Since February 2023, artist, university lecturer, and internet culture writer Joshua Citarella has been conducting interviews with a wide array of subjects who have formed their politics out of internet subcultures. It would be a crude oversimplification to say their so-called “e-deologies” range far and wide across “the political spectrum,” as the real hallmark of an e-deology is not so much how right or left it is as its tendency to collect respective baroque idiosyncrasies and qualifications. These are not merely Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, or even socialists and libertarians. These are self-identified “pan-constitutional monarchists,” “antidemocratic transhumanists”, “anarcho-primitivist electoralists,” “Islamo-nationalists”, “agrarian voluntarists,” “eco-fascists,” and many more seemingly infinite permutations of boutique ideas.

Here are some excerpts from one such interviewee, anonymized by their screen name “PapaCoomer,” a “Third Positionist,” aka “fascist”:

How would you describe your politics or ideology?

Third Position.

How would you describe your politics or ideology?

Third Position.

Who are your biggest influences?

Hans Hermann Hoppe, James Mason, William Luther Pierce, and Mencius Moldbug.

When did you first learn about or start visiting online political communities?

2017.

Citarella interviews Zoomers, which explains why another one of his interviewees, a sixteen-year-old from Texas, can say the jobs of the not-too-distant future will be “guerrilla fighter, neoliberal slave, neoliberal master” with a straight face. This person told Citarella they’ve been visiting online communities since 2016. If they are to be believed, this means they were then nine years old, tops. And if they are to be believed, they have been “politically active” offline as well, though this is not expanded upon. They do not mention whether their mom had to drive them around.

To say that right-wing extremism and reactionary radicalization and, yes, even fascism are “on the rise” among American youth has to come with some context. Is it troubling? Certainly. Am I scared of Gen Z brownshirts beating down my door in the dead of night and interning me in the Bitcoin server camps? Not really, for a few reasons.

A few comments from our sweet-sixteen Texan:

How would you describe your politics or ideology?

Ideology is dead. I only work to collapse the current system so a new one can rise from the old’s ashes.

How would you describe your politics or ideology?

Third Position.

Who are your biggest influences?

Ted Kaczynski, Nick Land, James Mason.

And then there are the predictions, delivered with utmost confidence.

What changes do you want to see in the next ten years?

The collapse of the United States, mass awareness of the current global state, the rejection of neoliberal and Enlightenment ideals.

What changes do you want to see in the next forty years?

Collapse of the global system, return of agrarian lifestyle, a feasible solution to climate change.

Whether you find these replies comical or distressing, I wouldn’t put too much confidence in their longevity.

Our junior accelerationist wasn’t always an adherent of what they refer to as “anti- systemic thought.” They identified as a Marxist-Leninist in 2016 — when they were eight years old. They’ve bounced around a lot, saying, “I’ve been an anarchist, fascist, communist, etc.”

It’s just not very likely what you believe at sixteen will last into adulthood. Young people are pretty flighty, and there’s no way to predict where their impetuous passions will land them. Not only do they change their minds a lot, they change them drastically, which isn’t anything remarkable to anyone who remembers being a teen, caprice being a hallmark of youth. Take “J,” a twenty-two-year-old self-described “reactionary.” He was a Bernie Sanders supporter back in 2016. Or “R,” who identifies as an anarcho-communist, but was an eco-fascist in 2019 — when she was eleven.

Children and young adults are always trying on hats, experimenting with their beliefs and identities by cultivating the sort of narcissism of small differences that young people have always carved out for themselves, often by being antisocial and, more often, by being selectively social. After all, these online sub-sub-subcultures are a way for these kids to find friends just as much as a way for them to feel unique.

Still, it’s unlikely they’ll take to organizing, even within their own ranks. There’s a huge difference between the way Zoomers “find themselves” and the way those who came of age before them did it: they’re doing it online, anonymously and in secret, with no physical space to bring them together, and no danger of running into anyone they don’t want to talk to. Extremely online is the norm. It’s kind of hard do a Kristallnacht if you don’t, you know, hang out.

Even if they did take to social settings, going so far as to try to evangelize their peers, these highly literate theoretical junior fascists are going to encounter some stumbling blocks during any attempts at a recruitment drive. Whether jock, punk rocker, candidate for valedictorian, theater kid, stoner, or any other John Hughes cliché that never actually came close to representing how we saw ourselves or each other, adolescents would be baffled, roll their eyes, or at least smirk a little to encounter such a person. It’s not that every school didn’t have self-serious aspiring intellectuals, but they were only a few; they were always marginal, and they almost always matured and grew out of it.

Certainly, things have changed since the days of Myspace, but it’s still difficult to imagine one of Citarella’s sixteen-year-old e-deologues at a skate park, a party, a sporting event, or some other situation where they might be surrounded by peers, manic street preachers evangelizing their highly specific, incredibly niche political beliefs, complete with citations of dead German theorists, rallying their fellow adolescents with self-serious discussion.

