It would seem that Anthony Reed-Ross and his obsessive and imagined fascist creep hypothesis still has its defenders. This one in particular being the blog poster nothingiseverlost who makes a ridiculous series of conflations and confusions regarding fascism.
Let's start at the point where he talks about the problem of creeping entryism as proposed by people before ARR such as Chip Berlet and Spencer Sunshine. The reason this has always been a dubious threat assessment is that at the end of the day the far right and the far left have different core values and sensibilities. Those factors will always get in the way of any or both groups coming together. I would argue the bigger threat is authoritarian Marxist Vanguard communist leftism which is able to get into more non-authoritarian groups under the guise of shared leftist humanist revolutionary values. This is the bigger problem I would argue in particular when talking about the psychology of Maoism which has poisoned much of leftist, radical and even liberal thought. For me the authoritarian Marxist left is about as bad as the fascists and other far right authoritarian ideologies. The simple fact is if the core values and sensibilities don't match there will never be any serious structural 'creep' of fascism.
NIEL then goes into critiquing the Marxist framework as laid out by Rhyd Wildermuth a framework which I don't quite accept either being that I'm not a Marxist. My framework is a more perennial anarchist one that focuses on the various manifestations of the state. I can agree that fascism is not quite a tool of the capitalist state but it IS a tool of statism as such and anti-statism is ultimately what matters when it comes to preventative measures. I agree much with Gille Dauve's analysis of fascism in 'When Insurrections Die'. A large part of understanding the emergence of fascism is understanding its role in unifying labor, state and capital. Does it have an autonomous existence beyond this, sure, but at this point it's a historically spent force. Nothing of fascism in the post WW2 era comes close to what it was when it was in lock step with corporatism as a historical force. Whether many social democrats want to admit it or not it played a role in the rise of the modern welfare state which went a long way in quelling the energy of the old left. It's not that Hitler and Mussolini(Franco was not a fascist) is all you need to know about fascism, it's that they(along with Gentile) and that era represented its peak historical power. Evola at this point is only read by a marginal few who usually mix him in with other mostly reactionary thinkers who are not necessarily fascist. His influence simply has no popular weight outside of small obscure intellectual circles at this point. I think you can broadly say that fascism emerges in capital and state with a particular 'matter without spirit'(Novatore) psychology and a reified obsession with struggle and nostalgia. It needs its own analysis for sure, what it does not need is a dedicated anti-elective position against it that enables a unified leftist front often involving authoritarian and anti-authoritarian currents that have no business being together. The fact that this psychology currently manifests itself in certain marginal musical youth cultures does not make it a political existential threat. Much of the fascist anti-fascist fights in these sub-societal spaces essentially amount to what Jacques Camatte would call political-youth gang warfare. It's crips v bloods but for mostly white working and middle class ideologues.
There is an appeal that fascism and other reactionary thought ideologies have that NIEL and other antifa warriors are not taking into account and it is something that Wildermuth wrote very well on back in 2017 in his piece 'Barbarians In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction'. In that writing he correctly points out that mythic territory has been ceded to fascists, nationalists and the authoritarian far right. When you look at the awful takes that many on the left still have on someone like Rudolph Steiner it's hard to argue with this point. The left is mostly thoroughly materialist and not interested in the occult and the archaic as a whole. A controversial take I've argued for instance is that symbols like the swastika and the number 88 should be reclaimed under a new non-fascist context. Thankfully the post-left, egoists and other non traditional radicals are bucking this trend. I suspect mythic territory will matter a lot in the coming generations whether this is in a future cyberneered epoch or a contracting emerging dark age one. This is not something you can blame on the fascists and the far right. The leftists shot themselves in the foot on this issue.
Regarding the Atassa affair, Aragorn and LBC published the work they did not endorse it. Only platform control obsessive leftists like this blogger take this as a cancel worthy problem. Given his own associations he ought to rethink what intellectual trash actually is. It ain't LBC and other post-left publications like it.
