Episode 36: Jordan Carroll on Science Fiction and the Alt Right

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Maura Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, what do we have on our plate for today?

Today, we're going to be talking about science fiction, a genre that is near and dear to my heart.

And I actually don't entirely know how you feel about it.

Are you a closet science fiction fan?

I am not.

You know, I have not really indulged a ton in science fiction.

I've seen all the Star Wars movies, and I could probably tell you the plot to like one of them, maybe half of one.

I think it's the same plot each time, but yeah.

My nerd side really is more into fantasy, like dragons, wizards, that kind of thing, which is really like a past-oriented kind of imaginary world.

And I felt a little lame after our conversation because I really got excited by what science fiction enables in terms of imagining the future.

You know, I felt like I had this kind of stunted, conservative imaginary after talking to you guys about science fiction.

Yeah, as our guest, Jordan Carroll, points out in the book that we'll be talking about, Speculative Whiteness, Science Fiction and the Old Right, there's something a little bit surprising about the fact that neo-Nazis of all stripes would be drawn to science fiction stories.

They tend to be about imagining a radically different and maybe better future.

They tend to be pretty disrespectful of established hierarchies.

Kind of feels like a leftist domain, like a liberal domain.

And yet he shows that basically between, you know, the Gamergate dudes, between Elon Musk, Matthew Heimbach, or Richard Spencer, there is a very serious interest both in science fiction fandom and science fiction media and in kind of getting to decide what it means.

Yeah, you know, I have come really over the past like eight years or so, really, since Gamergate, to understand these online fandom communities and some IRL fandom communities that grow up around science fiction as a site that really creates its own kind of masculinity.

This is something that you and I, Adrienne, have talked about in our taxonomy of conservative masculinities as the creep, you know, the third in our triad of the pervert, the preacher, and the creep.

And the creep is often a kind of masculine figure who is coming from a place of like wounded or doubted masculinity.

It's something that needs to vindicate and prove itself through feats of domination or, in this case, imagined domination, in which his superiority can be demonstrated and proved to an undeserving world that has underestimated him or not appreciated him.

And I think that's a kind of masculine identity that has proved very, very fruitful for these right-wing political movements to harvest.

Yeah, I think that's right.

We should be very clear, right?

Like we're all speaking as fans of various imaginative media.

And we should say like, you know, some of this is about film, some of this is about novels, but we're also getting into Warhammer 40K, which is a miniatures war game.

And I think between the three of us in the conversation, we probably belong to fan communities for many of these kinds of media.

So we're not trying to say that, like, you know, fandom itself has gone fascist, but it's to say that there is a kind of fandom that has found itself, as you say, kind of congenial, especially around its conceptions around gender and sexuality, with certain streaks of a kind of elitist and kind of biologistic fandom that is out there.

And that in moments like Gamergate, you see that sort of become mainstream.

We really get into it.

I feel a lot smarter after this conversation about how these fictional genres get recruited into political projects and how a community of imagination like a fandom can become self-policing or can fail to self-police in ways that I think also reflect

some of the ways that our other communities might function too.

Yeah, exactly.

So I hope you guys enjoy the show as much as we enjoyed making it.

Enjoy.

so, Jordan, welcome to the pod.

Thanks for having me.

So, I loved this book, and as will become clear, I'm a bit of a science fiction nerd myself.

And this is a book about science fiction nerds to some extent and the very dark side that they can have.

But I do want to start with the first question that might sound more skeptical than I mean it.

Why is thinking about science fiction important for understanding certain strains of right-wing thought?

Many listeners will have have noticed that there's quite a bit of sci-fi thinking in the far right, especially when it comes to sort of the Silicon Valley far-right nexus, but they may not know how load-bearing it really is.

So can we tease out what sci-fi does for or to the far right, to the alt-right, and so on?

Sure.

I mean, yeah, we normally think of science fiction as something that is inherently progressive.

That's sort of the narrative that we tell ourselves often about science fiction, increasingly in the last couple of decades, the way science fiction is presented in the academy, especially.

But actually, science fiction and fascism have been connected for a long time.

And I think that one of the reasons that's the case is that if you really think about the far right, it's an insurrectionary movement that believes that in order to maintain white supremacy and other kinds of hierarchies, they have to overthrow the state.

And so they need to imagine a radically different future.

And often they draw on science fiction tropes or science fiction imagery in order to envision their all-white utopias.

We see this, for example, with James H.

Madall, David Duke, William Luther Pierce, as well as Richard Spencer.

But maybe even more fundamentally, the far right, and in particular the alt-right, imagines whiteness as speculative.

They believe that only white men are capable of imagining the future, and that includes science fiction speculation.

And they also believe that

whiteness has a kind of promissory dimension or speculative dimension.

It's a potential that can only be realized, they think, in a fascist utopia.

So often as they're describing whiteness, they're describing not what white people are doing now, but what white people could be doing, like say colonizing the stars or creating other kinds of techno-scientific marvels.

So science fiction is important in part to fascists because they imagine that tomorrow belongs to them.

It's really interesting, right?

So many of our fascists, as you point out, are science fiction fans.

And what's the sort of role of fandom in this?

This is a pretty common complaint, right?

Gamergate has front-loaded gendered connections between fandom and reactionary politics.

But the same is true, right?

