Introduction: Fascist Worldmaking

Metapolitics

White supremacist movements have long weaponized popular culture. The second Ku Klux Klan wave started as a fan response to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), and the Klan propagated itself throughout the 1920s with books, music, plays, and even a baseball team.20 Many theorists have examined how German Nazis and Italian fascists aestheticized violence while presenting their order as a monumental spectacle.21 Hitler’s fulminations against an allegedly Jewish-controlled culture industry inspired Rockwell and his successors in the White Power movement to critique mass media for promoting what they saw as racial degeneracy, something they hoped to counteract with an alternative culture extolling white purity’s virtues.22 White Power activists have pursued this project through Nazi-themed punk, metal, and folk acts, as well as through online forums where they debate interpretations of popular media.23

The alt-right believes that, as Andrew Breitbart put it, “politics is downstream from culture.”24 Alt-right figures such as Spencer borrowed the concept of “metapolitics” from the reactionary Gramscians of the French New Right.25 Through metapolitics, they hope to undermine liberal hegemony by using cultural countermessaging to promote white identitarianism’s pre-political assumptions. Policy changes will follow, they claim, once they have cultivated fascist attitudes in white people through right-wing media manipulation.

These ideas reflect the influence of British fascist Jonathan Bowden, who believed that mass-cultural forms such as science fiction novels, fantasy epics, and superhero comics contain subtexts that subvert egalitarianism’s official dogma. In a speech republished as “Pulp Fascism,” Bowden argues that the protagonist in popular narratives is often a Schmittian sovereign who uses his exceptional power to smash his subhuman foes.26 Bowden even draws inspiration from Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972), a metafictional narrative that imagines the novel Adolf Hitler would have published if he had become a science fiction novelist after emigrating to the United States in 1919. Anticipating the far-right themes explored in this book, Spinrad’s novel ends with a “Master Race” of “superhuman” clones blasting off into space to colonize other planets after all Earth’s genetically inferior populations have been exterminated.27 Spinrad intended the novel’s over-the-top genocidal themes as an attack on the racism and militarism implicit in many science fiction classics, but the author was disturbed to discover the book was recommended by the American Nazi Party.28 Bowden joins a long line of fascists who find value in Spinrad’s hyperbolic sendup of their creed. As Bowden suggests, “fantasy enables certain people to have an irony bypass.”29 Using these strategies, the alt-right reclaims for itself the reactionary figures satirized or villainized in speculative genres. In other words, fascists figured out the subversion and containment model, i.e., the critical notion that orthodoxy must reproduce heretical ideas even if only to negate them.30

The alt-right must be understood as an interpretive project as well as a political movement. Science fiction, as Samuel R. Delany tells us, takes place in the subjunctive, detailing “events that have not happened.”31 For example, this includes “predictive tales” covering “events that might happen” and “cautionary dystopias” featuring “events that have not happened yet.”32 Building on this argument, Steven Shaviro shows that science fiction sets up “thought experiments” that need never happen but nevertheless tell us about what could happen.33 We might go even further to suggest that science fiction often leaves us uncertain about how we should interpret the relationship between the possible future and the actual present. A science fiction narrative might be read simultaneously as blueprint, warning, forecast, wish-dream, and counterfactual. Our critical understanding of science fiction relies on what might be called speculative indeterminacy, the unresolvable tensions between multiple forms of futurity.

The alt-right, however, reads science fiction as an imperative, dictating events that must happen or must not happen. As such, the central interpretive problem for the alt-right is whether a work of science fiction promotes Aryan interests by commanding white audiences to preserve and improve the race. Fascists thereby strip science fiction of its speculative indeterminacy. While most science fiction critics interpret the genre as experimenting freely with manifold new possibilities, the alt-right believes that science fiction compels white people to realize the inner potential already endowed to them by biological and cultural evolution.

Science fiction’s attempts at autocritique prove uniquely vulnerable to this approach. Science fiction creators including not only Spinrad but also Frank Herbert, Alan Moore, and Paul Verhoeven have often summoned the specter of fascism only to exorcise it. These narratives invite audiences to take pleasure in reactionary power fantasies drawn from the genre’s history before revealing to them that they have inadvertently joined the devil’s party. Alt-right reading protocols foreshorten this critique, highlighting the text’s invocation of fascist enjoyment while omitting the moment of critical estrangement that would banish those authoritarian possibilities. They see the dystopia as a political program.

