In the current and historic right-wing path, the #nastyfew are mess making to mix and confuse social shit – like the recurring claim that Nazism was a left-wing movement, or at least contains left-wing elements as a mess making provocative and “controversial” statement. Let’s take a few minutes to look at this mess pushing argument (and Its confusion)
Hard right talking points:
- It’s still “an open question” whether Hitler’s ideology was left or right.
- Nazis called themselves “National Socialists,” so perhaps there’s a left-wing lineage.
- No one has “done the analysis properly,”.
This is then framed in #mainstreaming pseudoscientific terms, borrowing credibility from the idea of science while avoiding rigorous historical or cultural context. This falls into #geekproblem territory where surface logic replaces any deep knowledge.
We need to spend time and focus to dismantle claim’s like this by highlighting the following:
- Ideologies grow from shared cultural soil
- You can’t categorize ideologies “left” or “right” – without considering the cultural compost they grew in. #4opens thinking reminds us to look at the process, not just the output.
- Shared features ≠ same ideology, fascism does share tools, aesthetics, and concerns with both socialism and conservatism, because it arises from the same history and uses elements from both. This doesn’t make it “left-wing” in any way.
- Ideology is not a checklist, the hard right idea to remove context is dangerously naive. Ideology isn’t a shopping list of policies – it’s a lived, embodied, blurry-boundary system of meanings, symbols, and affect. That’s part of the reason #dotcons and #NGO attempts at governance are floundering -because they think in terms of checkboxes, not compost.
- Misunderstanding of culture, when we collapse evolutionary psychology into cultural history, it becomes #techshit reductionism. An example is when we try to explain 20th-century genocide using universalist “human nature” arguments, rather than the unique horror of a cultural breakdown under specific hard right (and its left shadow) political conditions.
It helps to use the composting metaphor, problematic figures come from messy soil. It’s possible to be honest about the rot and acknowledge resilience, #nothingnew might be helpful?
The danger in the hard right populists is in confusing the crowd, with intellectual sleight of hand using familiar #mainstreaming phrases (“science,” “open question,” “no one’s done this properly”) and mixed ideological references that feel insightful at a glance. Then icing on the cake is the #fahernista playing of personal vulnerability that is used to deflects criticism.
Underneath this is a kind of cultural manipulation – blurring lines in a way that disorients rather than enlightens, it’s not critical thinking. It is an example of right-wing capture of shared cultural stories through contrarianism disguised as open-mindedness.
This is what happens when you let narratives drift unmoored from social history. It’s why we need to focus on grounding projects in native cultural understanding – because when you lose that grounding, anyone can hijack the conversation with pseudo-insights. In short, this hard right shit is composting badly. It’s fundamentally mixing rotten banana peels and plastic bags and calling it soil. It might look rich, but it won’t grow anything good.
You need a shovel, you help find one here https://opencollective.com/open-media-network
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