Like every time a beloved science fiction property is changed and people lose their goddamn minds over it, it does appear to be around these kind of like white supremacist eugenicist lines.

So what's the nexus here?

I think there are a number of connections.

I mean, one is historical.

There have always been fascists among science fiction fandom or white supremacists among science fiction fandom.

But more recently, this has been, I think, a crucial tool for far-right recruiting.

They know that this is where the conversations are, whether that be Gamergate or the Rabid Puppies Affair with the Hugo Awards.

Fascists know that they can pull people in by talking about science fiction and fandom in a way that if they're just talking about their politics, they might not reach broader audiences.

And I think this is a calculated strategy beyond just getting clicks or getting linked online.

I think that they believe that politics is downstream from culture, and they believe that they have to change the culture in order to enact a white supremacist politics.

They think that the reason that white people or at least some white people don't love their politics is that they've been brainwashed with this cultural messaging.

And so they see it as their goal to change the culture to make fascism seem inevitable and appealing to larger audiences.

In the past, that's often been looking for what they think of as subversive messages in popular culture, messages that are supposedly put there to demoralize white people.

But in more recent years, fascists have been trying to find far-right meanings or subtexts in ostensibly liberal or leftist science fictional texts.

And so they're trying to unearth these kinds of right-wing meanings that most of us don't see in order to appeal to this audience of fans.

In some ways, like a lot of the techniques that they use for analyzing these texts feel a lot like academic cultural studies, but run through a kind of funhouse mirror of looking for the hidden fascist meaning in text so that they can pull people in.

That kind of reading that has an almost inventive determination to it.

Yeah.

As you're talking, Jordan, it occurs to me that the science fiction fascist who you're articulating reminds me quite a bit of the incel.

And this might bring us to our putative focus on gender right like I'm thinking of you know the Ur incel Elliot Roger whose manifesto I had the misfortune of having to reread yesterday as a incel who committed a mass shooting and ultimately a suicide in Isla Vista, California in 2014.

And his writings and his presentation of himself was as a quasi-messianic figure out to correct a corrupted world that did not validate his masculinity, masculinity, right?

And that involves, I think in your terms, a kind of speculative gesture about the correct, righteous, sort of appropriately ordered world in which he would have been, to his mind, granted sexual access.

It's easy for me to see how like white supremacy and the promise of whiteness can have the speculative dimension, but what about like sexual access and entitlement?

This seems like also a very common theme.

Definitely.

Yeah, I mean, gender and sexuality are constant anxieties for the alt-right.

And we see this in a number of different places.

One, I think, is the alt-right's discourse around risk.

So they think of whiteness as speculative.

It's looking towards the future.

But they also think of whiteness as gambling on a better future, as risking everything in order to enact some other future.

And they believe that only white men have the drive to risk their bodies, risk their lives, risk all of civilization in order to build a space empire or colonize the stars or whatever.

And they frame this in very gendered terms.

They think that white men are now too comfortable, they're too safe.

They have this kind of dichotomy between Nietzsche's Last Man, who is this consumerist figure, but often described by people like Richard Spencer as emasculated or feminized.

And then on the other hand, they imagine themselves as these kind of astronaut uber mention

who are capable of dealing with great dangers, and that makes them manly and powerful.

And they think that the incels would all be astronauts exploring the moons of Jupiter if only they lived in the fascist utopia.

And obviously, this is an old narrative.

We can hear echoes of Nazi discourses on risk and insurance or risk versus safety.

But also, it's a very American kind of narrative.

We could look back to mythology of the frontier and Teddy Roosevelt, this idea that you prove your manhood or you prove your white masculinity in particular by confronting great dangers.

And that's one of the things that the alt-right promises.

Yeah, and it's fascinating.

You point out that this is kind of Fannish elitism, which is all about the potential, right?

Like, I have the potential to do this thing because I am unique.

I am different from all those around me.

I don't do any of it, but I have this amazing potential, right?

Like in the event currently, I am reading a science fiction novel and/or contemplating jerking off into a TubeSock, but possibly I could go out and conquer a moon of Jupiter, right?

Like the fact that it both has these kind of, I don't know, delusions of grandeur, I guess you could call them, and on the other hand, a sense of frustration, right?

Like if only, right?

I would, if only.

That strikes me as where the nerd figure, as a sort of marginal figure in American masculinity discourses, and the kind of, yeah, frustrated fascists meet, right?

Yeah, it's easy to call them losers, but it's also true.

Like it's a sociological fact that these are people who were, at least in their minds, set up to do something better.

They're often downwardly mobile men who maybe have some college education.

A lot of them are failed grad students or they have like a law degree that they're not doing anything with.

They have this cultural training and in some cases credentials, and a narrative about promise to the gifted young men who were maybe in the gifted and talented program, and they didn't do anything with it, either because a lot of these people are antisocial individuals with a number of personality flaws that probably got in their way.

or it's the larger decline of the U.S.

and global economy and the financial crisis and the general downward mobility of an entire generation of people.

Some people took that and broke for the left.

And then others said, well, I was promised something greater.

I had this potential and they racialize that potential.

And they imagine that what's missing is not a world where we are capable of using all of our talents, but they see their place as a hierarchy that they were promised and they didn't get to move to the top of, essentially.

Yeah.

A kind of a birthright that is unrealized.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

You point out in the book that this is really quite old, this kind of of nerd metaphysics, the stories of Claude Deigler or A.E.

van Vogt basically already have a lot of this.