But I want to argue that speculation serves a more fundamental purpose for the alt-right. The alt-right understands metapolitics as a form of speculative worldmaking that allows them to decide not only which worlds are conceivable but also who has the power to imagine other worlds in the first place. Greg Johnson, editor-in-chief at the alt-right publisher Counter-Currents, suggests that politics is the “art of the possible,” but metapolitics changes “people’s view of possibility” by altering their “basic ideas about how the world works and about who they are.”34 Spencer, quoting the same folk definition of politics, reaffirms Johnson’s point by saying that “the art of the impossible is exactly the reason our movement should exist.”35 This is why the alt-right is drawn to speculative genres. Metapolitics seeks to transform white nationalism from an unthinkable possibility to an inevitable future.

Jason Reza Jorjani, who cofounded the AltRight Corporation with Spencer and Arktos publisher Daniel Friberg, developed this notion further in his reflections on authority. Jorjani argues that a small elite of “authors” possess the ability to reshape “the ‘worldhood’ of our world at the most fundamental level, namely the level of the folklore that conditions the substratum of the collective and personal unconscious.”36 Unlike the mainstream politicians and influencers who merely pretend to have power, authors have phenomenal “authority to define the limits of [their] world, or at least to play a significant role in defining those parameters that determine what is or is not ‘possible.’”37 Jorjani asserts that the masses will never participate in this process of worldmaking because not everyone “deserves a future,” and indeed he predicts that most people will be subjugated or exterminated to make way for Nietzschean supermen who will use post-Singularity technologies to rewrite existence as they please.38 Through metapolitical authorship, the alt-right opens up new potential futures for powerful white people while shutting them down for everything else.

Metapolitics can best be explained through the analytic framework developed by Mark Jerng. He argues that race and genre operate at the level of modal imagination, a faculty that allows people to make prospective predictions about what might happen as well as retrospective judgments about how things could have gone otherwise.39 Through modal imagination we speculate on what is probable, possible, and impossible, and without it we couldn’t conceive of anything that is not present in the immediate moment.40 Race and genre structure our expectations about the world, interacting with one another in complex ways. Jerng argues that genres manipulate racialized meanings when “establishing situations and justifying actions while making others seem less possible or realizable.”41 At the same time, “race shapes genre” because it “composes expectations for what the world might look like and activates rules for knowing the world.”42 When the alt-right uses science fiction as a tool to change metapolitics, they intervene in the racialized worldview that constitutes the grounds for determining what is politically or socially possible.

I want to underscore here that I do not simply mean that alt-right adherents use science fictional narratives to paint what they see as attractive pictures of their ethnically cleansed utopias.43 Although they certainly do that, much more is going on here. My argument is that the alt-right seizes upon speculative genres to dictate who has the right to speculate in the first place.

The alt-right asserts ownership over science fiction because they think white people maintain a monopoly on modal imagination. Nonwhite people, they suggest, dwell in a state of modal impoverishment, cut off from possibility. The alt-right construes nonwhite people as insensitive to the consequences of their own actions and unable to envisage anything other than what already exists. Even more fundamentally, the alt-right asserts that there is nothing more to nonwhite people than what they have already become. According to the fascists, only white people may change, evolve, or open onto new possibilities. The myth of modal impoverishment insinuates that nonwhite people have no place in either the science fiction field or the futures that it conjures. We see the alt-right trying to police the boundaries of science fiction every time they protest when a person of color is cast in a genre film. It is not simply that the alt-right hates diversity in cinema: they’re offended by the idea that nonwhite people might exist in other possible worlds. The fact that a renaissance of Afrofuturist and otherwise antiracist science fiction has disproven the alt-right’s exclusive claim to the future only makes them more eager to colonize the genre for themselves.

Through metapolitical activism, the alt-right strives to redefine the public’s fundamental ideas about the world, including its sense of time and temporality. Only white people, we are told, retain the future-oriented capacities and dispositions required to make progress. They argue that whiteness enables men to delay gratification in order to plan and save.44 Whiteness, they say, is also the force that propels white men to engage in speculative ventures that require foresight, vision, and a tolerance for entrepreneurial risk.45 We hear that whiteness expands the scope of its members’ thoughts and actions, allowing them to operate on a grand scale in both space and time.46 White blood is touted as the font of innovation, creating every ingenious novelty and invention that built the modern world.47

Above all, whiteness appears as an inborn tendency to transcend the indexical present. For the alt-right, whiteness represents a matrix of possibilities more important than any actual accomplishments the white race may have already achieved. Before killing nine Black people at a church in Charleston, Dylann Roof wrote in his journal, “I am not fighting for what White people are, but for what we have the potential to be.”48 Whiteness appears as consubstantial with speculative futurity.

