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hetconned.bsky.social
leena
@hetconned.bsky.social
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Independent researcher mapping the fantasies the far-right are selling in a “post-truth” world. Interested in their affective economies, performance, and function. Exploring hetconning as a political technology of the far-right. https://linktr.ee/leenavand
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hetconned.bsky.social
A similar logic governed the recent baffling decision to alter the official portrait of four-star Admiral Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the US Senate, on display within the Department of Health and Human Services. Her legal name was removed and replaced with her deadname. Responding to the decision, Adm. Levine told NPR that it had been "an honour to serve the American people as the assistant secretary for health," adding, ,"I'm not going to comment on this type of petty action." The image was deemed by the administration to have "become politicised," and its removal was presented as a necessary depoliticisation. This inversion matters. Levine's portrait was not removed because it suddenly expressed a political argument-Levine herself hadn't changed overnight-but because her existence had been reclassified as ideological. This action didn't announce itself as censorship. It presented itself as maintenance. This is the quiet power of The Restorative Past fantasy once it reaches the halls of power. It transforms ideological projects into administrative ones. By the time policy is debated, the terms of that debate have already been narrowed, if not abandoned entirely. But these projects do not begin in government. Before they arrive at the level of policy, they gather momentum on online stages, where the performance and circulation of The Restorative Past fantasy functions as a powerful tool of recruitment and astroturfing, making coordinated campaigns appear organic and grassroots. It is here, in the aesthetics of nostalgia and the language of personal choice, that the fantasy does much of its most effective work. I've got a handful of examples of The Restorative Past Fantasy at work that Id like to dive into in more depth, and I'll be expanding on each in their own post as well as summarising them here, adding more as I go. (I'm trying to balance overview with concrete examples, so I'll keep this post as a wider snapshot an… "Traditional family values" as a timeless structure The invocation of "traditional family values" relies on a sleight of hand so brazen it almost dares you to call it out. What is presented as some ancient moral inheritance is, in practice, a mid-twentieth-century artefact, assembled from Cold War anxieties, suburbanisation, and postwar consumer capitalism. The nuclear family was not discovered in scripture or handed down from antiquity; it was aggressively marketed as a stabilising unit in an era terrified of communism, queerness, women's labour, and racial integration. To call this arrangement timeless is not ignorance but strategy. The hetconning here is laundering a historically specific social form to appear as though it has been here for an eternity. Masculinity as something feminism "complicated" The claim that masculinity was once simple before feminism arrived to ruin it mistakes enforced silence for peace and order. What reactionaries mourn is not a coherent identity but the absence of challenge. Earlier masculinities were no less contradictory, brittle, or anxious; they were simply protected from interrogation by law, custom, and violence. Feminism did not complicate masculinity so much as expose its restrictions and costs, particularly for women, and the men who could not or would not conform. The fantasy here is a wishful daydream for unaccountability. By framing feminist critique as needless complexity, the past is rewritten as a place where men didn't have to be accountable to their community, and men were free to self-select exactly what form their "protection" of women would entail, without their pesky input. Medievalism and nationalist inheritance Modern nationalist medievalism depends on a cartoonish compression of time, where centuries of migration, intermarriage, religious conflict, and imperial violence are flattened into a single, mythic lineage. Claims of rightful descent invoke a fantasy Middle Ages populated exclusively by the speaker's ima… authority are treated as heirlooms stolen by outsiders rather than contested and continually remade. The medieval past functions less as history than as a costume cupboard, supplying armour, crosses, and banners that lend gravitas to contemporary exclusionary projects. Digital nostalgia for early internet cultures Nostalgia for the early internet often reads as a lament for lost innocence, but what is being mourned is more accurately a loss of dominance. The "frontier" web remembered by its loudest defenders was smaller, whiter, more male, and far less accountable. Harassment, piracy, and exclusion were not aberrations but structuring features, invisible only to those they did not target. By framing this era as a fallen Eden corrupted by moderation, diversity, or platform governance, critics