And the other thing I didn't realize, just for maybe more casual science fiction fans who are among our listeners, the fact that the figure of Khan Nunyan Singh in the classic Star Trek episode Space Seed, who is this kind of like this Superman, this ubermensch, is basically kind of a reply already to that strain in science fiction fandom, that this, what you call the mutationist romance, where basically you are different from others, meaning you are better, you're above, and the future really belongs to you and not to the weirdos or normies or, you know, I'm guessing also women around you, right?

That there's a kind of racial sort of promissory note.

And that's exactly what's true of Khan.

And of course, anyone who's seen that show or who has seen Star Trek 2 and or that other Star Trek that did it again for some reason will know that he's very much the bad guy, right?

Like he's a delusional, genetically amped up psychopath.

And the future belongs to the collectivist, friendly, thoughtful, and sort of communitarian federation, not to this weird, malignant outlier who's a remnant of a weird false turn that humanity took, I think.

Right, exactly.

And that, I think, points to a fundamental contradiction that I had to grapple with throughout this project.

On one hand, we we see that this idea of the fannish elite, that fans are slans, they're mutants, they're like higher beings, and the rest of everybody else is so pervasive in science fiction.

And in some cases, becomes the basis of an almost eugenicist narrative that fans are superior, that fans should breed more, and that everybody else is inferior and doesn't contribute to history.

But on the other hand, we see that science fiction fandom critiques that very early on and very forcefully.

And yet, people like Spencer go back in and find the critique and flip it on its head.

And that's the contradiction is in the act of trying to unearth fascism in fandom and critique that fascism, these science fiction texts often preserve it and allow

people who

have a fascist agenda to come back in and try to resurrect it.

So, yeah, the episode with Khan

is very clearly about condemning Khan.

And yet, when Spencer looks at it, he loves this idea of the genetically superior Übermensch, and he hates Spock, who he sees as this kind of Jewish Marxist figure.

In the show, it's precisely the opposite.

Spock, you're supposed to identify with, and you're supposed to hate Khan.

But he clearly is able to wrest some right-wing meaning from this text because that history of struggle in science fiction is unavoidable.

We see it so often where science fiction is trying to correct itself, but inadvertently, again, preserving this right-wing tendency within it.

What about these seeming counter-readings, right?

Like you mentioned, some fans identifying with a figure that the science fiction project will very explicitly name as the antagonist.

You see this happening sometimes in like video games as well.

You know, there's a broad swath of genres.

Like what is the nature of that reappropriation of the antagonistic role?

Is it avowed?

Is it a product of bad reading?

How does that come about?

I think it is often a product of bad reading.

And in some cases,

it's pretty obvious that they know it's a bad reading.

But I don't think it comes from nowhere.

I don't think that they're just looking at these texts and completely projecting their fantasies onto it.

If we see, for example, the Paul Verhoeven version of Starship Troopers or Alan Moore's Watchmen, these are texts that are about looking at moments of fascist enjoyment that fans have had.

They're moments where we are seduced as readers or viewers into investing in a fascist project.

And then they turn around and say, look what you've done.

Like you are complicit in this.

Isn't this horrific?

We need to disavow it.

But what the fascists often do is they leave that last part off.

They'll look at Rorschach or they'll look at the Space Marines and Starship Troopers and say, isn't this wonderful?

Don't we enjoy this violence?

Don't we enjoy this elitism?

And they forget the final turn, which is the moment of critical self-reflection and which seems to be in short supply on the far right.

And that allows them, I think, to get past a lot of the kinds of messaging that we see in science fiction to the contrary.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

You say at some point that they busy strip science fiction of its speculative indeterminacy, right?

the way a good sci-fi story can play with meanings and can reverse your view of what you're watching.

We're going to talk about Dune later, but that's a classic case, right?

Where like you're with it, you're excited for it for a while.

And you're like, oh no, oh no, no, no, no, no.

This is going very, very badly.

And one of the things I feel like we keep echoing here, I keep imagining someone like Elon Musk also, as well as someone like Richard Spencer.

And of course, it's the same kind of dunderheaded sort of lack of indeterminacy that you get from Silicon Valley's readings of classic science fiction.

I was thinking here of a tweet I really have loved by a guy named Alex Blackman, who I don't know anything about, about a tech company saying, at long last, we have created the torment nexus from classic sci-fi novel, don't create the torment nexus, right?

Like you can have a company calling itself Soylent.

You're like, are you?

Do you layer irony upon irony or you just don't know what irony is, right?

Like, and in some way, there is something really interesting that's happening here that like our technology seems to be losing the exact same sense sense of indeterminacy that these very online fandoms sometimes do or these right-wing fandoms do.

Yeah, I came very close to putting the torment nexus tweet in the book.

It's the exact same phenomenon.

Like we think of, or like we as critical readers of science fiction, think of science fiction as subjunctive.

It's about playing with possibilities, thought experiments, critiquing the present, and they see science fiction as an imperative.

Like there's no kind of exploration.

And I think it in part has to do with their model of history, which is very much about destiny and a kind of future that's already pre-written and just has to be realized.

They don't see...

like most great science fiction authors do, history as something open and contingent and indeterminate and unpredictable.

