We are living through a time of brutal reaction. Since the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the functional repeal of the Voting Rights Act, fundamental rights of the American people—healthcare, education, due process, safety from armed agents of the state—are being stripped away at an alarming rate. Future historians will look back on this time period as an attempt to establish a reactionary regime analogous to that of Jim Crow.
This political reaction has also been accompanied by a cultural one: the rise of the manosphere, the ubiquity of crypto and sports betting, tradwife influencers, and of course the cavalcade of fascist cultural nonsense that accompanied Trump and his second journey to the White House. None of us can escape its idiocy.
We haven’t really had a full accounting of the awful fascist fever dream that we are all being forced to experience. For all the preening over the supposed excesses of woke and cancel culture, our sudden and horrifying lurch to the far right has mostly gone ignored in mainstream media. It’s crucial that we understand it so that maybe we can wake up.
One way to understand the right wing cultural realignment is to use their own terminology and worldview. The way that fascists understand the world is a reflection of their own cultish mindset, a window into their own irrational ways of existing.
So where should we start in trying to understand this reactionary cult?
There is one idea, the Woke Mind Virus, that can tell us a lot.
A Brief History of the Mind Virus
Coined by Elon Musk in the aftermath of the pandemic, the Woke Mind Virus is the supposed spread of irrational left wing ideas. Musk probably got the idea from Richard Dawkins’ 1993 essay “Viruses of the Mind,” which argues that irrational ideas like religion can spread through society like a virus.
Of course, “woke,” a generalized belief in an egalitarian society, is not irrational at all, rather it is Elon Musk’s cringe fascism that is irrational. Musk began his billionaire career as a darling of Obama-era liberalism, before taking a hard right turn. When he coined the term Woke Mind Virus in 2021, he was beginning the process of transforming from the “real life Iron Man” to the reactionary fascist we know today. Given that he came up with the term just as he was going through a massive and delusional shift to the right, most likely brought on by his trans daughter, Vivian, beginning her transition and cutting him off, it is not that outlandish to believe that he was simply projecting his own broken mind onto his political opponents.
In Musk’s telling, “woke” took hold of the broader culture and destroyed the lives and careers of thousands of totally innocent white men. Of course none of this happened. No innocent white men had their careers destroyed. Very few guilty ones did either. What did happen was that millions of people publicly shared a genuine belief that things could be better and those who committed heinous acts could be held accountable. But the right could never understand this. Instead they believed that those millions must have had their minds infected by a sinister ideology. The right thinks this precisely because their own minds have been infected by a sinister ideology: the Fascist Mind Virus.
You have seen the Fascist Mind Virus. You have seen it take hold of your friends, your family members, your coworkers. You have seen totally normal people all become utterly deranged, living in a false reality where Joe Biden and Bill Gates genetically engineered COVID to feminize men and replace the white race with immigrants. Even in its more benign forms, it can still cause a myriad morbid symptoms. Maybe you know someone who has decided that they’re going to say the “r-slur” again, or can’t stop posting AI memes, or has started writing up masturbatory fantasies in the comments of celebrities’ IGs, or has started betting on the odds that Trump will invade Cuba on Kalshi. Even if you have been lucky enough not to see it take hold of someone you know, you have still seen it spread in how much worse our culture has become over the past five years.
The best way to get rid of a virus is vaccination. What is a vaccine, but the genetic information of a virus, helpfully given to the body? To understand the Fascist Mind Virus is to defeat it. Future historians will spend thousands of hours pouring over internet ephemera to try to understand this resurgent fascist movement, but for now by using the right’s own accusations of the left against it, we can make four observations about how the Fascist Mind Virus infects its victims that will hopefully help inoculate us against it.
Focus on Irrelevant Bullshit.
The right loves to argue that the left works itself up into a tizzy about things that don’t matter like pronouns or racism, but it is the right that cares about irrelevant bullshit: ivermectin, the casting of superhero movies, Hasan Piker, the Cracker Barrel logo, which celebrities appear in which beer commercials, nonexistent trans women in the WNBA, whatever is going through Candace Owens’ mind.
The right loves focusing on bullshit because it is a great way to not only distract people from their actual problems, but to make them live in a constant state of rage. Enraged people are easy to manipulate and a world with millions of enraged people is a world where fascism can more easily spread. Fascism relies on the beliefs that you, on a personal level, are under assault from forces both powerful and omnipresent, and there is an entire industry of conservative talking heads fomenting outrage, making our society aggressive, overly sensitive, and intolerant. Individuals afflicted with the Fascist Mind Virus live in a constant state of hyper vigilance and anger, miserable for sure, but also naive and manipulatable.
One of the easiest ways to manipulate an infected individual is the classic trio of racism, sexism, and homophobia. This gets us to our second observation.
