We're Not So Different, You and I

Recently, I've been paying attention to trolls and their politics. There have been trolls as long as the internet has existed, but it is only in the last 10 years that they have become politically aligned with the right, and only since Trump's second inauguration that they have found real political power. The Vice President himself is, famously, adjacent to several ultra-right-wing trolls, and often engages with the coordinated harassment campaigns that are their speciality. Several official US government accounts are seemingly run by professional trolls. These Nazi/Nazi-adjacent troll communities have become a feature of online life, and if you live online with anything like a substantial following, it is impossible to avoid them.

I have been particularly interested coordinated troll harassment campaigns and the things they reveal about the fascists who now occupy our government. To explore this, I want to use as my case study one recent example: the harassment of Will Stancil, a well-known liberal commentator noted for being a tireless online brawler, less charitably, a tireless pedant. Stancil can be somewhat polarizing, but one advantage of being a pedant is a willingness to call bullshit. To his credit, he has vigorously called out the Nazified bullshit of some of the most powerful people in the world, including the aforementioned Vice President. The ultra-right have taken offense to this, and responded with an elaborate campaign of harassment in response.

I began to pay attention to this campaign when I saw that nearly every one of Will Stancil's post on X, the Everything App, was flooded with memes featuring a caricature of a black man. Stranger still, the caricature meme was taken from an AI-generated cartoon, "The Will Stancil Show," made by another Stancil troll and prominent internet fascist. The meme has metastasized into dozens of different iterations and spawned parody songs. There is even a memecoin. Other right-wingers have taken to creating insane Stancil fashwave edits. To me, the campaign seemed to be an ironic charade pretending that Will Stancil is a Nazi. Not to discredit him but, as best I could tell, to appropriate his image and thereby rob him of agency. All of this to troll a nonprofit lawyer who lives in Minneapolis and who, it should be noted, has no elected office or power of any kind aside from his social media presence.

All activity online is a kind of performance. Even if your account is in your name, with your picture, you inevitably undergo a sort of caricaturization in the minds of other users. To the trolls, Stancil is just a character in their memes, "Will Stancil," who they remix into Nazi imagery, the same way that JB Pritzker, the real governor of Illinois, is a character that I remix into medieval Mongol imagery. I have photoshopped Pritzker into all sorts of fantastical situations—JB Pritzker as Genghis Khan or as as Napoleon Crossing the Alps. I have spent more time in Photoshop matching objects, moving layers, applying filters, and toggling between the Quick Selection Tool and the Object Selection Tool I have on many other hobbies over the last few years; more time than I would like to admit. The way you spend your days is the way you spend your life, and large chunks of my life have been spent creating fodder for the insatiable appetite of the internet.

You cannot help but feel a twinge of affection for, even ownership of, a subject when you've been engaged in this kind of extended online pantomime. If JB was no longer Governor—or if he vanished off the earth tomorrow—it would leave a lacuna in my life. The music would stop, the lights would come on, and the extended online masquerade that I have indulged in for the last 3 years would end. I navigate the internet using this persona. The communities I belong to and the people I interact with all know me as the Nomadic Warriors for Pritker guy. I may have an MFA, but my writing has never gotten a national journalist to give me a call—only my social accounts. Who would I be online without them, and by extension, without the public persona of JB himself? It would require a reorientation of how I conduct myself. These types of reorientations or re-inventions can be painful.

Watching the endless iterations of Stancil-derived memes, I can't help but feel I am looking at a distorted version of my own online activities. These are cruel jokes by cruel people, but, when you consider the way that they actually spend their days, it is no different from mine. They are engaged in the exact same activity that I am, on the same platform, likely using the same software. Given the how elaborate the "Will Stancil Show" is, the most prominent of them have probably spent significantly more time on Will Stancil memes than I have on JB Pritzker memes. It takes a long time to get text-to-video AI to do what you want, and even longer to edit together!

The point is, these trolls are exhibiting the same behavior that I do, only expressed through a different valence. This behavior seems to be an emergent phenomena that occurs in Twitter-like media. Both the Pritzker-curious socialists and the Stancil-trolling Nazis engage in the same memetic conversations and networked meta-references. But I would argue that, at the affective level, the two parties are closer still. I may like JB Pritzker and agree with his policies, they may claim to hate Stancil and want to be cruel to him, but spend all of that time trolling a subject and the cruelty eventually warps into something else. I won't call it love, because there is an ironic distance to it. It's rather like the way a very young boy will annoy a very young girl that they secretly like or have an interest in. It is a fascination that tempered and warped in its expression by taboo. They may mean to be ironic when they say Stancil is their "most beloved icon," but such phraseology nonetheless reveals a grain of truth among all of their bullshit, even if it's unintentional.

They express themselves this way, through this ironic fandom, because they are emotionally stunted. If Stancil were to delete all of his social accounts tomorrow the trolls may declare victory, but it would be a hollow one. Their movement would only move on to the next subject to abuse. They exist like nomads (ha), moving from abuse to abuse. It's all they can do when confronted with argument. This is because they cannot argue with liberal ideas on principal. Rather, they resort to trolling—a fascist rhetorical tactic. It remind me of Satre's description of anti-semites from his essay, Anti-Semite and Jew:

"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words... They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

Their endless provocations are a kind of bad-faith fandom, meant to intimidate Stancil so that he will stop accurately labeling them as Nazis. But there is also a fascination there. They cannot say outright that they like or admire Stancil, since, in the insular online world that they inhabit, he is the enemy and the enemy must be crushed. But they can veil their appreciation in irony, the way a little boy veils his fascinated attentions towards a little girl in annoyance. What fascinates the troll? Earlier in his essay, Satre writes:

We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension.

When they encounter a principled proponent of liberalism—that ideology so tolerant of contradictions; so tolerant of the truth—they react with a mixture of envy, admiration, and hatred. So, the harassment campaign reveals the fundamental emptiness of the ultra-right, what Satre called "the fear of oneself and of truth." They admire what they do not have. Furthermore, they admire what they understand is a necessary component of their project. The ultra-right troll is always in need of an external enemy. They must keep fighting. They must keep spewing darkness. Like the troll of legends, when the lights come on they turn back into stone.

NOTE: I reached out to Will Stancil to get his assessment of the situation. I will updated this newsletter if I hear back from him!