The Soy Right Needs A Safe Space

We are being ruled by the softest losers alive

At Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, Elon Musk delivered a now infamous speech where he concluded by giving two very clear Sieg Heils to the audience. This was nothing like the “ok” sign, (a common hand gesture turned white supremacist dogwhistle) where one could invoke plausible deniability to claim hysterical liberals were seeing ghosts. This was unmistakeable. Or so one would think. As soon as the clip started circulating on social media, the right wing commentariat came out en masse to invoke Elon Musk’s autism as an excuse for his obvious Roman salute. If you believed your lying eyes you were being ableist, actually.

The richest man in the world was just a little-baby-socially-awkward autistic guy who was trying to say “my heart goes out to you” and if you thought otherwise you were a bigot. So much for the tolerant left!

Long gone are the days where fascists aspired to be übermenschen; strong, disciplined, superhuman… the idealized masculine. Our new neofascist overlords have scrapped that identity almost entirely and fully embodied its opposite — the Soy Right. They have special diets are afraid of seed oils. They wear skinny jeans and have meticulously groomed beards. They talk non stop about masculinity, drive pickups, and wear plaid, but can’t change a tire to save their lives. While the right spent years mocking liberals for wanting “safe spaces” and echo chambers, for crying about identity politics, for being frail, fragile, overly-sensitive weaklings, they were slowly transforming into the perfect mirror of all of it — without the nagging concern for equality or any of that lib shit.

The same right wing snowflakes who went on and on about cancel culture now indulge in it with glee. From Chaya Raichik, the Chabbadist weirdo who runs LibsOfTikTok and spends her days doxxing queer teachers, to Moms for Liberty’s nationwide efforts to ban books that make them uncomfortable, to Elon Musk classifying the word “cisgender” as an actionable slur on Twitter, it’s clear that the right only resented being the cancelled, not the culture of cancellation itself.

Never has this been more apparent than in the reactions to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians that started after October 7, 2023. Despite being the most vocal and enthusiastic supporters of a modern day holocaust, right wing Zionists are also simultaneously just little guys who “feel unsafe” and need protection. From hysterical exclamations that the phrase “from the river to the sea” is a call to eradicate Jews, to imploring elite universities to take up an identity based mantle to “protect Jewish college students” by tamping down on pro-Palestine speech, the right wing adoption of what they once mocked - that ‘words are violence’ - is everywhere you look.

The Soy Right is being oppressed and they want you to know it. They’re scared to take the subway, they’re offended that you called them white or cis, they’re upset that you didn’t think they were cool in high school, they want to call the manager because there’s less boobies in video games. They are crybabies of the highest order. While the right is winning cultural and political victories nonstop lately, that’s not enough. They also need you to like them. Why don’t you like them?!

It really does add insult to injury that not only are we entering the dark night of rising fascism, our new fascist overlords are such fucking losers. They openly cry about no one wanting to sleep with them, they tell you their small penises are a sign of their racial purity, they have mental breakdowns if you boo them. Never before has a group of people collectively been more worthy of being shoved into lockers than the Soy Right.

But how did they get like this? The culture of the right wing is primarily a culture of grievance and resentment. The Daily Wire probably wouldn’t exist if those Hollywood libs accepted Ben Shapiro’s scripts 20 years ago. For every person who ever “left the left” there’s a story that precedes it of being mocked one too many times by lefties online. The villain origin story of most of Andrew Tate’s fanbase is one of being friend-zoned by some girl whose affection they felt entitled to. The common thread among so many of those on the right is that they at one point or another felt excluded, pilloried, or called out by the cultural mainstream, and instead of becoming better people, they leaned in hard to an ideology that expected less of them.

Excerpt from “The Cruel Kids Table” by Brock Colyar for New York Magazine

Reactionary thought mostly stems from people feeling like they are losing their place in the world as their economic conditions worsen, with a heavy dose of scapegoating those they feel unjustly took it from them. As our material conditions decline, more and more people are becoming captured by this fervor and nostalgia for a past where they had some status, some security, some comfort — and where they could say the n-word freely. Because this is a more culturally homogenous era, where almost everyone is, quite frankly, soft, even the fascists are libs. Although there is undoubtedly a right wing tide rising, it is nevertheless speckled with the cultural liberalism of safe spaces and call outs and lots of whining. So. Much. Whining.

On some level we are all too comfortable. We in the heart of the empire have grown so accustomed to our endless flow of treats that it feels almost impossible to imagine the steadfastness of belief in higher principles, risking life and limb for a greater cause, that led to the American Revolution, to the abolition of slavery, to the militancy of the Black Panthers with their rifles and shotguns. Instead of a revolt for a better world, people revolt over minor inconveniences. During the brief period of lockdowns in 2020, there were right wing riots at state capitols because people couldn’t get their hair cut for a couple weeks. The American populace is addicted to their dopamine slot machines and anything that threatens that is treated more severely than the actual threats to life on planet Earth that are all around us. This treatlerism is bipartisan — liberals and conservatives alike often direct more anger towards DoorDashers for an order mix up than towards our rulers who are currently preoccupied with destroying our lives.

The primary American identity is that of the consumer, rather than the citizen or subject of empire. Our minds are fully infested with a toxic individuality that tells us that our goodness is defined by what we do or don’t buy, and that the best way to do activism is to change our consumption habits. We have almost completely abandoned the idea that we belong to a class, and that we should unite with others from that class. Our individuality even manifests itself through our movements, that at least since the 2010s have been primarily horizontal and leaderless — and therefore less effective. We become easily demotivated and demoralized when our efforts don’t immediately pay off, addicted to the instant gratification that we believe we are entitled to.

The pussification of the American populace is total. It transcends all racial, class, and ideological boundaries. We are a coddled, comfortable, and weak people; blinded by short-lived pleasures that ultimately distract us from broader goals. The reason the right is even winning the victories it has been is because many on the left have given up our radicalism in favor of the idea that we can just tick a box every two years or so and be done with it. That democracy requires little more of us than that. We’ve let the most useless people imaginable take up our banner and take over our movements. We’ve allowed ourselves to be cowed, to be lied to endlessly, to be let down repeatedly. We’ve allowed ourselves to become alienated and atomized. We’ve lost our will.

If you take a step back and look at the people who are currently taking over the government, who are ruining our lives, who are threatening the planet, you’ll see that they are paper tigers who wouldn’t last a second if we learned how to fight again. They’re only winning now on a technicality. They’re only winning now because they have no opposition at all. We have to find a way to return to being the ferocious collective that so threatened the ruling class that we abolished slavery, made the New Deal a reality, ended Jim Crow. We have to ditch the rugged individualism that brought us here. We have to stop favoring temporary comfort over long-term victory. We have to remember who the hell we are.

Not only are the stakes higher than they’ve ever been, there is also a deep humiliation in being defeated by the world’s biggest losers. Let us find our resolve and stuff these dorks back into the lockers where they belong once and for all.