And so I think that they forget a lot of that critical dimension of science fiction and yeah, just see dystopia as a blueprint that they're now going to enact in a kind of very simplistic and kind of obtuse way.

Yeah, I mean, one other example of this that's so Silicon Valley Connected because it's on Apple TV Plus is the foundation TV show, which takes a really interesting question about what would happen if you could map out the future.

Be like, we will now celebrate this man who invented the torment nexus, basically, and very clearly in a way that kind of anticipates or resembles what a tech company can do.

And that strikes me as another place where, frankly, the show just seems to misunderstand its source material to some extent.

Sorry to be the undergrad who hasn't done the reading, but

for those of us who haven't seen all these texts or haven't seen the foundation, could you give us just a quick gloss?

So should we try this together, Jordan?

It's tricky.

It's a kind of unnarratable story, but basically the idea is in the far future, the galactic empire is on the verge of collapse, but no one knows that yet.

It's basically an Edward Gibbon kind of riff on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

And the question is, what would happen if you knew, if you could predict this?

The story is really about this group of engineers who figures out how to truncate the time and minimize the losses for galactic civilization from this inevitable collapse.

And the show, I would say, I stopped watching it to be honest, because I was bored out of my skull.

Basically, Jared Harris, who's wonderful, has always figured everything out before everyone else has figured it out.

There is some of that in the book, absolutely.

And the nerds do know best in that novel as well, very clearly.

But in some way, the book is grappling with the question of what do you owe to the future if you really have scientific ways of predicting it.

And then in the show, it's basically like, ha ha, you dumb losers, I knew that you were going to do that, and that this person was going to try and stab their lover and then like get into cryo-sleep and whatever.

I'm sorry.

What?

How?

No.

Right.

And it very much is the Silicon Valley version of what Asimov's original novels are about.

Yeah.

I mean, it seems like this is really appealing to people like Elon Musk and the effective altruists, people who believe that they have everything mapped out in advance and that gives them the right to have more say in how the world runs, essentially.

Sounds like it might be an opportunity for just a smidge of epistemic arrogance.

I don't know.

Yeah, definitely.

So the other thing I wanted to ask you about, well, so maybe we'll walk our listeners through one example of like a place where this kind of fanish eugenicism seems to almost win over someone very clearly thinking they're parodying eugenics, right?

And this is C.M.

Kornbluth's Marching Moron, and which we'll recap it for people who have not read a science fiction story from the 1950s.

But that am I right to understand that Kornbluth very much thought he was writing a parody, a liberal parody of a right-wing kind of thinking about gender, about sexuality, about eugenics, and how then in the hands of certain readers became an exemplar of the very thing that it was meant to parody.

Right.

So essentially the story is a person from the present day of when the story was published is thrown into the distant future and he finds himself in a world where everybody seems to be less intelligent.

This is a lot of ways like the film Idiocracy, which is also a big touch point for for the alt-right.

Normally, this is just read as a matter of intelligence.

The people of the future aren't as smart.

He's very smart.

And there's a small cognitive elite secretly running the world in a kind of Ayn Rand fashion, and they know better.

But if you look at the narrative, it's really about not just intelligence, but foresight.

The people who looked ahead and thought about the consequences of their actions and planned for the future, according to this narrative, used family planning so they had fewer children.

The people who were more present-oriented, more impulsive, more unable to delay gratification, are outbreeding the people with foresight, essentially.

So it's a very eugenicist narrative.

In the narrative, though, we see the protagonist propose essentially a genocidal plan to get rid of all of the short-sighted people who can't plan for the future by shooting them off into space in these spaceships that aren't designed to allow them to survive, essentially.

This plan takes place, and then the small, gifted few who can see forward into the future realize how horrific this is and condemn him, and he's sent off to his own doom.

It's, again, ambiguous.

The narrative is loaded towards a eugenicist narrative.

Like, it's just a narrative fact that being short-sighted or foresighted is genetic in this story, unless we're really reading it against the grain.

But nevertheless, it's intended to kind of condemn this idea of looking forward, looking ahead, giving you more rights than other people, and this fanish elitism where fans say, oh, yeah, we are capable of looking into the distant future, and that makes us better than everybody else.

But when it's taken up by the far right, they don't see that kind of satire.

They just see it it as, here's how things are.

And several alt-right intellectuals or far-right intellectuals have kind of pointed to this story, and especially to the similar narrative, idiocracy, as an example of where the world is actually going.

But all of this points to, I think, an ongoing narrative about who's capable of imagining a future, but also who has the discipline to actually bring that future into being.

And it's clear that at least one interpretation of this suggests that that's a genetic potential, that not everybody can do that.

And only this small group of

hyper-intelligent individuals are capable of seeing past the present, essentially.

So I want to drill down on that last thing you said.

Where do they get this idea?

I mean, like, sure, the science fiction fan thinks about the future more, right?

The same way some people apparently think about the Roman Empire more than other people, as we found out last year through everyone's shock.

But on the other hand, right, like forethought and like space colonization do appear to be two different things.

Now, in my everyday life, I'm a Germanist by training.

And about in page 20 of your book, I was like, is this all Spengler?

And then Spengler showed up.

And so I did want to ask about that.

How much of this is just the decline of the West, where basically, well, Spengler, this is his sort of inter-war, well, it's written at the very end of World War I, but becomes a phenomenon really between World War I and II in Germany and beyond, one should say.

And it's this story about the difficulties of what he calls the Faustian element, which is this kind of striving, you know, blowing through any limits, even if it ends up killing you kind of ethos.

I mean, those listeners of ours who've been listening to the Nietzsche episodes will recognize that this is basically just a collectivized version of what Nietzsche was talking about.

And at the same time, it is for him characteristic of the European.

He makes a claim that the West has its essence in the Faustian and that basically that is what's now being lost in a sea of collectivism, etc.

etc.

Is that where this is from or did this predate kind of Spengler?

I think that's definitely one element.

For people like Richard Spencer, they are explicitly citing Spengler and they're citing other authors who are talking about the Faustian spirit.

And they definitely do believe that Europeans or white Europeans, I should say, and white European men are uniquely suited towards transcending the here and now and are constantly looking forward to the future, looking forward into the beyond, and as a result, are exploring the world and building technology and ultimately are destined to go to the stars.

And so, yeah, I think it's definitely coming from that as well.

Although, in Spingler, there is a kind of melancholy note to that or a cautionary note, a sense that there's something almost horrible about

this civilization of technology, of these massive projects.

I mean, if we go back to the original Faust narrative that inspired this in Goethe, like ultimately at the end, he moves beyond his satanic drivenness to change the world and find something like peace.

We see some of that ambivalence in some fascists, like a feeling that white people are restless and driven, but I don't think that they really grapple with that sense that this is,

even in Spenger, not only the source of grand projects like cathedrals, but also the source of modern misery.

Yeah, it strikes me that there is this kind of simplistic cheerleading in the speculative impulse.

I'm thinking of things like effective altruism, right?

Which so quickly evolved from

a speculative command over

supposed knowledge of the future that commanded you to say, give up your kidney, and then very quickly became, no, in fact, what you really need to do, brave Nietzsche Neubermensch, is to make as much money as possible and then invest that money right back into AI.

Like, how does

the narcissistic impulse in the right-wing science fiction reader emerge so consistently in spite of these other, like maybe less rosy or less gratifying strains in the literature itself.

Yeah, I mean, it's totally narcissistic.

When Richard Spencer is analyzing the science fiction film Solaris, he takes from it this idea that all of space is just a mirror for white men to gaze upon themselves and to see their glory.

And we see in a lot of these fascist narratives, there are no others.

Not only is it a world depopulated of non-white people or anybody who might object to their project, but they're not interested in aliens, which is a central conceit of science fiction.

They don't, except maybe as a ravening horde to fight back.

But really, like, there are very few fascist narratives about extraterrestrials.

It's a lonely universe.

It's a narcissistic universe.

Even though they talk about expansion and the beyond and the Faustian soul going out into the cosmos, It feels very claustrophobic and self-obsessed and narrow-minded in a way that's really, I think, fundamental.

Yeah, and that feels sort of, as you say, hyper-masculinized too, because there is, of course, kind of also, especially at mid-century, a kind of science fiction of belonging, right?

Like where you find yourself, you realize that you belong to something greater than you.

There's a story I sometimes taught back in the day by Robert Sheckley.

Have you ever read specialist?

No.

So this is about a spaceship where you realize that different components are different beings.

They all evolved to have different things that they do and together they can propel this thing.

And their pusher has died.

I think it's what it's called, pusher.

And they're like, we got to find a new pusher.

And that sort of twist at the end of the story is the pusher turns out to be a human being.

And like, and they're like, look, you're, we need you.

And he's like, I'm just a person.

Like, no, you may have forgotten that you're part of this spaceship family, but you are a pusher.

I think it's called pusher.

Please don't write me if I'm wrong about this.

It's been 10 years.

Right.

And then at the very end, the story ends with the human being basically being like, oh, I belong in this bigger context.

So there's like this very, this acceptance of the fact that what is out there might, in fact, make you feel small, might make you part of something bigger, might make you collaborate and cooperate with others and might challenge your very sense of selfhood, right?

And there's a lot of science fiction that does that.

But it's really interesting to sort of see the way that entire element, right, this sort of fundamental human fantasy can sort of be completely read out of it by these alt-right readers.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

Like the alt-right, in some moments, is obsessed with belonging and trust and friendship and comradeship of a certain kind, and yet

seems totally unable to imagine a future where that is important or, for that matter, to enact it.

I mean, part of the reason why the alt-right has fallen apart is they all seem to distrust and often hate one another.

And so they're unable to collaborate on anything.

Their vision of the future, I think, reflects that.

It's a Darwinian struggle or a struggle to the death.

They point to like a very bad reading of Hegel to describe themselves.

Thank you.

Everyone always repeats that as a reading of Hegel.

I'm like, that's not what he means.

Yeah, and it didn't get to the end of the, even the chapters.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Like, if it were a novel, it would be one-third in.

Like, read till the end, bro.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, their future is like this.

It's all death.

It's all struggle.

It's all conquering one another or conquering the universe.

They can't see space colonization as maybe a collective project of building a better world.

They see it as...

dominating the stars.

And the stars are especially appealing to them because they don't contain non-white people that they might end up coming into contact with.

And so it is like a very aggressive, a very dominating view of the world

that can't conceive of other modes of sociality.

It strikes me that, you know, what you're describing really is a vision of masculinity, right?

Solitary, domineering, conquering, adventurous, kind of broadly antagonistic, right?

