Matthew N. Lyons > Quotes

“Broadly speaking, security forces may tolerate, work with, or even sponsor violent rightist groups that target the left or oppressed communities, but are much more likely to suppress such groups when they challenge the state.”
― Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

“PayPal cofounder and Trump supporter Peter Thiel has voiced some neoreactionary-sounding ideas. In 2009, for example, he declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women … have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
― Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

“Fear of homosexuality has offered a particularly useful mobilizing tool. As Mab Segrest and Leonard Zeskind have pointed out, “Because homosexuality appears randomly across the population, anybody—or anybody’s children—could possibly ‘be one,’ so the fear of homosexuality affects a much wider audience than the actual presence of gay men and lesbians and provides a convenient lever for the politics of fear.”3”
― Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

“The far right of the 1930s was a creature of its times. It took shape in an era when Europe’s nation-states were still forming and consolidating, an era of large colonial empires and industrial production based on massive factories. The far right of today takes shape in an era when global capitalism puts a premium on mobility, flexibility, and reconfiguring old structures.”
― Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

“Meyerson and Roberto see fascism as an intrinsic structural tendency of capitalism in crisis, a form of rule that is promoted strictly from the top down.”
― Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire

“Federal security forces in the United States exist, fundamentally, to defend ruling class power.”
― Matthew N. Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire