One of the silliest recurring mantras and practices of the Latin American right has always been to impute their own sins to their adversaries. In the global disputes of the 20th century, for example, various conservatism actors used to accuse their leftist adversaries of being puppets of some external force, when in reality they were the ones supported by entities unrelated to the national interest.
Thus, for example, proto-fascist magazines such as the so-called The Reaction (?)a Germanophile and pro-Nazi pamphlet where Doctor Atl and founders of the National Action Party wrote, did not hesitate to accuse Lázaro Cárdenas or Lombardo Toledano of being some kind of Soviet or Rooseveltian agents, when, in fact, that publication received financing from the German Embassy of the Third Reich in Mexico.
It is not just an ideological dispute where the right empties great concepts of meaning, and uses terms like “freedom” or “democracy” in an Orwellian sense and attempts with those words to impose, through simulation, their antonyms. The issue is deeper than that and has to do with the fact that in the most closed right, their vision of the world is organicist and immobilist. This means that they think that the world is a divine creation where a deity – or a disembodied nature – orders the world so that some naturally command and others naturally obey, or where an eternal hierarchy exists based on issues of class, ethnicity, nation or gender.
Thus, in the organicist vision of these rights, the white person must be above the others; the man above the woman; the Caucasian over the indigenous or something like that, in a vision that is sweetened with paternalistic tricks, such as that the man commands the woman but also protects and provides for her, tricks that try to hide not only the error of this vision but also its perversity.
The arguments that refute this organicist vision will not be extended much. Since the time of Mendel, it has been demonstrated that there are no human races and that they all have the same creative potential and intelligence. From anthropological and archaeological studies we know that in primitive tribes 70 percent of human consumption was a product of gathering and that hunting, when there was any, and caring, were habits of the entire tribe, which throws overboard the idea that “naturally” the man is in charge of hunting and maintenance while the woman is limited to raising children.
Let’s go back for a moment to the right, which tends to attribute its vices to its adversaries. On April 7, 2005, when López Obrador’s violation of immunity was perpetrated, he called for a demonstration in the zócalo and, to avoid clashes with the police cordon, he asked his followers not to accompany him to the Chamber of Deputies and called for all types of confrontation to be avoided.
While this peaceful rally was taking place, an irrelevant local deputy of the PAN, a charlatan named Obdulio Ávila Mayo, accused in the media that, if read correctly, “López’s speech was a call to violence.” However, neither that day nor any other was there any violent action on the part of López Obrador or his entourage and followers. On the other hand, the then PAN President and spiritual leader of Mr. Ávila Mayo, Vicente Fox, did try to use the Army to repress the anti-lawlessness actions, but the institutionality and rationality of the then Secretary of Defense, Ricardo Vega, prevented it. Who were the violent ones? The same formula applies from then on, where the Obadorista movement began to grow through political and peaceful strategies while Calderón, as a spurious President, started a fire of violence in the country that has not yet been extinguished.
This prelude serves to reflect on the current Argentine post-fascism, especially embodied in an involuntarily celibate man of almost forty years old named Agustín Laje. A youtuber from Córdoba and former student of counterinsurgency in the United States, who for approximately a decade has risen to fame in forums of repressed and impotent arrogant people in Argentina, whom he radicalizes by convincing them that their vulnerabilities, economic or emotional, are the fault of left-handed people; or with harangues similar to those that his singleness is not the fault of his terrible attitude towards women, but rather the responsibility of feminism, or something like that.
The guy has stood out not because of his content, since he repeats the usual conspiratorial and supremacist chatter of the extreme right, but because of his platform. Late medieval in an era of the Internet, the guy has enjoyed more impact than he deserves, when in the media he praises, for example, the “traditional natural family”, that is, patriarchal, conservative, necessarily with lineage and homophobic, despite the fact that the guy, with almost four decades of life, has no wife or children, and the political reference of which he is the ideologist, that is, the Argentine President Javier Milei, is a guy. with evident emotional disorder, who not only has never had a partner but also no friends, and his only lasting relationships have been with his sister and his dog.
