The Rise of Fascist Slop

And The Breaking of Democratic Discourse

While Twitter has always been somewhat dubious regarding the reliability of the information relayed, Elon’s gambit has unfortunately paid off in the short term. Twitter is now driving the American political discourse. As painful as it is to admit—Twitter has become real life.

The brilliant coup that Elon pulled off in realigning the incentive structure of Twitter around the paid blue check (alongside completely absent content moderation) has given birth to an information ecosystem overrun with blatant and often ridiculous misinformation.

Between the verifiably false claims of Haitians eating cats making the Presidential debates, to the endless stream of false narratives about the FEMA disaster response to Hurrican Helene actively impeding relief efforts—Twitter is now the driving force of (false) political narratives in the United States. This isn’t to mention older insane stories that have taken hold on Twitter over the past year like the war in Ukraine being made up by the news.¹

It’s what I’d call—for lack of a better term—fascist slop.

The quality of these political stories is at best, “Well my neighbor saw someone say it to a friend of mine.” Which is to say, they collapse under even a hint of scrutiny. Like the AI slop that now dominates Facebook, the point of it isn’t to be believable, the point is to drive engagement. The more inflammatory (or fake and thus rage-inducing) the more it gets boosted by Twitter.

This in itself isn’t sufficient to make Twitter far right, however. Inflammatory and often fake information is value-neutral. It’s not as though Louise Mensch, the Krassensteins, or Mueller She Wrote haven’t been running in the same swamp of exploiting misinformation for money for years now.

What created the current toxic version of Twitter was the introduction of a decidedly far-right shove from Elon himself. He’s spent the last two years amplifying the most volatile and shameless grifters of the far-right into prominence and made them the primary characters of his website.

Given a shove into the spotlight, his structural incentives have done the rest.

The endless waves of dead-eyed blue checks now sell what is functionally a form of politicized fan fiction that feels like it should be true.

Which is the fascist element of Elon’s Twitter. Fascism (in the true ideological sense) thrives off of pure emotional mythmaking that’s untethered from the reality we live in. What’s true doesn’t matter so much as whether it advances the ideological cause or not. Like Mussolini’s largely fabricated March on Rome—baseless claims about FEMA money being stolen by illegal immigrants are what our political discourse is based on.

The fascist slop is nothing more than the end product of this engagement feedback loop being infected with a pathological political fixation on needing all stories to favor Trump.

What drives engagement is what’s emotional, and now the emotional need for Trump to win drives more engagement and money for those creating the slop.

The veracity of what’s being said is irrelevant.

I sincerely would not care so much about any of this if it was just a bunch of people on 4chan bickering amongst themselves—but all of this fascist slop is infecting our actual political community.

We’re quickly losing the ability to have a coherent conversation amongst ourselves. Our political life is becoming hopelessly stuck in a vitriolic shouting match wherein one side no longer feels any obligation to the truth. It’s going to well outlive Trump and unless it stops it will probably smother our ability to sustain a democracy.

When John Dewey advocated for public schooling at the turn of the century, his vision was for education to build the foundations of responsible civic-minded voters who could take seriously the issues of their country.

Dewey’s vision dated back to our founding: an American public that could be entrusted to handle the responsibilities of self-governance. The notion of a well-informed and considerate citizen was the most essential of all propositions for the establishment of a democracy.

It called to mind the high ideals of Athens in which responsible citizens debated amongst each other with clear eyes the fate of their community. Each person in the community would be able to weigh the choices before them and sincerely work to achieve the good of their nation.

The democratic vision of America depends on our ability to share a set of mutually agreed facts and work toward what we feel is best.

This never meant that we would be experts on every topic—few of us can hope to even be an expert on one topic—but it would mean that we could carefully examine the options before us and choose among them.

From monumental questions to whether America would go to war, or more mundane questions over zoning laws, the hope was that could handle that responsibility.

For a long time, we managed all of that. Our shared story has been one of a nation gradually moving closer to fulfilling our higher ideals. Despite our flaws, we still saw Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address, we stood triumphant in the Second World War, we put a man on the Moon, and we advanced rights to all our citizens.

We managed these feats as a nation thanks to Americans who were once united in service to our shared civic language.

Now look at us. We’re debating if legal immigrants are eating dogs in our Presidential Debates. Elon got what he wanted, I just don’t know how we recover from all of this.

1. I don’t think I need to provide a source for the war in Ukraine being real. If you believe this you need to immediately enroll yourself in some form of remedial education program.