We can therefore understand speculative whiteness as an ideological complex that promotes the following series of mutually reinforcing myths: (1) white people maintain a unique aptitude for innovative speculation, (2) speculative imagination is absent or deficient in nonwhite populations, (3) whiteness possesses a speculative value only realizable in a high-tech fascist future, (4) science fiction and other speculative genres are inherently white, and (5) white people become aware of their potential by seeing it manifested in speculative narratives.

Although the alt-right provides a major focal point for this book, my goal is to show that speculative whiteness is a persistent theme in science fiction culture and the broader far-right movement. In the first chapter, I will explore how science fiction culture has often suggested that some people are genetically predisposed toward future-orientation and long-term thinking, a notion that is racialized in libertarian and fascist thought. White elites often appear in right-wing narratives as mutants, aliens, and other futuristic beings who are beset by the backward masses. In the next chapter, I will consider how the alt-right and its forebears equated speculative risk-taking with white masculinity. Drawing on De Witt Douglas Kilgore, I show that white nationalists imagined space exploration as the next step in European settler-colonial Manifest Destiny, allowing white men to steel themselves toward danger while transcending earthly limits.49 Finally, I offer a brief glance at antifascist science fiction narratives that challenge speculative whiteness. Over the course of this study, I shall show the stories told in the name of speculative whiteness are fundamentally incoherent. Fascist science fictions would have us believe that revolutionary historical changes can emerge from a white racial essence that remains forever ahistorical and invariant.50 By laying bare these irresolvable inconsistencies in speculative whiteness, this book hopes to help wrest the speculative from those who would limit it to the service of oppression.

Speculative whiteness has deep roots in racist thought. Whiteness has often reserved for itself “a capacity to know and control the future.”51 One of the earlier examples of speculative whiteness in scientific racism was formulated in 1901 by Edward Ross, an influential nativist and eugenicist who argued that some races have more “foresight” than others.52 Ross decomposed foresight into two interconnected elements that we will see throughout this study: “a lively imagination of remote experiences to come” and “self-control that can deny present cravings, or resist temptation in favor of the thrifty course recommended by reason.”53 Alleged differences in foresight prompted Ross to divide populations into “the provident races,” who are motivated by “ideas,” and the “impulsivists,” who “remain absorbed in sensations.”54 According to Ross, the disciplined imagination of white people allows them to build a more prosperous economic future while Asian and Indigenous peoples “live from hand to mouth taking no thought of the morrow.”55

Speculative whiteness is by no means limited to fascist ideologues, but it proved paramount in postwar white nationalism. No slogan is more important to the movement than David Lane’s Fourteen Words—“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children”—but many other racists have laid claim to the future as well.56 Spencer provoked outrage by quoting the Hitler Youth’s song in Cabaret: “tomorrow belongs to us.”57 Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto defines his political tendency as “white people who have decided to have a future again.” He compares the white response to “demographic decline” with the science fiction scenario in which people who have heard reports of an earthbound asteroid give themselves over to “short-term hedonism,” partying like there’s no tomorrow.58 Falling white birthrates, he suggests, mean the end of the future.

The alt-right’s ontology commits whiteness to the future even as it confines nonwhite people to the past or present. White nationalist literature posits that Jews follow a mechanical causality whose strict determinism prevents them from making the daring leaps into the future.59 Muslims supposedly represent a recrudescence of a medieval past.60 Racists cast Asians as imitators, capable of maintaining white civilization but never creating anything new.61 Black and Indigenous people allegedly exist outside of historical time.62 Often we’re told that nonwhite populations obey present-oriented appetites, preventing them from ever thinking beyond their immediate circumstances.63 If whiteness in racist discourse endows European-descended people with the ability to inhabit a wide array of possible futures, its absence consigns other races to a dwindling range of possibilities.64

Fight for the Future

Knowing how often the right yearns for the past, it may seem strange that some reactionaries look to the future. When reactionaries feel a nostalgic desire for lost hierarchies, they tend to call up hazy conceptions of medieval Europe or classical antiquity, which they depict using images drawn from fantasy and related genres.65 Outside of eschatology, the future appears in many right-wing visions as a decline from these purported golden ages. Glib reactionaries invoke 1984, Brave New World, or The Matrix to emphasize how far they think society has fallen. White nationalists have authored dystopian novels featuring tyrannical governments dedicated to enforcing multiculturalism and political correctness, a dismal subgenre best known for William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978) that also includes Ward Kendall’s Hold Back This Day (1999) and William Wilson’s Utopia X (2004).66

