O tempo presente no ecossistema dissociativo fascistizante do Brasil – aspectos da grupuscularidade e do fascismo on-demand: linguagem e subjetividades

Abstract

This thesis investigates the fascistizing dissociative ecosystem in contemporary Brazil, understanding the political radicalization observed between 2010 and 2025 not as an outbreak of “madness” or collective delirium, but as the result of an ideological interpellation and a cognitive dissociation strategically organized through the internet. We propose the concept of on-demand fascism to describe a metamorphosis of historical fascism adapted to platform capitalism and the attention economy, operating through a rhizomatic groupuscularity that unifies heterogeneous groups around a common fascistizing language without the need for a formal centralized command. We identify that the discourse of the conspiratorial myth acts as the central driving idea of this grammar, grounding collective cognitive dissonance and the total negation of alterity through a fascistizing language that contains narratives such as “Globalism”, “Cultural Marxism”, and “Agenda 2030”. Grounded in the History of the Present Time and Digital History, the research carries out a cartography of collective assemblages of enunciation in the digital environment, highlighting how the platformization of life and the attention economy have produced an “I-pistemology” and a “myth-history” hostile to scientific evidence and democratic institutions. We aim to demonstrate that the COVID-19 pandemic functioned as a radicalization laboratory, consolidating sanitary denialism and moral panic, while the systematic discrediting of the electoral system prepared the subjective ground for the attempted coup d'état on January 8, 2023. We also analyze the role of Olavo de Carvalho as the main mediating intellectual of this language and examine the symmetries between the communication tactics of the farright and the military doctrine of the Army's Psychological Operations Manual, evidencing the instrumentalization of unfinished pasts in a cultural cyberwar. The thesis is structured into two parts. In chapters two, three, and four, we reflect respectively on aspects of fascism as a historical concept; the digital society and human behavior within this cybernetic environment, as well as a kind of “ideology” presented by the agents responsible for this space; and the character of the “cultural war”, psychological operations, and political performance operated by far-right agents in the country. In chapters five and six, we seek to empirically examine the agents that contribute to this process of radicalization and the stimulation of fascistizing language. We deal primarily with “Junk News” channels, audiovisual platforms, “Think Tanks”, influencers, and the transnationality of fascism today, and secondly, we depart from specific contexts to examine “ordinary” people in Telegram groups. For this, we use a vast documentary corpus ranging from books, journalistic pieces, military manuals, legal and police reports, as well as a database with over 30 Telegram groups saved between 2020 and 2023. We conclude that fascism in present-day Brazil is a molecular process that intertwines with everyday life through networks of desire, demanding from the historian and their research an ethical and political stance against collective amnesia and the dishonest revisionism that attempt to sanitize authoritarianism in the present time.