This is a blog about language and the far right. My goal in creating it is to provide people with tools to a) protect themselves and their communities from right-wing manipulation and b) fight back against a growing and increasingly militant global reactionary movement. There are a lot of ways to do that, but for my particular skill set it primarily means illuminating the shadowy minds of far-right actors from a linguistic perspective. That includes looking at the ways that they talk and write as well as the symbols they use, which may involve clothing, memes, gestures, graffiti, or whatever else they might concoct to communicate with one another or with the rest of the world. It also means looking at antifascist language and strategies for countering fascist encroachment into popular discourse.

I have two noteworthy qualifications for analyzing this stuff: for the language part, I do have a fancy-ish degree in translation studies from a comparative literature program at a big university in the US as well as many, many years of experience as a working translator, but more importantly, for the far-right part, I’ve been an active antifascist researcher and activist since 2016 and a general anti-authoritarian activist since some time in the mid-1990s. Over the years, I’ve developed a substantial knowledge base (and a not-insignificant personal library) regarding far-right actors throughout North America and Western Europe, and when I’m completely at sea about something, I usually at least know who to ask for help.

I anticipate (as of July 2025) that the content of this blog will fall under the following categories:

• Jargon and concepts: These are posts describing specific terminology, its origins, and its usage as well as the concepts underlying right-wing actions, including ideas like “the Great Replacement,” “ethnopluralism,” or “cultural Marxism.”
• Coded language: Far-right actors tend to be both opportunistic and aware that their ideas are not actually very popular, so they often invent ways to get their message across without explicitly spelling it out. These posts dig out what they’re actually getting at and why they’re trying to be slick about it.
• Rhetorical analysis: These look at the approaches that people on the far-right end of the political spectrum take in their attempts to convince others (including people you might not think of) to get in line with reactionary ideology.
• Narrative forms: Fascist ideology is constantly shifting: sometimes they love capitalism, sometimes they hate it; sometimes they are hardcore believers in race “science,” sometimes they form multi-ethnic coalitions, etc. But what never changes is their pursuit of power for its own sake, and looking at the narratives they use is one way to clarify the often confusing jumble of ideas they seem to throw at us. Broader still than the general concepts mentioned above, these are overarching frameworks for an endlessly recurring series of stories that fascists use to explain the world to each other and themselves. They include characters fulfilling the roles of, for instance, internal and external enemies, noble heroes, and “our people,” and they usually unfold in fairly predictable sequential order.
• Other: I can’t know what will come up, but I can imagine this might include things that are hard to categorize, like a discussion of the verses of national anthems that we don’t sing or the use of particular fonts to imply an affinity for a certain worldview (English-speaking neo-nazis, for instance, just love that oh so German Fraktur script). I may also review books here now and then.

There is clearly a lot of overlap between these categories, so take them with a grain of salt. But I think that should generally cover a lot of what I hope to do with this thing.