recast structural harms as creative freedoms. The fantasy of the early internet performs the same work as other restorative myths: it transforms a space of unequal power into a lost commons, and the expansion of participation into a mortal decline. "Return to the gold standard" and allied slogans Calls to "return" to the gold standard or similarly archaic economic arrangements operate as talismans rather than proposals. These slogans gesture toward a fantasy of monetary purity, where value was supposedly stable, labour rewarded fairly, and the nation insulated from global complexity. What they omit is that such systems were historically accompanied by brutal inequality, restricted participation, and frequent crisis. The appeal lies not in feasibility but in moral theatre. Gold becomes shorthand for discipline, restraint, and masculine seriousness, opposed to the perceived softness of contemporary economic management. As with other restorative fantasies, the past is less a workable model than a rhetorical weapon used to delegitimise the present. Retro-aesthetics and sanitised eras Retro aesthetics perform ideological laundering through style. By isolating the surface textures of … allow consumers to enjoy nostalgia without reckoning. The diner, the dress, the muscle car, the pastoral homestead all appear without the labour exploitation, racial terror, marital coercion, or imperial violence that made them possible. This is not accidental. Aestheticisation drains history of consequence, turning periods defined by struggle into mood boards. In doing so, retro culture trains us to desire the feeling of the past while rejecting any responsibility for its conditions, a perfect preparation for a hetconned world. I'll no doubt add more as I go. The restorative past fantasy is not a single story but a generative one, capable of attaching itself to wildly different political projects while performing the same work. Other fantasies I'm mapping include beliefs about a purified or "primal" self buried beneath modern interference (The Purified Self fantasy), in clean-slate fantasies of escape and rebirth (The Clean Break/Year Zero on Mars fantasy), in meritocratic stories that moralise inequality (The Meritocratic Ascension fantasy), in secret-knowledge Qanon narratives that promise order through codes and research (The Secret Knowledge fantasy), and in zero-sum accounts of gender that cast women as a scarce resource to be claimed (The Scarcity of Women fantasy) =. These are not discrete pathologies. They are expressions of a shared impulse: to resolve the instability of the present by imagining that the answer already exists somewhere else in time. The aim of this project is not to catalogue every version of that impulse, but to look them in the eye. Once these fantasies are named, they become easier to recognise as they circulate, mutate, and harden into policy 2. This recognition doesn't dispel their appeal, but it does interrupt and undermine their claim to inevitability. And in a political moment that trades so heavily on the feeling that nothing else is possible, I think that interruption matters. - Leena 1 (I have several more in mind but I got bore…
December 19, 2025 at 5:46 AM
hetconned.bsky.social
The Restorative Past fantasy, for the non-substackers:
The Restorative Past fantasy The belief that there was once a coherent, pure, morally legible past, and that the present is a fallen copy. HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM The Restorative Past fantasy The belief that there was once a coherent, pure, morally legible past, and that the present is a fallen copy. LEENA DEC 19, 2025 Share ... America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. -John Le Carré Image of Nazi book burning in 1933 In contemporary political rhetoric, it's striking how rarely we're invited to imagine something new. To consider futures possible. More often, the imagination is directed backward, toward return. The language of restoration dominates, promising the recovery of something coherent, moral, and natural that's supposedly been lost. I use The Restorative Past fantasy to describe this broad mode of temporal engineering. It encompasses projects as varied as tradwives and "traditional family values" narratives that frame masculinity as newly endangered (as though men are about to be suddenly raptured out of existence), nationalist appeals to a pure or rightful inheritance, and the soft-focus nostalgia that sanitises violence and exclusion in both digital culture and public life. What unites these examples is the conviction that the past already contains the answer, and that it's the role of political institutions is to restore and police that order. The appeal of the Restorative Past fantasy lies in its ability to convert political disagreement into a mission of moral repair. If the problem is decline rather than inequality, then the task is not redistribution or transformation but correction. Something went wrong. Something was introduced that did not belong. Remove it, and the world might make sense again. Queerness is one particularly convenient target for this work, and hetconning is a useful political technology to help get it done. There is no historical basis for the idea of