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Tucker Lieberman

Tucker Lieberman⁠

Essayist & editor💠Attis & Aleph historical poems about the great task of writing💠 Daily creativity prompt: Scribble This! 💠Thank you for being here 🏳️‍⚧️

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The Fascist ‘Death Drive’

They want the end of everything

6 min readFeb 1, 2026

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large fire in the street, burning trash. behind it, in the dark, you can just barely see a crowd of protesters.
Photo by Tom Caillarec on Unsplash

I think a lot about what the fascists want. It’s a question. I don’t know what they want. The big ones succeed in winning and hoarding lots of cash, but other than that, it’s hard to tell what value their behavior produces — for them, even.

Today I think what they want is nothing. An active nothing. The opposite of anything.

Here’s an eloquent three-minute video that makes sense to me. It’s by Dan Olson (Folding Ideas).

Olson’s talking about a social media post by the Department of Homeland Security a week ago. It “cast Trump as the renegade penguin” — yes, penguin — “a lone wolf hero breaking away from the herd, doing his own thing, an American thing which has presumably been lost.” The fascist message is that we’re in “merely an uncomfortable phase that must be endured before a promised reward.”

Although the right-wing seems to affirm that this plucky penguin symbolizes the “pursuit of a distant ideal,” unfortunately “that’s not really what’s happening here.”

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Essayist & editor💠Attis & Aleph historical poems about the great task of writing💠 Daily creativity prompt: Scribble This! 💠Thank you for being here 🏳️‍⚧️

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