Reduce People to Superficial Traits
The phrase, “identity politics” is a slur for the right, a way to argue that movements that want to end to endemic sexual assault or police violence are unserious. They say that the left doesn’t care about the content of an argument, only the ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation of the person speaking.
This is exactly what the right does.
Charlie Kirk famously said that he would be scared to fly in a plane with a Black person as a pilot. It doesn’t matter that pilots have to spend 1000 hours of flytime before they even get to touch a passenger plane, for Kirk just the fact that a pilot is Black is enough to make him scared.
Identity politics was originally used to refer to political ideas that seek to liberate marginalized identities. But the right has twisted and morphed identity politics into a dark mirror of their original intent. The right’s identity politics are not liberatory, they are totalizing and confining.
The right loves obsessing over identity. They had a meltdown over Lupito N’yongo playing Helen in The Odyssey. They uphold a vision of goodness that is associated with a caricature of 1950s American patriarchy. They inject themselves with gray market peptides and undergo grotesque acts of plastic surgery to better perform the identities they have foisted upon themselves.
It is here that we should pay particular attention to the right’s peculiar (and some might say perverted) obsession with trans people, trans women in particular. Their latest grievance has been a totally contrived moral panic about non-existent trans women in the NBA. The right cannot abide by any kind of visible trans woman without falling into a hysterical fit. It does not matter her qualifications or life experience, every trans woman is a de facto target based solely on her identity.
Of course, the right is particularly obsessed with trans women because their very existence challenges the rigid gender hierarchies they seek to impose. “The left is trying to impose their gender ideology on us,” has become one of their go to lines. But it is not the left who is obsessed with gender, it is the right, which leads to our third observation.
Venerate Manliness
The right loves their manly men.
In the days after Trump’s second election, the most powerful men in the world bowed before the altar of manliness. Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his new masculine era, appearing on Joe Rogan in a gold chain to talk about jiu jitsu and how corporate culture needs to be more masculine. Meanwhile Trump appointed drunken war criminal Pete Hegseth to lead the new Department of War (more manly than defense), who is bringing a “warrior ethos“ back to the military by testing the troops’ testosterone levels (and firing all the women and Black generals).
In an example of how the Fascist Mind Virus can quickly spread far out beyond the confines of the right, this veneration of manliness has spread out to more liberal spaces. “The Male Loneliness Epidemic” was the New York Times topic de jure for 2025. Centrists went out to search for a “Joe Rogan of the left” to reengage all of these poor lost young men. Even Rutger Bregman, a left-wing economist, spoke about what a shame it was that his young boys didn’t have male role models the way his daughters had feminist role models, completely missing the point that women can be role models for men too! (Also there are plenty of positive male role models!)
The patriarchal nature of fascism and therefore the Fascist Mind Virus is especially important for its proliferation. Hyper-masculinity is its own seductive menace that has been used for the entirety of human civilization to justify extreme hierarchies.
But the flip side of this resurgent masculinity is a horrifying loss of women’s rights. Veneration of manliness is incompatible with women’s liberation. That’s why the right is obsessed with men.
And of course the manosphere would not be possible without the right’s favorite thing in the whole wide world: social media.
Use Social Media to Stoke Division.
The “blue haired tumblr girl” meme is so prevalent on the right that it’s a cliche. According to the right, the left is a bunch of dweebs always on their phones.
The far right is a bunch of dweebs addicted to their phones.
That includes the president and vice president of the United States.
I don’t know if social media could have existed without contemporary fascism, but contemporary fascism couldn’t have existed without social media. From Gamergate onward, the right has used social media to spread the Fascist Mind Virus. For the right, social media is a replacement for the real world, a hypersimulation where they can harass women, attack minorities, obsess over trans people, and live out their most rude and antisocial fantasies without fear of consequence. When they do feel consequences, such as getting banned, they throw collective temper tantrums. One of these temper tantrums was so successful it convinced Elon Musk to buy Twitter and turn it into his Nazi safe space.
Progressive movements have successfully used social media to organize, but that has all been orthogonal to social media’s true purpose: make an ungodly sum of money so that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk can have more wealth than the GDP of several medium-sized countries combined. Social media companies want you to spend every waking moment of your life on their sites and the best way to do that is to make you either anxious or angry. Fascists then feed off of that anxiety and anger, spreading it to everyone around them.
Kill the Fascist in Your Head
And as we have seen, the Fascist Mind Virus does not infect exclusively fascists! It’s everywhere. Many pundits have had their brains absolutely cooked on Elon Musk’s Twitter and the result has been a severe warping of their worldview so strong, they are unable to accurately comment on the day’s events (which is their whole job). When Ezra Klein asked if he had become obsolete, the answer was a resounding yes, not because the world does not need commenters anymore, but because the world does not need another guy with a cooked brain.
And perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of our collective struggle with the Fascist Mind Virus is that commenters and even ordinary people do not blame the right for the collapse of American Democracy, but the left! Woke went too far and that’s how Trump got elected again.
There really was a change in American politics post-2016, a disorganized progressive movement with the potential to force political change. The fact that there was a potential challenge to their hegemony sent the right into a freefall of reaction, and then the pandemic and George Floyd protests sent them spiraling again into outright fascism. For us on the left, it’s easier to blame ourselves than to come to grips with the fact that the rich and powerful shifted the ground right under our feet. “We were too obsessed with pronouns,” is the kind of easy self blame that turns our gaze inward so we don’t have to look out at the horrible state we find ourselves in. It’s a psychological defense mechanism, but it’s ultimately self defeating.
But for those who do blame the left for the rise of fascism, there is an urge to submit to the Fascist Mind Virus. You have probably felt this urge yourself: just let all the horrors wash over you and accept that the world is a greedy, twisted place. The Fascist Mind Virus can be seductive to anyone.
The left found this out the hard way with Graham Platner, a masculine figure who could tow the line between right wing male worship and pluralistic politics. There was nothing about Graham Platner that made him fit to be a Senator. He was a rich kid, who joined the army and went on to become a military contractor before coming back home and finding himself unemployed, selling oysters to his mom’s restaurant. But Platner represented a vision of masculinity that was extremely appealing. His backers spoke of him in almost religious terms. They had let the Fascist Mind Virus infect them and in a loser, they saw glory.
But the thing with the Fascist Mind Virus is that reality will always reassert itself.
Submitting to the Fascist Mind Virus is an act of moral and spiritual suicide. Look at Elon Musk, the Fascist Mind Virus’ sickest victim. He is the richest man in the world, yet is miserable. He regularly makes a fool of himself in public then takes to X to sulk. He posts AI videos of himself on Mars. His ex-wife, ex-girlfriends, and children hate him. He doesn’t have a friend in the world. He pays people to play video games for him. His millions of admirers are foaming at the mouth idiots. As Joyce Carol Oates says, “The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.”
It is both our personal and political duty to fight against this Fascist Mind Virus. You are not immune to it. No one is. It has infected people of every race, age, gender, sexuality, and creed. It is coming for you and everyone you love. You cannot escape it. You can only fight it.
The Fascist Mind Virus has real world, material effects. It is the ideological foundation for the rollback of human rights and immiseration of the working class. Women and minorities still make less than their white male counterparts. The state has begun intervening in the healthcare of ordinary Americans. Immigrants find themselves in chains. The Fascist Mind Virus helps create the conditions for a horrible material reality for millions of people, including its own victims.
There has been a huge pushback to Trump’s encroaching fascism including a raft of socialists winning across the country, historic protests, and an entire city mobilizing to kick out ICE. For the first time in a long time, there are mass antifascist movements across the country you can join. If you don’t have time, then donate to socialist candidates. If you don’t have time or money because we live in a capitalist hell and somehow working two jobs and 60 hours a week still isn’t enough, then just surviving each day is more than enough for now.
On a personal level is where it gets real hard. We are under psychic assault by tech oligarchs who want us to spend every minute of our waking lives glued to our phones. News organizations are being swallowed up by those very same tech oligarchs so they can promote their increasingly bizarre fascist agenda. And all the while climate change, which again those tech oligarchs are making worse, is making everything suck (there’s a direct link between heat and anxiety).
Learn to rely less on your phone. Spend several hours a day away from it. Be remorselessly critical of any information that comes from anyone associated with fascists. If you find yourself stuck in conversations about manufactured outrages that don’t matter, then change the topic. Do politics in real life, whether it’s door knocking, organizing your workplace, or something else.
To submit to the Fascist Mind Virus is to not just cause yourself immense psychological pain, but to also miss the opportunity to fight back against it. To live in reality is now a daily struggle. There will be setbacks, but that’s okay. We have to strive to find what is true and real and discard what is not. Perhaps this is an exhausting way to live, but in times like these, it is the only way to live. The alternative is so much worse.
Fascism needs the following groups:
Mediocre sons of privilege - Rich kids who aren’t particularly good at anything. They are afraid of falling behind and will do anything to maintain their position.
Disenchanted intellectuals - Intellectuals whose “brilliance” isn’t appreciated by the mainstream. Mostly because they are weird and have zero social skills. But they want to make sure that one day the academy will regret their rejection.
Losers - People, usually men, who have failed in the current system and are looking for a target for their anger. Losers would never think of political action, but can be inspired to it in ways far dumber than you could imagine.
Finally, one cult leader to pull it all together. The cult leader has power because all other groups depend on him keeping the coalition together.