I'm offering a 3-session online course for @92ndstreety.bsky.social in June on white nationalism and GrecoRoman antiquity. The far right knows more about ancient history than you expect, but there are traditions of classicism that challenge their narratives. Join me! roundtable.org/live-courses...

1/ We keep asking the wrong question about deepfakes. The real question isn't whether voters get fooled into changing their minds. It's whether they get confused enough to stay home. The math is brutal. And in 2026, it's already working at precinct level. #DV1 #ProudBlue #Voices4Victory #USDemocracy

I appreciate the military angle here, gives it a certain je ne sais quoi. I also appreciate seeing people use the term fantasy here, as I go about my little project mapping them even though nobody asked: hetconned.substack.com/p/traditiona...

Was in the fortunate position of interviewing some researchers recently and one of my questions was “If we put all your research on a big corkboard, what would be the common threads between it all?” & i’ve been doing amateur Freudian analysis on my own output ever since it doesn’t look good folks!

My latest. America is giving dying mall vibes. open.substack.com/pub/karenatt...

Always happy to have a constructive conversation about my writing and thinking but I will be a bit of a noodge and insist that such critiques engage with what I actually said and not something you made up ✌️

Milestone reached: a post of mine is doing the rounds with people who have fundamentally misunderstood what I was saying and are calling me a fucker about it

Finished Muskism this week on this recommendation and have much to digest about the fantasies men like Musk are choosing to believe in order to not send themselves insane. Fun to think of the brain damaging capacity of immense wealth and how that interacts with the things I’ve been writing about.

Don’t miss this. Absolutely essential stuff.

Uh oh, the bat signal

*EOI by April 10* Feminist early career researcher wanted: the Vic Women's Trust is commissioning independent research into the impact of AI on women and girls, funded by its harm-prevention entity, the Dugdale Trust for Women and Girls. ($25k) Apply here: www.ethicaljobs.com.au/members/Vict...

Starting a new project is nerve wracking and a bit lonely but today I got the first comment from someone I didn’t know, gotta take your wins where you can get ‘em!

The internet didn’t get worse by accident. It did what it was built to do, & when we call the early internet a golden age, we ignore all the hostility that got us here. New Hetconned on the Lost Internet fantasy & why we should tread carefully with nostalgia: hetconned.substack.com/p/the-intern...

brilliant post, leena. my response here: publish.obsidian.md/republicofbo... btw (and case in point) substack is riddled with the far right; arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Hello new followers! If you thought the most recent post went a little easy on Curtis Yarvin may I present this aperitif from my post on neo-feudalism/medieval nationalism to whet your whistle: hetconned.substack.com/p/special-li...

"these virtual spaces were always, always hamstrung by this sort of self-imposed conformity. they were rarely very radical, and certainly not positioned to take on the dominant cultural order." that's right, i'm quoting from Let's Play Life again ellaguro.blogspot.com/2024/03/lets...

hey - finally something on this subject i agree with

This is really good, Anna makes me think nostalgia for the early internet is a lot like nostalgia for the American frontier: a lawless time and place where abuse ran rampant, but in hindsight we only remember the exhilaration of a sparse population on a landscape open for development or exploitation

Nice (and gentle) counter to "Golden Age Of The Internet" nostalgia. As always it's what (and who) they leave out that makes it gilded.

The internet didn’t get worse by accident. It did what it was built to do, & when we call the early internet a golden age, we ignore all the hostility that got us here. New Hetconned on the Lost Internet fantasy & why we should tread carefully with nostalgia: hetconned.substack.com/p/the-intern...

There’s something so theatrical about it, so exaggerated and signally. They want cookies and applause from men they respect and also to be a useful recruitment tool to get more little actors in their troupe. (The crossover with sovcits and theatre studies has been fascinating to read about!)

Any agents looking for a book on chauvinism, I’m 20% of the way there 💀

A misogynist is someone who signs up to do the dirty work of keeping women in their place, either in the wider project and/or the immediate intimate social group. This can be anyone, in any sphere of influence, and it’s *crucial* to separate that from their personal feelings about chicks they know.

This is why Kate Manne’s work correctly defining misogyny is so crucial to understanding our current moment. Misogyny isn’t “hating women”, these guys all have exceptions to that. Misogyny describes the *policing arm* of the patriarchy; its foot soldiers are the misogynists. It’s like ICE.

Made a field note about method to avoid finishing any of the half-written drafts I’ve got piling up. *taps forehead*

New Hetconned, a note on method: A problem with studying reactionary movements is that the people producing the fantasies are extremely annoying & extremely online. But if I ignore them, the analysis feels vague & thin. If I make it all about them, it's turning the whole thing into a freak index.