But fascists have always been willing to embrace the most revolutionary forms of modernism and modernization so long as they can be made to secure a future that strengthens the powers of the privileged.67 Italian fascism drew early inspiration and adherents from the Futurist avant-garde, while Nazi Germany worshipped in the cult of the engineer.68 Even when the fascists were not promising technoscientific marvels, they claimed to represent what Roger Griffin calls “‘a sense of a beginning,’ the mood of standing on the threshold of a new world.”69

Alt-right science fiction may also seem unlikely because we normally think of anti-racist authors such as Octavia Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin when we think of science fiction, but this critical consensus results from a long political struggle within science fiction culture. As andré m. carrington shows in Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, science fiction was widely presumed white for much of its history. The science fiction field, he observes, was characterized by “both the overrepresentation of White people among the ranks of SF authors and the overrepresentation of White people’s experiences within SF texts.”70 During recent controversies such as Racefail 09, science fiction writers critiqued the field’s racism.71 But, as Isiah Lavender III notes, despite a flurry of antiracist academic conferences and BIPOC-authored anthologies, the white problem persists in science fiction fandom and scholarly culture.72 Others have detailed white supremacy’s hold on other speculative genres such as fantasy, as well.73

These liberatory movements in the field have coincided with a deep, right-wing tendency in the genre. As David Forbes has argued, science fiction’s family tree includes a line of reactionary science fiction running from Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle to the latest Baen military science fiction paperback.74 Even science fiction’s contemporary canon sometimes lends itself to this trend. David M. Higgins demonstrates that science fiction informed the alt-right’s sense of victimhood by presenting “reverse colonization” narratives in which imperial powers oppress white men.75

Throughout these speculative imaginings, though, the alt-right maintains a complicated relationship with science fiction culture. Some critics who follow Darko Suvin in defining science fiction as progressive treat the genre’s reactionary elements as inessential holdovers from the pulp tradition.76 Aaron Santesso is one of the few scholars advocating for the opposing position. He argues that science fiction is plagued by fascist tropes—e.g., militaristic supermen saving futuristic utopias from biologically inferior invaders—that continually reassert themselves as right-wing in otherwise apparently progressive texts.77 This work is very useful, but it’s worth stressing that even reactionary narrative conventions can be resignified to take on other political valences. Furthermore, we should emphasize along with Santesso science fiction’s ideological “diversity.”78 Its history contains both Madole and the fans who met his Animist Party proposal with skepticism. Science fiction fandom has always been fractious. Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr., may have dominated early science fiction while promoting notoriously right-wing views, but the field also included countervailing influences such as the Futurians, a circle of science fiction authors with communist connections.79

However, before we absolve science fiction, we should remember that, even among the Futurians, James Blish liked to provoke Trotskyist Judith Merril by claiming to be a “book fascist” sympathetic to fascism in theory if not practice.80 Science fiction has never been innocent of fascism. I do not want to cede science fiction to the white nationalists, but I also do not want to downplay science fiction culture’s complicity by treating right-wing extremists as mere interlopers who arrived late to pervert the genre by imposing their own agenda on it.

But if we reject genre essentialism, we still need to explain why some genres lend themselves to fascist appropriations while others do not. National Socialist Black Metal quickly became a cottage industry, but white power rap remains a novelty. Each genre is a terrain of struggle, shaped and reshaped through political interventions, but not all battlefields offer every side the same strategic advantages. Riven by political contradictions, science fiction includes racist, sexist, and elitist formations as well as critical and egalitarian ones. The alt-right did not project speculative whiteness onto science fiction: it pieced it together out of components already found within the genre.

This reconfirms Stuart Hall’s argument that the radical right does not invent itself out of whole cloth: it “takes the elements which are already constructed into place, dismantles them, reconstitutes them into a new logic, and articulates the space in a new way, polarizing it to the right.”81 Here the alt-right did more than simply affirm the reactionary aspects of science fiction while negating its emancipatory dimensions. Even among commentators on the alt-right, this kind of selective interpretation comes off as crude and unconvincing.82 Instead, the alt-right has imaginatively reconfigured science fiction by positioning the genre’s reactionary impulse as the motive force driving its progressive elements forward. They believe that white supremacy is the source of science fiction’s utopian aspirations.