You mentioned earlier that a lot of these texts, or at least the right-wing misinterpretations of these texts, have a preoccupation with eugenics and with breeding, right?

How do these readers engage with the appearance in these texts where they do appear of like actual women and children?

I mean, they really do write women out of science fiction, it seems like.

They don't really attend to the strong and long-standing presence of women in science fiction going at least as far back as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

And in their narratives about the future, they often don't have have much of a place for women.

Women are there to bear children for white men, or in some of the more bizarre fantasies that they have, women are essentially replaced by biotechnology that will breed more white men.

And so it is a very hyper-masculine narrative and one that doesn't attend in any way to women or women's experience beyond a very stereotyped image of the trad wife, I think.

Well, that's that's catnip from Wera.

We should think about sci-fi trad wives at some point, but I do wonder one book that you dwell on a little bit too that will be fresh in people's minds, and that might be kind of a confusing addition to the vault-right canon is Dune, right?

It's an odd one at first glance, right?

I mean, with the Marching Morons, you could see how they got there, but...

Dune is so obviously steeped in non-Western tradition.

The white savior trope is brutally, you know, deconstructed in it, and women are super important in it, right?

Like, I mean,

so they're super powerful.

I guess, I guess, I'm answering my own question.

They're portrayed also fairly negatively, but so is everyone else, right?

But yeah, I mean, just given that, you know, Dune just came out as two very, very successful films.

We'll have Mark put in the

at this point

for the movie.

How do they grapple with the kind of dissonant aspects of the Dune universe for them?

Yeah, I mean, at first glance, it would not seem like Dune would be very appealing to fascists.

It is, in some ways, a cautionary tale against the figure of the superhuman dictator.

Paul Atreides, in some sense, is a mutant who can see further than everybody else.

He has this gift of prescience and he utilizes that in order to remake the galaxy.

And yet, by the time we get to the end of that project, we see that he and his family are transforming into monsters and they have killed millions upon millions of people.

And ultimately, the only thing left for them to do is to create this vast plan to try to undo their own power and to make it so that no one else can enact this project project ever again.

And do fuck a worm.

Yeah, yeah.

Very important.

Definitely.

So, yeah, you would think that this parable of the dangers of mutant fascism would not appeal to somebody like Spencer, but actually, they, again, read this in a very foreshortened way.

They often focus on the first book, or when they do look at later books, they kind of drop out key elements that seem pretty crucial.

And so they valorize the God Emperor of Dune as this figure that's capable of risking everything in order to create this better world.

And they see the world of Dune as embodying their project.

It's a world that contains archaic elements, it's kind of feudal, many technologies are forbidden.

It's a world where aristocrats are still very much in power and move history.

But it also includes things like space exploration, psychic abilities, and other kinds of science fiction nova, science fiction innovations, essentially.

And so they call this archaeofuturism.

This is the vision of the world that they want, a world that combines the distant past with the distant future.

And they really celebrate Dune in a way that I think would have probably disturbed Frank Herbert, its author, quite a bit.

I'm going to be stealing archaeofuturism.

It's an excellent coinage.

Is that yours?

No, it is a member of the French new right,

Guillaume Phai, came up with this term.

We have this joke on Embed with the Right where we delve a lot into

right-wing diagnoses of gender, right?

Like what their description of what is going on.

And as a radical feminist, I always agree with the first half of the sentence, and then I disagree with the second half, where if it's like, oh, you mean that's good?

You think that's good?

And that's what I thought of when you described archao

as being actually a coinage of somebody who, in fact,

this is exactly what I wanted.

Yeah, yeah.

This is perfect.

I feel like as we talk about archaeofuturism, I do have to ask you, I know you don't talk about it much in the book, but I know you've also written on Warhammer 40K, which is sort of the classic archaofuturist, I mean, text is putting it mildly.

Well, this is also Elon Musk's canonical misreading, right?

Does he like that?

Oh, God.

I don't know.

I feel like 40K requires too much attention than Elon Musk is able to muster for the simple reason that it's a game that takes forever.

It has something like 60 novel cycles.

I like cracked open one and I was like, wait, there's 60 more of these.

I'm sorry.

I am too busy for this.

I'm not very busy, but I'm too busy for this.

And it's this whole universe, 40 years old, and it's Archaeofuturism.

So it's set in the distant future, but it is basically a fantasy story, right?

Like it has all the trappings of a fantasy story.

And I always assumed that that was, I think this is a Thatcher era artifact.

And I always thought that, like, exactly, like Maura was saying, the archaeofuturism of it is meant to be parodic.

This is this.

horrifying vision of what the end of history could look like, right?

Like nothing is ever new, but it's getting more and more technologically destructive and sophisticated.

And then I was like, whoa, they like that.

It's basically people just get into this,

Trump as God Emperor.

Like, it's like, it's quite astonishing, like, that they really look at that, which, like, I feel like the creators of, I think they're called Games Workshop, right?

It's called, yeah, that Games Workshop really went out of their way to be like, this is parody, you guys.

I really don't know.

Like, like, Heinlein was soft-pedaling it.

You know, Herbert was soft-pedaling it.

Like, this is obvious.

You're committing genocide.

And, like, everything has a skull everywhere.

It all looks like, you know, if the SS was mechanized, like, please don't take this seriously and or don't take this as an endorsement.