a uniformly heterosexual past. Queer lives are threaded through the record, sometimes submerged in euphemism or omission, but never wholly absent. This fact unsettles the story of heterosexuality as a natural default, revealing it instead as a social arrangement that has always required active maintenance. By presenting exclusion as a correction, hetconning reframes that same maintenance work, recasting violence and erasure as necessary acts of upkeep. The removal of queer people from public life … This is not only a matter of belief, but of affect. Restorative fantasies offer relief from the instability of the present. They promise escape from the ongoing work of negotiating difference, and the discomfort of social change. They transform disorientation into grievance and grievance into purpose. In moments of crisis, that offer can be compelling. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Berlin enjoyed a dense and public queer culture, supported by bars, publications, advocacy networks, and research institutions, most notably the Institute for Sexual Science. This visibility became a focal point for reactionary narratives that framed modernity itself as decadent and corrupt. Queerness became a scapegoat for broader anxieties about social change, sexual freedom, and the erosion of traditional authority. When the Nazis consolidated power, they didn't just criminalise queer people. They destroyed archives, burned research, and dismantled the institutions that put queer life on the public record. I hesitate a little here, as direct comparisons between Weimar Germany and the contemporary United States are... indelicate. Different century, different institutions, different scale. But the continuity that matters here lies in the boring mechanics of administration, where power advances not through heroic spectacle but sometimes in the banality of office paperwork. In early 2025, as part of a sweeping rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the Trump administration began purging government materials and websites of language deemed ideologically suspect. The instruction was blunt and mechanical: search for prohibited terms and remove them. Among the matches was a Boeing B-29 bomber preserved in the historical record under its name, the Enola Gay. The record was flagged for removal because the word "gay" was caught by a broad, indiscriminate Ctrl-F sweep. History was reduced to a searchable database in which certain strings of characters had become una…
December 19, 2025 at 5:46 AM
hetconned.bsky.social
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.
The Restorative Past fantasy The belief that there was once a coherent, pure, morally legible past, and that the present is a fallen copy. HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM
December 19, 2025 at 3:03 AM
hetconned.bsky.social
许hetconned引 Hetconned: understanding the temporal engineering of the contemporary far-right Why the far-right keeps selling us a past that never existed LEENA DEC 14, 2025 S 1 Share "America-a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced, but celebrated-has become amnesiac." - Henry A. Giroux, "The Violence of Organized Forgetting" (2014) Particularly after the mass-onboarding event of the pandemic lockdowns, we've seen a whole new cast of characters on the far-right treating the internet as their stage. After the pandemic years unsettled our sense of time, it's hard not to feel especially unsteady watching them attempt to rewrite history. But they are. I'm calling this phenomenon tactic hetconning. Hetconning is the retroactive straight-washing of history to frame queerness as a modern intrusion. Burning books, banning certain words from appearing on government websites, and otherwise vandalising the public record, are all examples of hetconning at work. Casting queerness or transness as "new" does real harm. It normalises homophobia and transphobia by framing queer lives as provisional, an optional addition to an otherwise heterosexual world. That framing has a chilling effect in the present, signalling to queer people that acceptance is conditional and fragile, and that visibility may carry a cost. When wielded as a political technology, it makes the exclusionary goals of the far-right feel "natural," or even inevitable. It's a disingenuous pretext used to justify attacks on LGBTQ+ people as a form of cultural self-defence—a narrative infrastructure that authoritarian politics relies on. Strip queerness out of our history and you can sell people a world that never existed. Sell them that world, and you can radicalise them to defend it. Make their income rely on perpetuating it, and they're locked in. What you've built, at that point, is a baked-in recruitment pipeline, disguised as fighting for common sens… pattern. "Why are women announcing on TikTok they shouldn't have the right to vote?" "Why is the guy who gags down raw meat on livestreams raking in millions?!" "Why are whole online subcultures convinced that policing gender could ever lead to liberation?" When I scratch even lightly at these questions, a familiar architecture reveals itself: women framed as destabilising forces, men building empires out of weaponised grievance, and entire communities