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

(I set up a separate bluesky account for work in that space so you didn’t have to hear all about it unless you wanted to! @hetconned.bsky.social)

I know a lot of my buds here are trying to avoid the Worst People of the Internet. ❤️

If we’re in a “post-truth” world right now, then I want to understand the fantasies the far-right are selling instead, how their affective economies work, how they perform and signal them (both inside and outside the group), what political projects it advances and whose power it consolidates.

There’s no historical basis for the idea of a uniformly heterosexual past, which leaves the tradwife fantasy (for example) exposed in that it has to avoid the fact a heterosexual nuclear family unit is a social arrangement that’s *always required active maintenance* & isn’t as “natural” as they say.

Fantasies like the “Restorative Past” fantasy (the first one I’ll be deep diving into), cover tradwives and some parts of the manosphere, nationalist medievalism, and even digital nostalgia for the early internet. These fantasies are sold and performed online, and rely on hetconning to function.

I’ve been swimming in online misanthropy for over a decade now since writing my first book, and patterns and structures and technologies are beginning to coalesce in my notes. Mainly the idea that the “fantasy” is essential to the recruitment and maintenance of the right-wing project.

I only went and bloody did it. Made a little spot to write about it, too: hetconned.substack.com

“Hetconning (n.) — the deliberate retroactive straight-washing of history to frame queerness as a modern intrusion. A pretext for justifying attacks as a “return” to a world that never existed”

Looking forward to having somewhere to put all these thoughts down. First fantasy in the firing line is the “Restorative Past” fantasy, coming soon.

hetconned.substack.com