And the all-right's like, yeah, it sounds like an endorsement to me.

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, I am obsessed with Warhammer 40K and have been for decades.

And you're right, it's the same dynamic as a lot of these other texts where

40K is very much.

supposed to be a satire.

This was, I think, more explicit in the early materials in the 80s and 90s.

There was an element of ridiculousness to it that I think as it's become more popular has faded a little bit.

But there's a kind of contradiction running through 40K that we've seen before,

where on one hand,

it's

a parody, it's a satire.

It's a lot of British people looking in some ways at American pop culture and making fun of it.

So you have like Rambo is in there and Terminator and Aliens and American science fiction, and they kind of blow it up to hyperbolic proportions.

And it's set in this universe where these armored space marines are protecting humanity from aliens, but they're doing so in the service of this grotesquely dystopian dictatorship where any kind of free thought is stomped out immediately.

And where there's often, due to the

this hidebound and traditionalist way of organizing things, you know, we see a refusal to develop new technologies.

Or because it's so centralized, entire planets just get lost in this world and eaten up by aliens because nobody noticed them.

And so, yeah, it's really meant to satirize adolescent male power fantasies.

And there's a large leftist fan base.

Shout outs to Snipe and Webb and Arbiter Ian and a number of other YouTubers and commenters who are looking at this from a critical perspective.

And yet, like part of the enjoyment is a world where there's only war, I think, which is, I think, a very right-wing fascist view that everything is this eternal struggle.

Yeah, I mean, just to give listeners a sense of just how absurd this world is, I forget what he's called, but the Empire of the Imperium of Man, right?

The Emperor is a psychotic zombie to whom 10,000 people a day have to be sacrificed in order to sustain him.

It's like you've left the realm of metaphor and you're just like, okay, it's like, we're just saying it at this point.

It is just so obviously satirical, but I hadn't thought about the gender dimension quite so much, which is that like the output for the player is a bunch of dudes hanging out and being bros together.

And that like, sure, the demented God emperor might be a bit of a problem, but like in the end, you're in your armor, you got your guns, you're hanging out with your buddies, and like, you know, there is a kind of male wish fulfillment fantasy bound up with this absurdly dystopian future, right?

Like

really hard to top any of that in terms of just sheer bleakness.

And yet it is very much a story whose output is male purpose and male companionship.

Yeah, I mean, the space marines, they're all men, and this has been a subject of controversy.

The more progressive view of the hobby suggests that maybe we should change this, whereas there is a contingent of fans that are like, no, Space Marines have to be men.

This is canon.

But you can see what is at play there beyond just sexism.

It's this fantasy of being a dude, encased in armor, not having to feel anything.

and never having to deal with women and being completely detached from any connections beyond these military relationships to other men.

So it's very much a fantasy of a certain kind of heterosexual, hyper-masculine adolescence that never ends for this right-wing contingent of 40k fans.

How does it end?

I mean, spoiler alert for those.

There's no ending.

It's just

war forever.

Like, it's just basically they just keep adding to the timeline.

And then they're like, and then a new war of space elves and a new war with the chaos gods and a new war.

I mean, they're starting to change the timeline a little bit.

I think Games Workshop has rightfully recognized that there's a problem with the hobby that needs to be addressed.

And they're slowly trying to alter the setting.

And part of that might be imagining that history will move forward beyond the way it's been stuck for a long time.

But I think because it's this open world franchise that the main purpose is to sell little plastic miniatures and video games, there can't be a narrative resolution.

It's just there will be more war and it has to be a stalemate so the armies are balanced forever.

It strikes me that that's like a common theme in a lot of

this right-wing imagination of science fiction.

It's like there's, okay, even if you get to a triumphalist end, you do not then arrive at a utopia of peace, right?

Which would be impossible for them ideologically because war is its own end.

The proving ground for masculinity, exactly.

Right.

And masculinity is like kind of by definition insecure and always needing to to be reproven and reproven.

There's no like static masculinity that is unimpeachable, right?

So you have this kind of constant.

Words are failing me because I cannot actually articulate the bleakness of this vision of just constant unending war and conflict and domination.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, one thing about chaos that's worth mentioning, right?

Like, so these space marines are always fighting the gods of chaos, which are these slithering, kind of changeable, mutational kind of apparitions that, you know,

right?

Exactly, right?

Like, which it's all very slimy and you don't want to go in there.

And it's like, well, okay, like,

yeah, these are just, you're scared of ladies.

I get it.

Like, right?

Like,

you need a gun in order to confront the ladies, which, of course, that gets to the irreducibility of this.

There's nothing Faustian about it.

It's just repetition compulsion.

It's just, you know, neurotic, I guess, is the way to put it.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there's even, there is a literal god of sex and pleasure that is the enemy of these armored, joyless, hyper-masculine incel space marines.

That's fascinating.

And I mean, this is, this is going too far afield and more we need to do another episode on this at some point.

But like, there's also something interesting about how responses to kind of Thatcherism kind of leaned into masculinity in certain ways that are just very, very interesting.

Like, on the one hand, like, critiques, I think you hear of V for Vendetta, which is another one of these that like ends up being weirdly sexist for the fact that like its politics are ultimately like supposed to be quite progressive.

And the same kind of changeability seems to me true for 40K as well.

That like, unlike, let's say, the Verhovan Starship Troopers, where part of the fascist future's appeal is its horniness.