convinced exclusion is some necessary kind of cleansing. I'd seen this pattern before, when writing my first book almost ten years ago, about Gamergate. At the time it masqueraded as a grassroots uprising against "corruption" in games journalism; in practice it rehearsed the emotional and affective choreography that would later animate a much larger right-wing project. The same indignation, the same purification fantasies, the same insistence that women constituted a civilisational threat. The same capacity to turn grievance into a lucrative concern. Steve Bannon has since admitted he treated gamers as a proving ground for testing his theories on how to inflame culture-war issues, a way to study how resentment circulates. He saw how quickly it could be weaponised, and how useful it could be for mass recruitment into the broader right-wing project. The chaos was never just chaos; it was data. And the far-right took detailed notes. What was once chaotic and decentralised didn't stay that way. What emerged from that era was not just a mob but a model. Collect and capture the once-scattered outrage, engineer it to point in a certain direction, add gasoline, flick match, and walk away. The contemporary far-right no longer needs to wait for serendipitous flare-ups; it's constructed an industrialised grievance economy capable of manufacturing its own momentum. Hetconning is central to that system. Borrowed from "retconning" in fiction, a portmanteau of "retroactive continuity," it refers to the narrative trick of reshaping a… they tap into, and the political work those tantasies pertorm. Gamergate relied on multiple lies in order to function. One was quite a load-bearing fantasy: that games have always been the exclusive dominion of boys and men, and that girls are recent (and unwelcome) interlopers. I started to wonder about the role of the fantasy in the culture war boiler room, and what other myths were being engineered to keep the fires burning. I'm interested in fantasy as a political technology, and I want to map the fantasies the far-right are trying to construct. These fantasies take different shapes across countries, but they all rely on the same manoeuvre: fabricate a golden age, demand everyone attend its funeral, get everyone riled up, then weaponise that grief. "Circulating the phantasm of "gender" is also one way for existing powers-states, churches, political movements-to frighten people to come back into their ranks, to accept censorship, and to externalize their fear and hatred onto vulnerable communities." - Judith Butler, "Who's Afraid of Gender?" (2024) I use the word fantasy here in deliberate opposition to the organising principle of a leftist utopia. Fantasy depends on fabrication, an invented past that never existed but must be believed in for reactionary politics to function. Utopia, in contrast, is what bell hooks describes as an ethical horizon, shaped by struggle, accountability, and collective care. It doesn't require the erasure of history, but rather demands a reckoning with it. "To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality!" - bell hooks, "Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics" (2000) Right-wing fantasy is a technology of control: nostalgic, exclusionary, grievance-based, demanding obedience in order to "retvrn". Leftist utopia-as hooks, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, José Esteban Muñoz, and others remind us-is a technology of liberation: collective, imaginativ… downstream of memory fights: when the past is successfully rewritten, the range of imaginable futures shrinks with it. I've spent a long time paying attention to the internet's worst tendencies, to the misanthropes, the grievance entrepreneurs, the people turning cruelty into content and content into income, and I won't pretend that proximity hasn't taken a toll. Watching fantasies harden into actual policy can induce a kind of epistemic vertigo-the disorienting recognition (and subsequent weltschmerz) that our shared standards of truth are eroding in real time. Watching that erosion happen is destabilising. Writing about it is how I keep my footing. Hannah Arendt warned that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the committed ideologue but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction has collapsed, where anything becomes believable and nothing feels solid. I'm doing this work not because I think I'm going to save anyone, or crack some grand code that generations of far sharper minds somehow missed. It's partially a selfish sense-making exercise during a time of tumult, and partially a way to get back into a daily writing habit. This project isn't a manifesto or a pillar of the resistance; it's a record of how these fantasies operate, who they serve, and why they keep working. I plan to keep taking notes. Thanks for reading hetconned! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribed
December 15, 2025 at 5:22 AM
hetconned.bsky.social
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
Hetconned: understanding the temporal engineering of the contemporary far-right Why the far-right keeps selling us a past that never existed HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM
December 14, 2025 at 5:37 AM