leena

@hetconned.bsky.social

126 Followers 246 Following

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

15,675 words
Oh yeah? The online rando says. You think every author has to read? Well, maybe you haven't considered an author who gets caught in a freak basement explosion that lodges a rusty pipe from the boiler into their skull, which after being surgically removed leaves them unable to comprehend written words, and also they have a preexisting ear sensitivity that means they can't listen to audiobooks with headphones-and before you ask, they live in a crowded home of screaming war orphans so they can't play audiobooks on speakers-and even if they could still read, they literally do not even have a single free second of the day between work, cooking, cleaning, and posting on social media. Are you saying they can't still be a writer? Huh? You're saying a disabled war orphan caregiver with literally no free time because of late capitalism can't be a novelist? You elitist gatekeeping @&%*#^$*! (As a side note, I've never seen a great term to define this common rhetorical move. It is a bit like straw manning, except you're inventing an imagined exception instead of an imagined argument. And a bit like white knighting, though not on behalf of anyone real. I hereby propose "straw knighting" as the term.)
Daniel radcliff in slippers with guns being very normal
Thumbs up guy meme
Book cover: MUSKISM A Guide for the Perplexed Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff
2 comments Leave a comment Dean Kiley * 7:53 PM Got engrossed by this antisentimental, evidence-marshalled, incisive, compelling, and wholly-persuasive analysis of the seductive surface-smoothing mechanics of neocon nostalgia online. LIKE • & REPLY
No one has been more explicit about turning this medieval fantasy into a theory of modern governance than Curtis Yarvin, who also writes under the name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin is the kind of man whose presence makes you instinctively cover your drink. His ideology is often described as "edgy" or "provocative", " despite not saying much to differentiate him from the "devil's advocate guy" from every early 2000s Bulletin forum. A gormless dork of a man seemingly intent on trying to make "The Dark Enlightenment" happen 1, Curtis Yarvin has spent years arguing that democracy should be abolished and replaced with a CEO monarchy, where the state is run more like a company, and its populace become its customers. Political disagreement can then be reclassified merely as consumer dissatisfaction, where if you don't like how things are run, you can take your business elsewhere. A (dull) child's understanding of how things should be run, where authority flows downward, and loyalty must flow upward, to him, the King. The special boy.
If we're too busy encouraging mourning then we're sure as shit not organising to de-privatise the network or nationalise the pipes, and if we distract ourselves with wanting to restore the internet past, we have no room for thinking about how it could have (or should have) been engineered differently. Leena van Deventer
Field Notes: A note on method On studying reactionary movements without turning the whole thing into a catalogue of maniacs LEENA VAN DEVENTER MAR 12, 2026
Field Notes: A note on method On studying reactionary movements without turning the whole thing into a catalogue of maniacs 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
No one has been more explicit about turning this medieval fantasy into a theory of modern governance than Curtis Yarvin, who also writes under the name Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin is the kind of man whose presence makes you instinctively cover your drink. His ideology is often described as "edgy" or "provocative", , despite not saying much to differentiate him from the "devil's advocate guy" from every early 2000s vBulletin forum. A gormless dork of a man seemingly intent on trying to make "The Dark Enlightenment" happen 1, Curtis Yarvin has spent years arguing that democracy should be abolished and replaced with a CEO monarchy, where the state is run more like a company, and its populace become its customers. Political disagreement can then be reclassified merely as consumer dissatisfaction, where if you don't like how things are run, you can take your business elsewhere. A (dull) child's understanding of how things should be run, where authority flows downward, and loyalty must flow upward, to him, the King. The special boy. In his "Patchwork" writings 2, Yarvin outlines a vision of fragmented sovereignty organised through private ownership. He proposes replacing existing states with "a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries," each governed by "its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents' opinions. "A Patchwork realm is governed by a Delegate," he writes, "who is the proxy of the proprietors." He cannot resist adding an antisemitic aside in the same breath: "(The Delegate is always Jewish.)" Even when he is sketching his new clean corporate monarchy, he goes out of his way to smuggle in a tired old trope. Treating him as a cultural curiosity or eccentric blogger is another form of organised forgetting. Paternal authority can promise relief from complexity 3. Tech culture's desire to eliminate friction maps neatly onto feudal logic, and governance can become similar to a software problem. If…
Special Little Lords Medievalist nationalist fantasy, inheritance as ideology, and the neo-feudal dreams of the tech right LEENA VAN DEVENTER FEB 03, 2026
One of the tragedies of so much contemporary masculinity discourse is the way it collapses inward, away from politics and toward self-management. The promise on offer is one of relief: a way to feel resolved without having to renegotiate power, responsibility, or being a part of collective life. Leena van Deventer
Doomsday prepping and bush survivalism are celebrated as extreme examples of ingenuity and self-reliance, while quietly functioning as a withdrawal from any obligation to others. It's easier to feel competent when no one else is present to answer to or measure yourself against. But that withdrawal doesn't resolve aggression, it just redirects it. Leena van Deventer
What is restored by this fantasy, in the end, is permission. Permission not to listen. Permission not to engage. Permission to mistake withdrawal from society for some quiet stoic dignity. The cost is then borne twice: by communities hollowed out through disengagement, and by men, straight and queer alike, taught that shrinking their world is a mark of strength. Leena van Deventer
"When men are taught to turn their bodies into weapons, it begs the question: who are they fighting? A body trained as a weapon must eventually be aimed at something. As Michael Messner observed in his study of sport and masculinity, "the body-as-weapon ultimately results in violence against one's own body''"' Leena van Deventer Masculinity, Hetconned HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM
"many of the women promoting this domestic dependency are not withdrawing from the economy at all. They are, in fact, running small media businesses. They cultivate audiences, manage brands, negotiate sponsorships, track metrics, and generate income through affiliate links and paid communities. They're often selling dependency while quietly retaining their own autonomy." leena "Traditional Family Values" and the Labour They Conceal HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM
"Traditional Family Values" and the Labour They Conceal (Home)making America Great Again HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM
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…
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. HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM
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…
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