Who Goes Nazi? Brooklyn Edition
If youâre anything like me, a twenty-something Twitter leftist with an advanced degree in the humanities, you hate absolutely everyone around you and badly want to kill them. You live in a brownstone playground of Timorese food and adult coloring books, and you want to suicide bomb the L train but leave a note blaming it on manspreading or whatever, so people donât think youâre one of âthoseâ random mass murderers (the bad kind). You hate having to tell people at parties that you âwork in content,â and you hate the fact that they all also work in content. You hate that they all make content for outlets that are slightly cooler and more prestigious than the outlets you make content for. You hate that none of them have even fucked you for like thirteen months. You hate that you canât even hate them for the ways in which theyâre different to you, because there arenât any. But fear not! Thereâs one thing youâve got that nobody else does: you know that youâre definitely, 100% Not A Nazi.
But what about them? Imagine if the Nazis took over America and it was suddenly cool and prestigious to be a Nazi, and there were trendy Nazis on the TV the whole time, and they once again sold soap with slogans like âDove: The White Pride Soap for Hating QTBIPOC and Not Amplifying Their Voices.â But also donât imagine, because thatâs exactly whatâs happening.
This game was invented by Dorothy Thompson in her classic 1941 Harpers essay Who Goes Nazi?, in which she presciently pointed out that intellectuals are definitely more Nazi than aristocrats, but not nearly as Nazi as union leaders. But she set her essay at some dinner party in the Hamptons or wherever, and last time I went out there I went swimming in the sea and a wave hit me and I lost my bikini top and a bunch of bros in boat shoes started laughing and pointing at me in a way that despite my white privilege I still feel was somehow like imbued with racism, and then afterwards I just stayed inside for three weeks writing content and ordering groceries online, so the setting needs to be updated. Letâs look at your group DM. Which of these Twitter creatives who live in Brooklyn would go along with it and become a Nazi? (All of them.) And who never, ever would? (Me.)
Mr A isnât actually in your group DM, and youâve never encountered anyone like him irl, but you literally canât stop talking about him, so he gets included anyway. Mr A is a short ugly loser, and heâs already a Nazi. He doesnât even live in Brooklyn, he lives in his motherâs basement, and eats chicken tenders, and he doesnât get laid, but in a different way to the way you donât get laid, which has to do with patriarchy. Mr A is a Pizzagate. Mr A is a Gamergate. Mr A is a segregationist. Mr A opposes the reforms of the Emperor Diocletian (284-305). Mr A wonât shut up about the superiority of a âfree silverâ bimetallic monetary system over gold specie, and keeps on talking about the âgold shillsâ in a way that doesnât really make sense until you realize that your own name is Goldschmidt, and yeah, he doesnât really care about expansionary monetary policy at all, heâs talking about the Jews, and specifically you. Mr A is basically a pathetic worm whose life sucks and nobody likes him, but also he represents the whole of the repressive forces of society and heâs at the top of the social hierarchy. Everyone youâve ever met is actually Mr A, wearing various masks. He is the source of all your problems. He must be killed, and once we kill him, we need to find more people like him to be the source of any problems we have left over.
Mr B is in your group DM, but you also have a separate group DM with everyone else except Mr B in it. He keeps trying so hard to be nice, and says stuff like âso how is everyoneâs day todayâ with a smiley emoji, and when youâre talking to him you get this airless feeling like youâre about to suffocate in his treacly good-natured presence. Every time you see Mr B at a party youâre afraid that heâs going to blurt out that he loves you, but you canât keep your distance too much because heâs so clearly autistic, and you donât want to be ableist. Anyway once in the group DM he said that while he obviously thought divining for water with Y-shaped copper rods was good and important and valid, he didnât understand what it had to do with socialism. That made everything better, because clearly heâs a Nazi. The whole group DM expended hours of emotional labor educating him about how dowsing is part of LGBTQ+ culture and how his dismissive bro-y attitude was reactionary and gross, and eventually he posted a video of himself crying and begging for forgiveness and promising to do better, because you guys were the only friends he had. This was classic white fragility, but in the end you let him stay. You just have the other DM now, where you make fun of him and itâs ok, because if the Nazis came and he had license to start being cruel and sadistic to other people, heâd definitely do it.