White supremacist Frank Raymond provides the most systematic articulation of this idea in his science fiction novel Sweet Dreams and Terror Cells. Raymond argues that people of color are hampered by what he calls the “energy conservation constraint,” an innate tendency to be satisfied once immediate biological needs are met.83 According to Raymond, this leaves people of color with no inclination to spend time on imaginative play or technoscientific innovation. Raymond contrasts this racialized condition with the Caucasian mind that stretches “out into the unknown, breaking free from the hard ground of the here-and-now practicality and harsh reality of the concrete of the street and the demands of the belly.”84 Raymond likes to quote Goethe’s Faust to describe this aspect of the white spirit: “at what is vast and mystical we thrill.”85 This is a mind that explores not only reality but also possible worlds in fantasy, science fiction, and horror.86 Only white people are capable of creating science fiction, Raymond asserts, because the white mind alone possesses an imagination that strains to escape “from the only reality that one’s eyes saw and one’s ears heard.”87 He sets out to prove this through hundreds of pages of praise-singing to whiteness, the sole race that Raymond believes could have created Frankenstein, the Harry Potter series, The Hobbit, the Earthsea series, Dune, “The Sandkings,” and “Monster Mash.”

Raymond offers several possible explanations for this perceived racial difference. Echoing a long tradition of white nationalist thought, Raymond maintains that the arctic climate of northern Europe selected for the long-term planning associated with food storage and shelter during the winter.88 However, Raymond argues that inherited prudence does not explain white people’s innate love for science fiction.89 He feels there is something otherworldly about white people, who seem at ease with alternate dimensions, time travel, and universes where time runs at different speeds. Raymond speculates that beings from another planet, habituated to traveling between parallel worlds, passed this yearning to transcend reality down to white humans after mixing with select hominids.90 He concludes that white people invent science fiction stories because their homeland resides in a different space-time continuum. The idea that white elites are visitors from the future pervades both classic science fiction and far-right speculation.

Genealogies of the Alt-Right

A complete history of the alt-right is beyond the scope of this study, but we can understand the fascist resurgence of the 2010s by placing it in the context of a period characterized by economic stagnation, political paralysis, imperial decline, and cultural exhaustion. This decade produced a recruiting pool of young white men who were internet-obsessed, overeducated, and unhappy with their dwindling prospects in the wake of the financial meltdown.91 Some of them tried to break this impasse through involvement in Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous, or the Ron Paul Revolution, only to see these movements apparently defeated. They felt trapped in an intolerant present with no future ahead of them.92

Under these circumstances they could have just as easily broken for the left, but they were invested with a socially conditioned sense of entitlement that pulled them to the right. Many alt-right partisans began as aspirants for the professional-managerial class but slipped into less prestigious career tracks. Burdened with what I have called the “spoiled cultural capital” of their unrewarded pedigree, training, and credentials, they felt robbed of the chance to exercise their full potential.93 They were the gifted white boys who, having been promised greatness, came to fetishize this unrealized aptitude as a racial endowment.

Although many alt-right recruits were initially sympathetic to mainstream right-wing ideologies, some felt that the neoconservative-neoliberal project of universalizing liberal capitalist democracy was doomed to failure because it attempted to impose an inherently white system on racial populations unsuited to it.94 Others simply dropped their professed commitments to economic or political liberty to adopt an unapologetic authoritarianism. At the same time, we shouldn’t think of the alt-right as a clean break with the mainstream right: there’s always been overlap between respectable conservatives, fringe ultraconservatives, and right-wing extremists.95 Nevertheless, the alt-right still differs from the GOP’s reformist line insofar as it calls for a revolutionary program to overthrow existing governments and implement a white ethnostate or imperium that would better protect hierarchies of race, class, religion, and gender.96

The alt-right’s temporal orientation reflects these revolutionary attitudes. Emma Planinc argues that alt-right hopes to disprove liberal democracy’s triumphalist “end of history” narrative by inaugurating a “regenerated future” in which superhuman elites rule unhampered by egalitarianism or liberal humanism.97 Alexandra Minna Stern describes the alt-right as a project to take white people “back to the future,” invoking a paradoxical temporality that rejects linear notions of time as a product of progressive ideology.98 Because many on the alt-right believe that history moves in cycles and great men can revive ancient archetypes as if no time has passed, they see no contradiction between combining archaic and futuristic elements to make “archeofuturism.”99 Alt-right partisans seek to escape from the current degenerate age and initiate a qualitatively different epoch characterized by both a resurrection of traditional principles and a renaissance of technoscientific innovation.

