Don’t Let Anyone Tell You This Isn’t What it Looks Like

Note: this article contains transphobic and racist social media posts, including a manipulated photo showing a person in blackface, and discusses racist, transphobic, and anti-semitic right-wing rhetoric and violence.

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You’ve heard, I’m sure, that the Portland Thorns—the organization currently led by two very nice Canadian women, one of whom said in her introduction to the press that she wanted to create “the most connected, purpose-driven club in the world”—chose a player named Sydny Nasello out of the University of South Florida in this year’s college draft. I imagine you’ve also seen the social media activity fans dug up the instant her name was called. In case you haven’t, here are some screenshots:

I don’t know Nasello. I don’t know, when it comes down to it, exactly why she chose to retweet these things, nor do I know if her views have changed since the most recent one above, from November 7, 2020. But I have spent enough time on the internet to know that retweeting usually serves the purpose of amplifying a message that a user agrees with, and I am aware enough of our current political moment to know that these particular posts suggest a specific worldview. Everything I am about to say is based on that information.

Working with the assumption that retweets mean endorsement, let’s consider the three above one at a time.

The first one indicates that the retweeter denies the reality of trans identity. This is a belief so obviously harmful that it requires no further explanation.

The second one is a little harder to parse, but here I feel that a bare retweet, with no added comment, implies the retweeter has a positive view of the little boy raising money to build a 30-foot wall on our southern border.

The last one, by the former president’s greasy-haired son, no less, alludes to the widespread pro-racial justice, anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, equating anger over centuries of well-documented state-sanctioned violence against Black people with anger over an election that some people believe, without evidence, was stolen. It also alludes to baseless conservative claims that racial justice protesters turned many cities—Portland included—into smoking, lawless ruins ruled by roving antifa gangs.

If our assumption that the retweeter agrees with these things is correct, her views are firmly in line with those of the archetypal Trump voter. Not the reluctant fiscal conservative, not the ordinary rich person who doesn’t want to pay higher taxes; the flag-waving, grievance-driven fanatic.

These tweets reflect a worldview basically reducible to a single principle: no person or group of people has an inherent right to exist, much less the right to be treated with dignity and respect, to express themselves, to participate in the political process, to have complete bodily autonomy, to move freely, or to form associations with others as they choose to do so.

This view denies trans people the legitimacy of their lived and felt reality, denies people uprooted by conflict the right to seek asylum, and denies people living in extreme poverty the right to be treated like human beings at all. To people whose views are in line with these tweets, those rights are only accorded to those with the means to seize them, whether by physical, economic, or political power. To the extent that any person or group of people cannot do so, even (or perhaps especially) if that inability is caused by longstanding institutionalized oppression, this is taken as evidence of inherent inferiority and unworthiness not just of those rights, but ultimately of continuing to live.

Conveniently, there’s a word for this world view: fascism.

Again, it’s impossible to ascribe, with absolute certainty, a set of beliefs to someone you’ve never met, but everything I know about the world leads me to believe that someone who would amplify these messages on their personal social media probably thinks this way, broadly speaking.

A couple hours after she was drafted, Nasello tweeted a Notes app statement containing the kind of non-apology apology we expect from public figures who have been caught expressing views they still wholeheartedly embrace but fear will get them “canceled”:

Nasello can play coy all she wants. She can come up to the teacher’s desk and say “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” with her eyes shyly lowered while she fidgets her hands behind her back. But we all know, and I imagine she knows, that she’s dodging the real issue. The problem is not that she might, at some time, have made some abstract group of people feel “not supported.” The problem is that she has deliberately and repeatedly indicated that she believes some groups of people are inherently less valuable than others. If she does not hold that belief, I don’t know why she would have retweeted Charlie Kirk saying as much. If she’s changed her mind since then, surely she could have said so specifically in her statement.