Ms C is one of those women who doesnât like other women, and you know this about her because you canât fucking stand the bitch. Plus she says stuff thatâs really not ok, even though it costs nothing to have empathy and be kind. Youâve personally heard her use the D-word, the H-slur, and the L-pejorative, all while laughing and holding a glass of white wine by the stem, like she doesnât need to consider the harm this does to others, just because sheâs âfunnyâ and âan artist.â Sheâs the Cool Chick. She makes nude self-portraits (the bad, skinny kind), and sheâd throw you under the bus in a second for male attention and approval. Sheâd definitely go Nazi. But the worst thing about her is that she has the impudence to be bisexual and Asian, which makes it really hard to call her out. But then you realized that all Asian people are collectively responsible for the long history of anti-Blackness and misogynoir in their communities, and youâre thinking of holding her collectively responsible for the Rape of Nanking too, once youâre certain sheâs a sushi Asian and not the dim sum kind.
Ms Dâs boyfriend works in finance, or like accountancy or something, or I think I heard he was a musician? Maybe a drummer or possibly he used to bartend at a place where they had live music. Anyway they definitely have vanilla cishet sex in the missionary position and you canât stop thinking about it, his body, her body, naked, moving, breathing, together, almost silent, tender, disgusting. She says sheâs a socialist but doesnât devote every minute of her waking life to getting mad about people online. This means sheâs just vaguely following a trend, and if the trend were being a Nazi (which it is), sheâd be a Nazi (which she therefore is). You canât imagine yourself actually hitting her but itâd definitely be punching up to maybe poison her food?
Mr E used to be a comrade, but then he did a tweet that got 38.6k RTâs and now heâs moved to Los Angeles to spend his whole time in writersâ rooms. Last you heard he was pitching an animated show for adults about a snail with borderline personality disorder. It hasnât even been greenlit yet, but youâre already thinking about all the ways in which it will be a missed opportunity and do harm and perpetuate tropes. Mr E will definitely turn out to have been a Nazi, and then you can start an anonymous petition to get the show cancelled so he has to move back to New York. Once heâs back you can send him a long email about how much it sucks his career burned out and how (even though you wonât say it in public) sometimes people do actually take the social-justice thing too far. That way heâll be a comrade again, which is good, because we believe in rehabilitating people who have a genuine change of heart.
Mr F probably thinks heâs better than you. Heâs a union organizer. So are you (you added â#Unionizeâ to your Twitter name), but his union stuff involves workers who arenât in tech, content, or grad school, and he probably thinks that makes him more in touch with âthe real workers,â who he probably thinks are just a bunch of cis white males in a factory, who are probably all racist and probably have thick, heavy dicks that intrude on your mind in a kinda #MeToo way a lot of the time. He talks about class, and you agree that class is important because youâre not a lib (you support Bernie, you just want him to Do Better). But from the way he says it youâre certain he doesnât acknowledge all he/him lesbians as part of the working class. Heâs trying to save a tiny sector of the workers from a necessary and important socio-economic shift that will impoverish them and make their lives worse, and thatâs what being a Nazi is. This is why his union needs to stop dragging their heels, change all of their rules and priorities, and let you get him fired.
Ms G (me) will never go Nazi, because she is beautiful and kind and pure, and has all the good opinions instead of the bad ones. Because of this sheâs allowed to do things that other people canât do. She can totally fail to understand what having an authoritarian personality actually means, and construct a version of the Who Goes Nazi? essay in which the people who go Nazi are just people who are already right wing, having confused politics with personality, probably because she herself has no personality other than her politics. She can minimize, ignore, or even encourage the infliction of actual suffering when it happens to the wrong kind of people. She can write that ânothing that terrible has really happenedâ since the publication of Mark Fisherâs Exiting the Vampire Castle, even though Mark Fisher himself is mysteriously not around to appreciate that fact. She can do some shit with threatening to leak an unedited draft that I donât even want to go into. She knows that the Nazis donât come promising hatred but promising to be your friend, but itâs ok because she doesnât really have any friends, just mufos. Sheâs doing great. Sheâs building a better, kinder world. She will never, ever be the Nazis.