We might think of the alt-right as regrounding conservative ideas about the future in blood and soil. Melinda Cooper shows that the right turns on a politics of speculative futurity: neoliberals anticipate innovations made possible by speculative finance, neoconservatives forestall emergent threats through preemptive warfare, and evangelicals await the hope embodied in the fetal subject.100 Each of these future orientations depend on a faith that can risk everything because it believes in pledges made by the free market, the American empire, and God almighty. The alt-right evokes the same anticipatory affects found in GOP politics—techno-optimism, xenophobic paranoia, solicitude for the unborn—but it places its trust instead in the promissory value of the white race.

The alt-right’s dreams of unspent potential are clearly framed in generic terms. Spencer speculates that all the “bad-ass men” of the white race who may be imprisoned, opioid-addicted, suicidal, and alcoholic now would’ve achieved greatness if they’d been given a Star Trek–like space program to motivate them.101 The alt-right converts mediated their grievances through the temporal forms of repetition and variation that have characterized the mass cultural genre system since its inception.102 Mass cultural media promise familiar novelties: a superhero launches into new adventures even as he remains essentially the same character inhabiting a recognizably similar world.103 By the same token, fascism portrays the white race as the unchanging protagonist of history even as it ushers in a radically renovated future. The alt-right came to see the world as if governed by a media franchise’s canon, possessing a fundamental ethnoracial continuity running underneath every historical difference.

The alt-right therefore has no desire to see a fundamental rupture with present-day identities or hierarchies. They follow the reactionary’s motto set forth in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”104 Spencer articulated the metaphysical premises of this historical perspective in his Nietzschean slogan, “become who we are.”105 Unable to countenance real revolution, the alt-right sees tomorrow as the unfolding of possibilities already latent within the white race. For white nationalists, the future is already here.

Notes

1. 1. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 72–87. See also Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1999), 418–20, 524.

2. 2. Coogan, Dreamer, 419; “Animalist [sic] Party,” Fancyclopedia 3, July 6, 2022, https://fancyclopedia.org/Animalist_Party; James H. Madole, “New Party for Animals or Something,” Startling Stories 13, no. 3 (Spring 1946), 106, https://archive.org/details/StartlingStoriesV13N031946Spring/page/n105/mode/2up.

3. 3. James H. Madole, “‘The New Atlantis’: A Blueprint for an Aryan ‘Garden of Eden’ in North America (Part IX),” in Kerry Bolton, Phoenix Rising: The Epic Saga of James H. Madole (Paraparaumu Beach, New Zealand: Renaissance Press, 2001), 37. This publication was consulted in the Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections, Michigan State University Libraries.

4. 4. James H. Madole, “‘The New Atlantis’: A Blueprint for an Aryan ‘Garden of Eden’ in North America (Part II),” in Kerry Bolton, Phoenix Rising: The Epic Saga of James H. Madole (Paraparaumu Beach, New Zealand: Renaissance Press, 2001), Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections, Michigan State University Libraries, 16.

5. 5. James H. Madole, qtd in Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 114.

6. 6. James H. Madole qtd in Coogan, Dreamer, 418.

7. 7. Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 72.

8. 8. Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson), “Actual quote, not that it will matter: ‘The screamers on AltRight who love Trump are mostly childless single men who masturbate to anime,’” Twitter, January 19, 2016, 5:32 p.m., https://twitter.com/therickwilson/status/689621554636984320?lang=en.

9. 9. Lynzee Loveridge, “Otaku on the Receiving End of GOP Strategist’s Trump Supporter Insult,” Anime News Network, January 20, 2016, https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2016-01-20/otaku-on-the-receiving-end-of-gop-strategist-trump-supporter-insult/.97755.

10. 10. Jordan S. Carroll, “Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 19, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/race-consciousness-fascism-and-frank-herberts-dune/.

11. 11. Vegas Tenold, Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America (New York: Nation Books, 2018).

12. 12. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See Jordan S. Carroll, “The Politics of ‘Space Marine,’” The California Aggie, November 17, 2011, https://theaggie.org/2011/11/17/column-the-politics-of-%E2%80%9Cspace-marine%E2%80%9D/.

13. 13. Jordan S. Carroll, “Welcome to Warhammer 40k’s Anti-fascist Future,” Polygon, October 25, 2022, https://www.polygon.com/23414657/warhammer-40k-anti-fascism-space-marines-capitalism-leagues-of-votann-hate.

14. 14. Matthew Heimbach, “Science Fiction Fascism Part II: Warhammer 40k,” Trad Worker, February 7, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20170916001748/https://www.tradworker.org/2014/02/science-fiction-fascism-part-ii-warhammer-40k/.

