enjoy the decline!

outrage, affect, and cursed telegram channels (sorry)

Content note: This is a grim one - about rising fascism, anti-migrant racism, transphobia, homophobia, and generally the fascist threat. Sorry. I did give you a nice wedding post 2 weeks ago, so…

There is a channel on Telegram where a fascist broadcasts updates about small boats bringing migrants to the Kent coastline. Several times a day, he posts updates gathered from government data and his own observations - he stands on the coast and films lifeboats and border force boats as they come in, zooming in on migrants’ faces. His followers react dutifully to each message:

lifeboat inbound with about 50 (🤬 5)

Border Force boat packed with illegals (🤬 7)

More coming, today’s numbers will be high (🤬 4)

Here are today’s numbers. Relentless invasion!! (🤬 10)

When I first joined the channel for research, I was horrified about the posts themselves, but also curious about the 🤬-reacters. What does it feel like to open your phone to these messages, designed to make you furious, and then go and assert your 🤬 along with the crowd? Is it some kind of release? Does it make you feel better? Why make yourself furious on purpose multiple times a day, over and over, in the exact same way?

Then, of course, I thought about how I can sometimes use social media, and how it’s really not that different at all (in form, at least). What will make me furious today? Who’s going to be today’s main character? I’m not both-sidesing here. It’s obviously immeasurably worse to be a fascist. But the impulse to look at things we know will make us furious on purpose seems to be one we all have.

The impulse predates social media, too. My first boyfriend’s mother was the kind of woman who loved to talk about the things she hated. “Ooh, I can’t stand it!” she’d coo, with obvious relish. One of the things she, oooh, couldn’t stand - this is a small rural town in the early 00s, it doesn’t excuse it, but just for context - was gay people. Or rather, not gay people as such, but gay sex. Anal sex. BUM SEX. Oooh, she couldn’t stand it. Putting it… you know… UP THERE. She once declined renting a flat because it transpired the previous tenants had been a gay couple. “I just couldn’t stop thinking about them doing it EVERYWHERE,” she said. “Putting it… you know… up the… BUM… on the sofa, against the walls… oooh, I can’t stand it.”

As my dear thank-goodness-never-mother-in-law shows us, people having sex, or having a sexuality, or doing something we perceive to be incorrectly sexual or sexualised, is a huge magnet for this instinct to dwell upon our own sources of disgust and outrage. This is connected to the anti-migrant racism, of course: fascism sees both migrants and queer people as threats to the pure white family and nation. Back on Telegram, I also watch the channels where opponents of Drag Queen Story Time events have been ‘organising’ themselves. Unsurprisingly, there’s considerable overlap with the anti-migrant channels in terms of membership and style, although these ones are less coherent: amongst the posts from the more influential figures, updates from “on the ground” at protests outside libraries, there are random interludes from flat-earthers, people claiming to have secrets about Joe Biden, or people insisting we should all buy gold bullion.

In contrast to the more uniform 🤬 mood on the anti-migrant channels, the anti drag queen channels - which are, of course, against all forms of gender non-conformity, the distinction between drag performer, trans person, and random person with blue hair meaningless to them - have more variety of affect. Some members, who have more of a sense of optics, don’t want to dwell on the more flagrant queerphobia, preferring to stay within the slightly more guarded language of safeguarding, sexualisation, ‘appropriateness’. But some have no such restraint, throwing the word “degenerate” around like it’s 1937 and making the most distressing and violent accusations about queer people you can imagine, with a heady mix of racism and pure absurdity. The 🤮 react is most common here. Via shared posts, I even found a channel called ‘Enjoy the Decline’ where members lean into the notion of looking at what they love to hate, on the basis that if society is collapsing into postmodern queer degeneracy, they may as well enjoy the ride, which seems to mostly take the form of posting pictures and memes of people they find contemptible. A very online, 2020s approach to “Ooh, I can’t stand it!”.

Why am I in these channels, you may well be asking? In a trajectory that probably mirrors many of the channels’ sincere participants, I joined out of wanting to do something - in my case, to try and gain some insight for counter-organising. And I did get some (it was not difficult - they do not do opsec). But why am I still there? I like to know my enemy, and it’s helpful to understand the direction these groups are taking, especially when the mainstream media is still reporting that the anti drag protests are led by ‘concerned parents’. But there’s also part of me, like many of the sincere participants, which is grimly fascinated and hooked. How can people be like this, I think, as I scroll through the confused and barely coherent hatred. How can people be like this, they think, as they watch another blurry video of a blue-haired teenage protester they’ve been told is an antifa paedophile.

Again - I’m not both-sidesing this. Liberal doctrine would have us slip comfortingly into some kind of moral about us both being as bad as each other. I know that’s not true. But I do think it’s important to take notice when our psychological mechanisms are overlapping with the fascists’. I must remember that I can’t propel myself on “how can people be like this” alone. I can try to know my enemy’s tactics, but I can’t know his soul, and it probably wouldn’t help if I did. We don’t gain anything from staring just to frighten ourselves.

So - what can we actually learn from these horrible places? Why have I subjected you to a whole essay about them, only to say there’s no point looking? Partly, as I said, because I think they’re cautionary when thinking about the ways we propel ourselves emotionally. But also because I think there is one real, concrete thing to learn: counter-protest works.

Mostly, the emotional tone in these places is bullish: we will fight. We will win. But sometimes, people break ranks. Many of the Drag Queen Story Time protests over the summer have been poorly attended by the fascist side, and very well-attended by what one vlogger called ‘trantifa’ (an attempt at insulting queer antifascist protesters, which is actually a fucking cool name if you ask me). Most respond to this by claiming that ‘trantifa’ are paid state actors, in cahoots with the cops (oh buddy), or otherwise somehow not real people. But sometimes, enough people counter-protested, and effectively showed local support for the events, that it broke through and broke morale, for some members at least:

I don’t think we will win 😔😔🥺🥺

Just been on the Fascistbook page on this story and the comments are worrying as most seem to support this . I made a comment but seemed to be in a minority 😟

If most of the locals don’t mind these kind of events, what can we do about it? It’s like pushing water up a hill sometimes.

Convinced of their rightness, members of these groups seem to see no problem with wearing their emotions on their sleeves in public groups - be it 🤬, 🤮 or 😔. The most powerful of these is 😔 - that’s what will make people quietly slink away, decide it’s not really worth it, perhaps go back to their family and realise Telegram isn’t really doing it for them any more. And what provokes 😔 ? Showing up. Making them realise this is going to be harder than they think. That not everyone quietly agrees - that enough people disagree, audibly, that they will need to push water up a hill. That’s what I got from these channels - we’ve got to be the hill.