There are also two Twitter “likes” by Nasello’s account that I want to highlight:

These stand out to me not because they express particularly more extreme or dangerous views than the three retweets I included above, but because of their tone. To me—again, because I have spent a fair amount of time on the internet and can recognize alt-right rhetoric—they add a particular hard edge to the basic outline illustrated by the retweets discussed above.

They are noteworthy because they exemplify what is perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the radical right as it currently exists in America: the way that to the extreme right’s adherents, all of this, the casual cruelty and dehumanization and undermining of democratic norms, is a big fucking joke. The modern right was birthed on the internet, by millions of people memeing about things like the Holocaust, trying to outdo one another in edginess, screaming racial slurs on Xbox Live, all for the lulz at first, until at some point the joke became, “let’s stage a torchlight march where we chant ‘Jews will not replace us,'” and the punchline had a body count.

Once again, I do not know Nasello’s intention here, but I think it’s fair to say that the act of clicking what’s called the “like” button usually indicates agreement or appreciation. So: in that light, let’s consider the two tweets above.

I will confess that I’m not sure what the joke is supposed to be in the first one. In part, it seems it’s simply intended to be shocking for the sake of being shocking. One point being made is that anyone (“libs”) who would feel belittled or insulted (“offended” or “triggered”) by blackface is clearly an idiot and therefore that blackface is inherently funny; all the more funny to portray one of the country’s best-known left-wing figures, a woman who presumably understands why blackface is harmful to Black people, wearing it.

There’s some second layer here, too. At the end of 2020, LeBron James’s longtime contract with Coca-Cola ran out, which I assume is the reference being made. I suppose we’re intended to make some connection between Black people (because James is Black, get it?) and Coke, something about how brands have given in to the Woke Mob and will now only endorse people of color. I think? If I’m right about that connection, there’s an added element about James being not just a very rich and famous Black man, but one who is fairly outspoken about racism, which racists do not like.

The joke is nonsensical, as far as I can tell, but in short, it mocks 1) the idea that racism is bad, 2) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinking that racism is bad, and 3) corporations wanting to appear not to be racist.

The second tweet isn’t a joke so much as an exemplification of the way the online right expresses approval of its heroes, in slangy terms that gesture toward irony but, as with everything in this world, are anything but. Beating an antifa protester with a stick is termed “based,” while here Trump’s ultranationalist chest-thumping amid a deadly pandemic his administration exacerbated is “hard.” He’s just another memelord, in this view. Calling migrants rapists and criminals is a meme, sexual assault is a meme, racist violence is a meme.

That the views expressed in the posts I’ve included here reflect the outlook of a larger and larger majority of one of the two mainstream political parties in this country is irrelevant to the fact that this outlook is straightforward, by-the-book fascism. This is the single most vile and dangerous ideology that human beings have ever invented, and it’s here right now, and we cannot pretend that we don’t see it.

For the third time, let me reiterate that I don’t know Nasello, so to some degree, all this is conjecture. I think, however, that it’s quite reasonable, as conjecture goes.

And I want to be abundantly clear about the appropriate answer to a person who espouses this kind of extreme right ideology. There is no room for tolerance when it comes to fascism. Fascism is about power, and its proponents do not deal in good-faith dialogue and debate. This set of views is so dangerous not only because it involves wishing harm on certain groups of people; the additional danger is that it seeks to perpetrate that harm through the destruction of the democratic process and anyone who dissents. If we let ourselves be drawn into a facetious discussion about the legitimacy of these views, pretending that somewhere between “we should overthrow the government and install a white nationalist autocracy” and “all human beings are inherently valuable” lies a reasonable middle ground, we’ve already lost.

The Thorns say they didn’t know about all this before drafting Nasello. Fine; I have no reason not to believe them. That’s a serious unforced error, but fortunately it has a simple solution: the Thorns must release Nasello’s rights. An organization cannot seriously claim to respect the rights of women, Black and brown people, and the LGBT+ community while allowing someone with these views onto its payroll. In the Rose City, there is no football for fascists.