A well observed feature of the far right is its strange tendency to combine indifference to factual accuracy, or even honesty, with soaring rhetoric about truth, beauty, and greatness. Beyond just a well-documented willingness to obfuscate, bullsh–t, and lie, many of the far right’s core ideological convictions seem like bloviated imaginaries and outright fabrications. Often figures on the far right openly acknowledge this tendency, as in a 1922 speech where Benito Mussolini admitted his adulation of the rejuvenated Italian nation was a manufactured myth:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion.
It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the
sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is
the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And it is to this
myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality,
that we subordinate everything else.

This willingness to conjure patently artificial values into being, while still insisting all else be subordinated to the products of one’s fantasy, is hardly unique to the early twentieth century right. In 2004, a George W. Bush administration official widely believed to be Karl Rove dismissed the “reality based community” for failing to realize that, as an empire, “we create our own reality.” In The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump anticipated his political style by admitting he engaged in “truthful hyperbole” that “plays to people’s fantasies” and desire to “believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” More recently J. D. Vance, himself well-versed in far-right thought, has insisted that if he has to fabricate stories to attract people to his cause, then by God, he’ll do so.

The far right tends to associate the liberal — and often socialist — emphasis on reason with an egalitarian inclination to treat all people alike. The basic idea is that all individuals possess a capacity to dialogue and reach correct, or at least mutually beneficial, conclusions about what is right and wrong and who ought to be in charge. The far right perceives this as threatening to orderly respect for hierarchical authority and the aspiration for greatness that gives life meaning and texture. Then as now, the far right expresses a strategic skepticism toward the claims of critical reason — but only in order to induce a deeper commitment to its preferred dogmatism. Once you deny that critical reason has any independent force, it is very easy to insist that power alone gets to decide who believes what.

From the far right’s standpoint, an excess of critical reason has a dangerous tendency to promote democracy by encouraging endless criticism and discussion that ultimately leads people to question authorities they are better off submitting to. Everyone reasoning and criticizing for themselves can only lead to political and moral chaos. Moreover, since most ordinary people tend to be motivated by low materialistic concerns, encouraging the democratic use of critical reason by all will tend to debase the aspirations of the political community.

For many on the far right, reason can never mobilize people’s passions, bind them together, and encourage them to submit to authority the way identification with myth, volk, power, and glory do. The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt — a contemporary of Mann’s — captured this spirit well in Political Theology and other works, where he emphasized that political concepts are secularized theological concepts. Ultimately, we must all irrationally choose the God we worship together, and being a political community means defeating enemies who worship another. To this day, the far right’s ability to win converts is due to its radical emphasis on aesthetics at the expense of all convictions. Its aim above all is to excite, to not be boring.

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/mann-doctor-faustus-fascism-far-right/

“Beyond offering simple services to estimate your age, Persona’s exposed code compares your selfie to watchlist photos using facial recognition, screens you against 14 categories of adverse media from mentions of terrorism to espionage, and tags reports with codenames from active intelligence programs consisting of public-private partnerships to combat online child exploitative material, cannabis trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, romance fraud, money laundering, and illegal wildlife trade.”

https://www.therage.co/persona-age-verification/