In regards to what he calls 'red/brown' alliances he doesn't figure that sometimes left and right wing discourse have shared problems that through an alliance can have preferable outcomes. Consider the left/right alliance during the new left era which had a shared welfare/warfare state critique. That temporary alliance played a role in ending the Vietnam war. We see another left/right alliance in regards to a shared opposition to neoliberalism-albeit for differing reasons-along with a shared critique of the military industrial complex. If this short lived alliance plays a role in ending neoliberalism and warding off a major war then it will have had a preferable effect.
NIEL likes to play off his analysis as the complex one but he's the one who is erroneously tagging people as fascist and far right when they are not and his understanding of what fascism actually is leaves a lot to be questioned. He assumes that someone working for RT is a Russian ideological operative when quite often it is more complicated then that. For certain individuals RT is the platform to express their mainstream media maligned ideologies to a fairly large audience. This is obvious in the case of someone like Abbie Martin.
In regards to the non-binary punchline, the reason why it is such an easy punchline is simply due to how annoying and puritanical the language is. Much of non-binary idpol amounts to linguistified political pornography and if it's a turn off to a pro-queer Stirnerian such as myself you can imagine how much of a turn off it is for those who are far less initiated. Queerness should always have been more about individuality then elective historically constructed identity. He then makes a faulty analogy to druidry and other alternative spiritualities. The obvious difference in this case is that druidry and other orientations like it are not coming from a politically annoying institutional elect. These are initiative ways of living that have been around for at least the last 200 years. They are identities that are mined from the past. The problem with these elective position driven non-binary identities is that they are being facilitated by technology and other mediating factors. Hardly the type of Stirnerian anarchic egoist driven apolitical queer orientation that I would like to see.
Let's finally speak of the ecofascist boogyman that NIEL sees as a problem. I'm reminded of what John Michael Greer said on the issue in the last year. There are ecofascists, just not that many of them to be an existential or even a milieu level problem of any kind. Sadie and Exile may very well fit the bill but who really cares. These are two individuals that changed their values in a reactionary direction. When it comes to deep ecology in general there are tendencies towards anti-modern world views but these tendencies should not so fast be called fascism. I think we will see more eco-conservatism in the future as certain tendencies on the left arc towards transhumanism something I suspect NIEL and his lot do not see as a creeping problem as much as I do. He has a complete blindspot for cybernetic institutional leftism and its emergent backers such as William Gillis. If this totalitarian humanism(Keith Preston) is indeed developing as an ideology why wouldn't there be a reactionary turn in deeper dedicated ecological worldviews. These are modern cradled problems that need sophisticated analysis and fascism is a complication that comes out of modernity among other complications. Non-fascist that I am I can understand the drive for a life of some kind of power processed overcoming to use a Kaczyski term. There is a big difference between someone like Renzo Novatore as compared to Mussolini or Evola in terms of how you go about rejecting modernity. Post-left anarchy and what I call anarch-egoist-anarchy is a way of trying to reconcile these issues in terms of ecology, human excess and being and becoming in the world.
What I suspect is the case is that NIEL has deep seeded humanist sensibilities that are challenged by a more post-left post-humanist way of looking at the world and his phantom three-way fight is a manifestation of this. There is no existentially warranted fascistic emergency that needs to be fought nor is there need for a dedicated anti-fascist radical force no more then there is one needed against statist communism which is also mostly historically irrelevant. The fight should be against capital, state, technology, history and civilization. To be on team antifa today is to be a humanist foot soldier that either directly or indirectly backs up system and society. Anti-fascism was always a liberal modern humanist deployment. I say that these things have done more to hold back the realization of anarchy then the historical spent force that is fascism.
Links to related text
https://nothingiseverlost.wordpress.com/2021/03/28/is-alexander-reid-ross-the-ceo-dad-of-antifa-on-contagion-shades-of-grey-and-the-three-way-fight/amp/
https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2021/3/16/mission-creep
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-dauve-when-insurrections-die
https://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/capcom/on-org.htm
https://godsandradicals.org/2017/06/17/barbarians-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/renzo-novatore-toward-the-creative-nothing