"[Bongino] was worried about whether or not they’d look good on a doorbell camera. This is not a professional administrator, this is a casting director." www.liberalcurrents.com/killing-for-...

Patriot Front members have tried to build their own intentional racist communities is through their gyms, as this mentioned. One, called Patria Gloria, posted last year about traveling around sleeping on the same mats they train on. Not super hygienic and seems like a great way to get MRSA.

A coalition of interfaith organizations has filed suit to halt Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, arguing it is dominated by Christian members and unlawfully structured. The complaint says the panel marginalizes religious minorities and advances a government-backed vision of a Christian nation.

Great response to Megan Kelly’s attempt to whitewash American history.

Thanks to all new followers for being interested in my weird little theory 🙏

@hetconned.bsky.social coining the phenomenon by saying ‘I know what I’ll call it: “hetconning”’ has that perfect thump sound you get when someone kicks a football just right, and all you can do is watch it arc to the top corner and the back of the goal net

As a professional heritagist I’m fascinated by the uses of historical memory to create significance and there are lots of frameworks to model that process (‘retro’), and I can say definitely: ‘hetconning’ is a fucking winner of a term

A primer on hetconning for new readers: hetconned.substack.com I’m interested in fantasy as a political technology, and the markets the contemporary right are setting up to sell those fantasies to further the wider right-wing project. Hetconning is the frame I’m using to map and examine them.

Whatever you think of the Washington Post at this moment, here's a chance to support the dedicated, hard-working journalists who were just laid off. If you have the means, your donation is most welcome. If you don't, a kind thought and maybe spreading the word to others is support enough 💙

ICYMI: I wrote about white nationalists appropriating medieval aesthetics and how it primes them for being unwittingly grifted into serfdom by the techno-feudalists of the dork enlightenment.

I blame badly written fantasy novels. Oh, and all the fascism.

New hetconned: Special Little Lords The medieval imagery of the alt-right on display at rallies and the January 6 insurrection lines up neatly with neo-feudal ideas circulating among tech elites about inheritance, hierarchy, and rolling back democracy. hetconned.substack.com/p/special-li...

New: Masculinity wasn’t “simpler” before feminism. It just went unchallenged. Today’s reactionary nostalgia touted by the manosphere turns men inward, shrinking life to the management of their own bodies instead of fully participating in civic and social life: hetconned.substack.com/p/masculinit...

New: Masculinity wasn’t “simpler” before feminism. It just went unchallenged. Today’s reactionary nostalgia touted by the manosphere turns men inward, shrinking life to the management of their own bodies instead of fully participating in civic and social life: hetconned.substack.com/p/masculinit...

If you could sub and share with people you think would like it that would be super appreciated! I really want to share this with other people who think about these online freaks as much as I do. I'm also blogging more casual (non-hetconned) stuff here: yeahrighto.substack.com/p/what-are-w...

Next draft is almost done (probably publishing later this week maybe), the second Restorative Past fantasy listed in there, the (fake) idea that feminism has "complicated" masculinity, or ruined or diminished it in some way (usually by withholding our labour). Here's a splash:

And my third post is the first example of deeper dives into that Restorative Past fantasy, specifically about the tradwife phenomenon and how it requires a huge amount of hetconning to convince anyone 'Going Back' is in any way a good thing for women: hetconned.substack.com/p/traditiona...

The second post is an example of a type of fantasy I'll be exploring in more depth (with more granular examples needing their own posts), and that's the Restorative Past fantasy, the (fake) idea we need to "go back" to when things were "simpler": hetconned.substack.com/p/the-restor...

The first post is explaining the umbrella concept a bit more, where I position hetconning as a kind of temporal engineering and a key political technology of the modern right-wing project. hetconned.substack.com/p/hetconned-...

ICYMI: I've been blogging about a framework I'm using to map the fantasies the right-wing are selling in a post-truth world to advance their creepy little agenda. 'Hetconning' is the retroactive straight-washing of history to frame queerness as a modern intrusion, & crucial to so many culture wars.

First one under the larger umbrella of restorative past fantasies, “traditional family values” explores tradwives and the hetconning required to sustain them: hetconned.substack.com/p/traditiona...

My first deep dive for the hetconned files: The Restorative Past fantasy. The belief that the past was pure & that we need to “retvrn”. Hetconned is me trying to understand the temporal engineering of the contemporary far-right and why their project relies on selling us a past that never existed.

wait a minute how are the "your body has gone soft from not eating the raw meats of your ancestors" guys also the "the computer should summarize the big scary email for your inadequate brain" guys