Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Resisting Racist Fantasies in Online Discourse: Eco-Fascism & the Dangers of Capitalist Alienation
Abstract
Eco-fascism is a white supremacist ideology that purports to champion the protection of the planet via racist fear mongering. Using misinformation, decontextualized statistics, and racial pseudo-science, eco-fascist discourses argue that people of color are responsible for the climate crisis and propose racial violence and authoritarianism as the solution. While self-identified adherents of eco-fascism represent a comparatively small online contingency of the alt-right movement, they have made headlines across the globe for their acts of terrorism. In Norway, New Zealand, Texas, and New York, eco-fascists have murdered hundreds of innocent people and spread their message via a network of social media platforms and internet forums. In this project, I aim to contextualize eco-fascism within broader cultural discourses. In the introductory chapter, I propose three central influences that animate eco-fascism. First, I argue that discourses identifiable as “eco-fascist” are animated by real material conditions, including the climate crisis and capitalist exploitation. Second, I argue that eco-fascism's rhetorical responses to these material conditions are mediated by historical and ideological influences that are embedded within the common sense of liberalism. Third, I argue that eco-fascist discourses are structured by psychic responses to the worldlessness of capitalist alienation: the death drive, the symbolic father, and political fantasy. In each of the three case-study chapters that follow, I assemble and analyze an online discourse that reveals a facet of eco-fascism’s rhetorical appeal. Case studies include the 2020 meme “Nature is healing – We are the virus,” the Modern Viking community, and four eco-fascist shooter manifestos. I conclude with a warning about eco-fascist influence in the far-right politics of the future and a call for rhetoricians to consider the structures of enjoyment when analyzing revolutionary texts.
Subject Area
Communication|Rhetoric and Composition
Recommended Citation
Sipe, William Joseph, "Resisting Racist Fantasies in Online Discourse: Eco-Fascism & the Dangers of Capitalist Alienation" (2023). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI30566422.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI30566422