The Battle Over Shame
This piece confronts an uncomfortable question about whether social shame still works against those embracing extremist ideologies. Hamilton Nolan's conversation with journalist Christopher Mathias cuts through academic debates to examine how antifascist activists have actually operated over the past decade.
What Fascism Means in Practice
Mathias rejects waiting for academic thresholds before naming fascism. Hamilton Nolan writes, "I see fascism as a right-wing politics of domination, often taking the form of ultranationalism, that situates a particular subgroup of people atop a social hierarchy and targets already marginalized groups for expulsion or death." This definition centers harm rather than historical comparison.
The piece draws on Robert Paxton's scholarship identifying the Ku Klux Klan as proto-fascist, and notes Nazi lawyers studied Jim Crow laws when drafting race legislation. Nolan frames this as a corrective to American mythologies about steady progress.
"I think so much punditry over the last ten years has been fixated on what we are experiencing as precisely analogous in this or that way to Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy—that only after key thresholds are crossed can we actually say it's happening here—eliding the ways in which America has always been fascist."
Critics might note this framing risks diluting fascism's specific historical meaning by applying it across centuries of American racial oppression.
Doxing as a Weapon
The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville serves as the book's foundational moment. Hamilton Nolan writes, "There's no one who was in Charlottesville that day—Nazi, antifascist, journalist, or otherwise—whose life wasn't irrevocably altered by what happened there." The doxing tactic leveraged existing social taboos: expose someone as a Nazi, and their employer, family, and community would shun them.
But the taboo is fading. Nolan notes examples from the years before the 2024 election where doxed Nazis faced community shrugs rather than consequences. The language of "great replacement" and "remigration"—euphemisms for ethnic cleansing—had migrated into mainstream political discourse.
As Hamilton Nolan puts it, "There is an ongoing battle in this country over shame." The administration's immigration enforcement chief warned protesters they would be named publicly to employers and schools—doxing flipped against dissenters.
Free Speech Without Consequences
Nolan challenges the centrist equation of free speech with speech without consequences. Hamilton Nolan writes, "Nazis don't give a fuck about free speech. They want to silence all kinds of marginalized groups permanently, whether through death or expulsion or other means." The analogy offered: if someone enters a bar shouting racial slurs and sieg-heiling, most Americans would force them out.
The piece argues the right spent decades manufacturing a bogeyman of antifascist violence to deflect from actual far-right violence. Hamilton Nolan writes, "Throughout the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, again and again you'd see these fake antifa rumors—about 'busloads of antifa' roaming the countryside, or antifa starting wildfires—creating the pretext for the far right to essentially occupy entire towns."
Critics might note that physical confrontation of speakers, regardless of their ideology, erodes norms protecting unpopular speech from violent suppression.
Objectivity as Smoke
Nolan praises Mathias for rejecting journalistic neutrality on fascism. Hamilton Nolan writes, "I just reject the notion of objectivity, or that there is a 'place from nowhere' in reporting on all this." The piece frames this as honesty about stakes: reporters live among neighbors and friends threatened by fascist movements.
The designation of antifascists as domestic terrorists—without any federal statute permitting such classification—marks the culmination of this bogeyman manufacturing. Hamilton Nolan writes, "What those murders made clear was that [the administration] will label whomever opposes them as 'antifa' or 'domestic terrorists' as a way of justifying their subjugation or murder."
Critics might argue that abandoning objectivity undermines journalism's credibility precisely when it needs to persuade skeptical audiences.
Bottom Line
This conversation exposes the fragility of shame as a social control mechanism when extremist views migrate into mainstream power. The verdict: doxing worked when fascism was taboo, but the tactic's power diminishes as the taboo disappears.