In the same way that virginal priests believe they have the moral authority to teach about good sex, this group of antisocial abnormals, who can’t even stand each other, and who probably don’t know the basic rudiments of dealing with women, come to us to want to teach us how to create good families and good children.
This background is relevant because recently, after the murder of the fascist influencer Charles Kirk in the United States, Mr. Laje came out to crow from the rooftops that this crime was something like a massive fault of the left or progressivism. Without yet having information about the crime, on September 10, the self-conscious laborer wrote, literally, the following: “Attack against Charlie Kirk, a well-known American right-wing influencer. For the umpteenth time, the left shows its true face. They are not adversaries, they are enemies.”
It mattered little that the evidence disproved Laje. It was learned that the criminal who attacked the Trumpist fanatic was another Trumpist fanatic, religious, Republican and pro-gun. That is to say, a standard specimen of the most ruthless right in the United States, who decided to murder, without any legal obstacle involved in the acquisition of a high-powered weapon, another right-wing idiot because, in his view, he was not right-wing enough.
Laje didn’t care about that. He maintained his incriminating assertion of the left, which is added to other mass condemnations of the subject, who usually blames all feminists when something happens that he does not like, or, in a conspiratorial tone typical of a narcissist with delusions of persecution, accuses progressive plots on Netflix or cultural Marxism to turn gay boys or feminist girls.
However, reality turned out to be foolish again. Last weekend, the news was announced that a little character named Pablo LaurtaUruguayan, committed a double femicide against his partner and his mother-in-law, and kidnapped his five-year-old son. The misogynistic atrocity is horrifying in itself, but it is aggravated by the fact that the murderer Laurta is also an attempted “right-wing influencer” who ran a site called “men united”, presumably to denounce injustices of feminism or women.
The forty-year-old criminal, as expected, is an unredeemed fan of Agustín Laje and Milei’s other ideologist, a certain Nicolás Márquez, whom he invited to forums in his country in 2018 and with whom he traveled, lived, talked and photographed himself very comfortably after taking them to conferences, and after making it clear to the four winds that they are his ideological inspiration.
The guy Laurta is a clear example of what the function of cyber-preachers like Agustín Laje is: his mission is not to promote ideas but to traffic in the putrid complexes of the most harmful sector of society. Like Mussolini recruiting criminals to form his black shirts, Laje does, with all proportions, a similar exercise: he dedicates himself to radicalizing little men convinced that their problems are not the fault of a hierarchical and unjust social system but are the fault of feminine and progressive conspiracies. And it radicalizes them not so that they learn to demand social and collective rights that have been denied to them, but to make them feel that they too can be social predators and that this is the only way to succeed.
As expected, Mr. Laje, cowardly, distanced himself from Laurta and requested the full weight of the law against him and even stood against violence against women. Too late. Laurta pulled the trigger but most likely when doing so she felt that Laje was speaking in her ear, confirming her worst and most misogynistic beliefs, where she surely felt that the lives of those women she killed, in some way, belonged to her and therefore she could dispose of them with violence.
It is made clear here that at no time is Laurta treated as “crazy” or mentally ill or anything like that. Because it must be made clear: madness is involuntary and those who suffer from mental illness cannot or do not know how to control their actions. And Laurta is surely a guy who knew what he was doing, and who decided not to put limits on his femicidal misogyny. He is where he is not because his sick mind betrayed him, but because he decided to do what he did.
Laje-style post-fascist catechists, on top of everything else, are cowards. Of course they will never have the self-criticism that makes them reflect that although words are not bullets, they can inspire bullets. And that those words, and their poisonous content and their massive internet platform, have an impact on thousands of people, whose vulnerability only awaits the precise stridency of those who seek to profit from their neuroses and complexes.