15. 15. Heimbach.

16. 16. “God-Emperor Trump,” Know Your Meme, accessed July 6, 2022, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/god-emperor-trump.

17. 17. Tenold, Everything You Love, 39, 195.

18. 18. See Brooks Landon, Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4–10.

19. 19. See, for example, Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” College English 34, no. 3 (December 1972): 372–81.

20. 20. Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 182.

21. 21. Lutz P. Koepnick, “Fascist Aesthetics Revisited,” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 1 (January 1999): 51–73.

22. 22. C. Richard King and David J. Leonard, Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture (Burlington Vt.: Ashgate 2014), 2–5.

23. 23. Kirsten Dyck, Reichsrock: The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Hate Music (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2017). King and Leonard, Beyond Hate, 7–8.

24. 24. To avoid directing internet traffic and advertising revenue to active far-right websites, all citations referencing them direct readers to copies kept by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine instead of the original URLs. Andrew Breitbart qtd in Thaddeus G. McCotter, “Pop Cultural Conservatism, Year One A.B. (After Breitbart),” Breitbart.com, March 1, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20240328160627/https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2013/03/01/pop-cultural-conservatism-year-one-a-b-after-breitbart/.

25. 25. Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 21–32.

26. 26. Jonathan Bowden, “Pulp Fascism,” Counter-Currents, March 25, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20230202080529/https://counter-currents.com/2013/03/pulp-fascism/. See also Jonathan Bowden, Pulp Fascism: Right-Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Popular Literature (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013).

27. 27. Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream (New York: Avon, 1972), 241.

28. 28. Norman Spinrad, “Psychopolitics and Science Fiction,” Science Fiction in the Real World (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 158.

29. 29. Bowden, “Pulp Fascism,” n.p.

30. 30. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 30–36.

31. 31. Samuel R. Delany, “About 5,750 Words,” The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 11.

32. 32. Delany, 11.

33. 33. Steven Shaviro, “(ENG) Steven Shaviro: Extrapolation, Speculation, Fabulation,” YouTube, October 18, 2021, https://youtu.be/mbu4hBe2GA4.

34. 34. Greg Johnson, qtd in Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 12.

35. 35. Richard Spencer, qtd in Kevin Musgrave and Jeff Tischauser, “Radical Traditionalism, Metapolitics, and Identitarianism: The Rhetoric of Richard Spencer,” boundary2, September 1, 2019, https://www.boundary2.org/2019/09/kevin-musgrave-and-jeff-tischauser-radical-traditionalism-metapolitics-and-identitarianism-the-rhetoric-of-richard-spencer/.

36. 36. Jason Reza Jorjani, Uber Man (London: Arktos, 2022), 68. Kindle.

37. 37. Jorjani, 69.

38. 38. Jorjani, 72, 170.

39. 39. Mark C. Jerng, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 13–14.

40. 40. Adrian M. S. Piper, “Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination,” Ethics 101, no. 4 (July 1991): 726–57.

41. 41. Jerng, Racial Worldmaking, 19.

42. 42. Jerng, 19.

43. 43. See Edward K. Chan, “The White Power Utopia and the Reproduction of Victimized Whiteness,” in Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society, ed. Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan, 139–59 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

44. 44. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 170.

45. 45. Jason Reza Jorjani, Faustian Futurist (London, Arktos, 2020), 81.

46. 46. Frank Raymond interview with Henrik Palmgren, “The Caucasian Mind: Transcending Biological Needs,” Red Ice Radio, April 18, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20231003034845/https://redice.tv/red-ice-radio/the-caucasian-mind-transcending-biological-needs.

47. 47. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Mariner, 1999), 288–91.

48. 48. Dylann Roof qtd in Rachel Jane Liebert, Psycurity: Colonialism, Paranoia, and the War on Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2018), 22.

49. 49. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Afrofuturism: Space, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2003), 76, 223.

50. 50. See George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978), 31.

51. 51. Linda Martín Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2015), 24.

52. 52. Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (July 1901): 76. See also Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010), 251–54.

53. 53. Ross, “Race Superiority,” 76.

54. 54. Ross, 76.

55. 55. Ross, 75.

56. 56. David Lane qtd in Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, 53.

57. 57. Richard Spencer, “.@joshtpm No, tomorrow belongs to us,” Twitter, March 18, 2017, 5:44 p.m. ET, https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/843216482838355968.

58. 58. Greg Johnson, The White Nationalist Manifesto (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2018), 6–8.