The fact that

there are female Space Marines and they're all showering together and they're just hot and all making out.

And Verhoven's point is like, just because

your war crime machine is diverse, you know, and sexually liberated doesn't make it better like war machines are bad yeah i mean thatcher is mocked in early warhammer fantasy at least so in in closing i i wanted to ask a question about sort of our present moment so as a you know as a bit of a science fiction fan myself right in some way this is a golden age a bunch of novels i thought i would not see represented on screen in a long time if ever are now on screen right like we mentioned foundation mentioned dune i guess dune had been filmed previously but that was not a movie that when I saw it as a teenager, I really liked, although I've come to like it quite a bit.

And there's all this other stuff that they're working on, right?

There's going to be a 40K show pretty soon, I've heard, with The Witcher Guy, which is great, Henry Cavill.

And part of that clearly is that there is a kind of zeitgeist overlap with Silicon Valley.

And I feel like we've been dancing around that.

Like, we have the world's richest man who is, I guess, an incel at heart, even though he appears to not be.

Frantically impregnating everybody he can yeah Yeah, but who makes his name kind of building rockets We have as Maura was mentioning we have the effective altruists or long-termists as well who indulge these very science fiction tinged fantasies and whose gender politics tend to be pretty reactionary frankly in in most cases

What do we make of the fact that like we have these tech overlords who were science fiction fans clearly once upon a time, right?

Like, I mean, find the other person that I was thinking of is Peter Thiel, who seems to be more of a fantasy fan, right?

Naming everything after Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings, Moes.

That's a little bit different, and I would want to keep those two apart.

But still, we are, we're living through this future as created by science fiction fans.

And again, I say that as someone who is going to have to log off in five minutes to get to my DD game, but still, like, what does it mean for that kind of fandom that conceives of itself as so marginal to suddenly be kind of in control of humanity's destiny to some extent, or really having a serious impact on what happens to this planet.

What do you make of it?

I mean, there's an argument to be made that fandom has become maybe not the new spirit of capitalism, but a new spirit of capitalism.

I've written a lot about the ways that Silicon Valley culture is bound up, not just in science fiction imagery, but in fannished practices, a kind of obsessiveness, an orientation towards repetition, going back to the same thing again and again, and being lost in something.

These are all things that both science fiction fans report, they describe themselves as getting lost in a novel or in a game, but also

software engineers and other people in Silicon Valley often have this same relationship to coding.

They lose track of all time, they forget everything else, and they get lost in their own work to the exclusion of all other concerns.

So, there is a hyper-focus, I think, in fandom that's really useful for Silicon Valley.

You want your coders to ignore dinner, ignore social obligations, remain focused on the one thing that produces profit for you.

But it's also useful, I think, for culture industries.

They want a very predictable, dependable audience that's going to watch the 17th sequel as well as the 16th sequel to whatever it is that you are producing.

And so I think that

Hollywood and other culture industries are cultivating audiences that look a lot like science fiction fans, but maybe without that critical dimension or a speculative dimension that seems so important for science fiction fandom.

I mean, we kind of talked about this earlier, where it's

It's a world in the future where not a lot ultimately happens.

A lot of the temporality of these new science fiction narratives feels like

the way that, say, Umberto Echo described Superman, where he fights these galactic empires, and then the story basically stays the same for a lot of the comic strips or the comic books.

It's the same thing with these new franchises where

every few years we're going to get a new Star Wars film, or we're going to get a new classic science fiction text that's going to be adapted, or rebooted, or sequeled.

And it's not necessarily going to depict a fundamental break with the present.

It's going to give you the same repetitive, predictable enjoyment that you can hyper-focus on and that you will be a good consumer of in the future.

And of course, there's an element there where the new spirit of capitalism, the kind of franchise, ends up pushing the limits of who these works are for, right?

They're interested in being inclusive because that's how they market, which will then always outrage the sort of white supremacist element, right?

Like you're going to want a buckstormtrooper, you're going to want to have, you know, female Space Marines because like you can double your money that way.

And so like, I do think that this kind of spiral of escalation where these corporations market these kinds of objects that to some extent appeal to the exclusionary impulses in their fans to an ever-widening fandom.

They're going to get these kind of counter-readings that recover the exclusionary element that has always been, I think, part of science fiction fandom, even at its sweetest, even at its most sort of anodyne moments.

And I do wonder where that's going to leave us and where that's going to go.

Yeah, I think you're right.

I mean, we might find a utopian dimension to the various cultural industries' attempt to expand fandom beyond a small group of primarily primarily white educated fans.

And I think this points to one of the things that we see throughout science fiction.

And we see the fascist element, but we also see anti-fascist science fiction that really suggests that the future is what we make of it.

It's not just the unfolding of racial destiny of a privileged few.

One of the slogans that I kind of hit on at the end of the book is the idea that tomorrow belongs to everybody, that the future is not just white men, that the future will be people of all backgrounds working together to build something beyond the present, to overcome racial capitalism and to imagine a better world.

And so I think that even though some of these franchises are cynical in some ways, we might hold fast to those moments where they show a future where it's not so homogeneous and it's not so exclusive.

Yeah.

I think that's a perfect place to end.

That's beautiful.

Jordan Carroll, thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you so much.

This is great.

I learned a lot.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Genuine Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.