You see, these children are nerds.

That isn’t to say nerds can’t be dangerous — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have been more rapaciously effective at concentrating wealth than any robber baron before them. Even liberal nerds like George Soros and Bill Gates have advanced some truly heinous neoliberal policies all over the world. But these kids can’t even vote yet, so they’re not very likely to depose our tech overlords and assume their thrones anytime soon, if any of them even wanted to do so, or would want to by the time they have the wherewithal to devise some insidious app.

The problem with being a fascist in America is that we’ve never had a very project-oriented state. Essentially, they face the same obstacle that socialists do: capital.

We don’t really build political institutions or vehicles for ambitious planned economies, much less something as ordered as an ethnic state. Modern America has always preferred exploitation to genocide and outright authoritarianism. And we tend to be passive actors in the genocides committed by other countries. Sure, we outsource it to proxy states by sabotaging their left-wing movements — for example, by arming Cold War Latin America and Israel, or doing business with the Nazis, as Prescott Bush did — but the truth remains that anyone claiming to be a fascist in America is a weird Europhile, mentally ill, or fifteen years old.

The idea of American fascism runs counter to capitalism. Don’t get me wrong: as far as contemporary states go, we’re probably top dog when it comes to the enabling of fascism abroad, and as far as developed countries go, our neoliberal structure is uniquely and exceptionally cruel, oppressive, and exploitative toward Americans themselves. But, if you’ll forgive the pedantry, you’re not going to roll out fascism in good old USA anytime soon for the same reason you’re not going to roll out socialism: neither has the institutions or base to challenge capitalism. Our “evil elite” is a different beast, and anyone trying to overthrow it has no means by which to do so. We have no militant labor power, and we have no storm troopers. Instead, we have the deep state and Amazon, and the Republican and Democratic “parties” — neither of which is an actual party with citizen members exercising any kind of democratic control.

Whether for the Hitler Youth or the Young Communist League, things are looking pretty bleak, which goes a long way toward explaining the nihilist, if not totally millenarian, leanings of these kiddie radicals. They really don’t seem to have much hope in politics. There are overtures to revolution, but it tends to be flip, and you really have to doubt their follow-through. Accelerationism seems to be pretty popular this season, but these aren’t really politics; they’re lowered expectations and shrinking dreams, the hope that maybe some sort of inevitable deus ex machina will get us out of this mess. As they get older, some of them foreclose on that too.

Let’s go back to J, the twenty-two-year-old nearly Bernie Bro turned self-identified “reactionary.”

He posts anonymously, of course, because he has a job, and he keeps multiple Instagram accounts to share reactionary content in case he gets flagged for something the algorithm learns to identify as hate speech, such as the Black Sun, a Nazi symbol popular with white supremacists.

J is not white, and he’s Hindu. So how to square the Black Sun with his own religion and racial designation? He doesn’t. He rarely seems to think it’s important. Just like the former troops that became American bikers or the Sex Pistols or Siouxsie Sioux, he seems to be attracted to the subversiveness of it.

He’s quick to say he has other online content he follows: fitness and exercise forums, cute animal videos on YouTube, and so on. So when he says, “If I wanted to describe myself as someone online, I would say I’m a reactionary,” he’s saying he’s formed an identity based on the social media he consumes, not the actions he takes, just like his white reactionary friends online who have no interest in drumming out their non-white compatriot. He makes it clear that while it’s possible for the reactionary internet (and the one political science class he took in college) to transform his worldview, he doesn’t have any plans to do anything about it, especially when his relationship to ideology is such a tenuous and mercurial part of his overall identity, which begs the question: Are you really a Nazi if cute animal videos are on par with your politics? And are you really a Nazi movement if you don’t even go outside and march?

J is smart and thoughtful enough to know that the “discourse” is a hobby. It requires no real-world engagement or activity, or even earnest belief. He’s just not serious about it; he grew out of that.

Even if they stick with it, even if capital trips up hard enough and the conditions become ripe, these kids aren’t really fascists. They’re bored, lonely, scared, and hopeless. They have nowhere to go, no one to be with, and nothing to do politically and, increasingly, socially. It’s always worth keeping in mind that most Zoomers aren’t thinking about ideology at all. Why would they be? As if the timeless, universal chaos of growing up wasn’t already enough — failing a test, suffering your first breakup, learning to drive, trying to fit in while also trying to stand out — the internet provides constant and welcome distractions from the dearth of possibility they’re convinced is set in stone.

That’s the true danger here, the true tragedy: a disaffection and atomization that precludes the political engagement necessary for a better world. All they can do is to try on silly, ugly hats.

Fascists? Not really. Not any more than their counterparts are Maoist-syndicalist-accelerationist-anarcho-Catholic-traditionalists. But the kids are most decidedly not alright, and it’s up to us to give them not just something to believe in, but something to do. I’ll admit it’s a pretty tall order these days, but I still have hope. What can I say? I’m an old romantic.