform of fascism until they found an ethnic cleansing request, as they did recently with Lewiston, Maine, a town with a small Somali population.

If you are not properly online, you cannot fully grasp the levels of radicalization that define those running the federal government right now. And if you try to explain it – if you try to break it down for those unaware of social internet's soul corrosion – you are going to sound crazy.

The normie might ask you how you can possibly know the regime is using these tactics to push a fascist agenda and wink at fellow fascists on the internet. How are you so sure about all this? You might answer: I just know. And the fascists will deny their true intent because weaponized bad faith allows them to do just that.

I wrote shortly after the 2024 election about the various goals of modern fascism, one of which was to poison the information environment until people forget what a functional information environment was like. Part of that poisoning is the mainstreaming of far-right online politics in the form of cutesy little memes and seemingly innocuous images and phrases.

It’s something toxic wafting through the air, and even those of us who take the time to find the origin of the stench can’t quite identify it, or tell others what it might mean for them. The stench gets trapped in our nostrils and simply becomes part of being alive. Soon, maybe, we won’t remember life before the stench. Soon we may tell our friends and family that the stench has always been there, when we know, deep down in the part of us that is free from terror and anxiety and overwhelming manipulation, it has not. 

I don't have an answer to all this. I wish I did, but I don't. I think it's good to once in a while remind yourself that you know what you are witnessing and there's no amount of gaslighting that can change that. Be a witness to these horrors, to the degradation of a nation and its people. Write it down. Post about it. Calmly inform your family and friends if they wonder what a regime post or phrase means. The best we can do, for now, is to not normalize that toxic stench all around us. Say no: It wasn't always here, and it doesn't have to stay forever if we don't want it to.

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