59. 59. Francis Parker Yockey (Ulrick Varange), Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948; repr. Sausalito, Calif.: The Noontide Press, 1962), 12–16, 422–39.

60. 60. Daniel Wollenberg, “Defending the West: Cultural Racism and Pan-Europeanism on the Far Right,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 5 (2014): 310.

61. 61. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 290–91.

62. 62. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Complete in One Volume, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1937), 167.

63. 63. Richard Lynn, “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Psychopathic Personality,” Personality and Individual Differences 32 (2002): 294.

64. 64. See Devin Zane Shaw, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2020), 54.

65. 65. Louie Dean Valencia-García, ed., Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories (New York: Routledge, 2020); Kristian A. Bjørkelo, “Elves are Jews with Pointy Ears and Gay Magic: White Nationalist Readings of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” The International Journal of Computer Research 20, no. 3 (September 2020), http://gamestudies.org/2003/articles/bjorkelo.

66. 66. Edward K. Chan, The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 194–200.

67. 67. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 24–28.

68. 68. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, “The Artist to Power? Futurism, Fascism, and the Avant-Garde,” Theory, Culture & Society 12, no. 2 (1996): 39–58; Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

69. 69. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 1.

70. 70. andré m. carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 16

71. 71. See, for example, Nalo Hopkinson, “Report from Planet Midnight,” Report from Planet Midnight (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2012), 27–50.

72. 72. Isiah Lavender III, “Science Fiction and Racism: Decolonizing the White Problem, an Essay in Three Parts,” Foundation 50, no. 139 (2021): 106–20.

73. 73. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 4–7.

74. 74. David Forbes, The Old Iron Dream (Oakland, Calif.: Inkshares, 2014).

75. 75. David M. Higgins, Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021), 1–3.

76. 76. Aaron Santesso, “Fascism and Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 41 (2014): 138–39.

77. 77. Santesso, 147–48.

78. 78. Santesso, 156.

79. 79. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (New York: Dey St., 2018), 122–23, 360–69; Sam Moskowitz, The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1954); Damon Knight, The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction “Family” of the 30’s That Produced Today’s Top SF Writers and Editors (New York: John Day, 1977).

80. 80. Knight, The Futurians, 155.

81. 81. Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show,” in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), 44.

82. 82. James J. O’Meara, “Lennart Svennson’s Science Fiction Seen from the Right,” Counter-Currents, November 23, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20230604010229/https://counter-currents.com/2016/11/science-fiction-seen-from-the-right/.

83. 83. Frank Raymond interview with Henrik Palmgren, “The Caucasian Mind: Transcending Biological Needs,” Red Ice Radio, April 18, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20231003034845/https://redice.tv/red-ice-radio/the-caucasian-mind-transcending-biological-needs.

84. 84. Frank Raymond, Sweet Dreams and Terror Cells, vol. 1: When Giants Break the Spell, 2nd ed. (n.p.; Krystalvoyager75, 2015), 158.

85. 85. Raymond, “The Caucasian Mind.”

86. 86. Raymond, Sweet Dreams, 137–38, 159–60, 170–71.

87. 87. Raymond, 159.

88. 88. Raymond, “The Caucasian Mind.”

89. 89. Raymond, “The Caucasian Mind.”

90. 90. Raymond, Sweet Dreams, 347–49.

91. 91. Dale Beran, It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office (New York: All Points Books, 2019).

92. 92. Beran, It Came, 12–16; Mathias Nilges, Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time without Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 8–10.

93. 93. Jordan S. Carroll, Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of U.S. Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2021), 188.

94. 94. Main, Rise of the Alt-Right, 4, 119–20, 168.

95. 95. John S. Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 9–10.

96. 96. Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2018), ii.

97. 97. Emma Planinc, “Regeneration on the Right: Visions of the Future, Past, and Present,” in Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, ed. A. James McAdams and Alejandro Castrillon (New York: Routledge, 2022), 269–70.

98. 98. Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate, 33.

99. 99. Minna Stern, 35–42.

100. 100. Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 10–14.

101. 101. Free Bird Media Canada, “Richard Spencer—Could Focusing on a Space Program Restore Fire to the Soul of Western Man?” YouTube, 4:38, September 20, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w89NOZjBgGQ&ab_channel=FreeBirdMediaCanada.

102. 102. John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 57.

103. 103. Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” Diacritics 2, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 14–22.

104. 104. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Pantheon, 1960), 40. See also Robin, Reactionary Mind, 24.

105. 105. Tamir Bar-On, “Richard B. Spencer and the Alt-Right,” in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, ed. Mark Sedgwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 224.