As of late, I’ve noticed that both sides of the political spectrum are making bad faith semantic arguments as to what the true nature of their ideologies are. For the left, I’ve heard people who support Antifa, who call Antifa tactics and actions “fascist”, say that “Antifa means AntiFascist, which is by definition against fascism, which means antifa cannot be fascist”. Likewise on the right, the term “woke right” has come into being from James Lindsay, as a way to describe rightwingers who are behaving like woke activists, namely by attempting to cancel people for saying things they don’t like, purity spirals, and forcing people into struggle sessions when they say/do something that people on the woke right do not support. Commentators such as Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), state more or less “the woke right cannot exist, because woke is a term used to describe leftwing ideology and behavior, and therefore the woke right cannot exist). I find it interesting that both sides are acting totalitarian in this manner, in the exact same way, attempting to narrative control through semantic overload.
It’s clear that the arguments from either side against their semantic challenge comes from a bad faith attempt to control the perception of their side. Even though Antifa activists literally act like Mussolini’s brownshirts, or Hitler’s blackshirts, they deny any relation due to a coy definition. They might as well say “We are the good guys because our side is called ‘The Good Guys’, and by definition, ‘The Good Guys’ are the good guys”. It’s circular reasoning, and is inherently a logical fallacy. The cognitive dissonance which originates this line of thinking likely has to do with some form of confirmation bias; The Antifa activists who are harming those they disagree with believe that their opponents deserve the harm, due to the opposition to what the activists believe is inherently good and just. To the Antifa activists, the ends justify the means, and therefore they can act with totalitarian impunity, and harm those they disagree with, because they are actually harming fascists by definition (everyone who opposes them is a fascist). This should be chilling to anyone, as it’s this line of thinking that opens the doors to the worst atrocities to be committed, especially if these people are to ever gain power.
The woke right is a similar issue, however, as of now, the woke right is not overtly as violent as the Antifa activists. However, the semantic control over woke right, and the fact that the right wing is beginning to act woke, means that the right wing is not too far behind the left in terms of totalitarianism and political violence. The right has adopted numerous nostrums in order to tribalize themselves from the leftwing, which is essentially the foundation of a new Hegalian dialectic. The rightwing engaging in struggle sessions, purity spirals, and their own cancellations, makes them no different in practice to the leftwing. What they’re ultimately advocating for is the same formulation of tyranny that the leftwing wants. The right would just prefer that the tyranny be used against things they don’t like, rather than against them.
This has more or less confirmed things I have said in previous musings, that people have a psychopathic desire for power, and they chillingly build their own guillotines.