Hetconned: understanding the temporal engineering of the contemporary far-right
Why the far-right keeps selling us a past that never existed
“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 sense.
Once I began to understand how hetconning operates, the seemingly disparate absurdities of our current moment began to arrange themselves into a familiar 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 story’s past to suit the needs of the present. By retrofitting a purely heterosexual past, it produces a usable—useful—history, one based on exclusion and policing deviance. Strip queerness, transness, or complexity from the archive and you’re left with a world people can be convinced once existed, was taken away, and must be recovered.
Hetconning props up the narrative infrastructure that authoritarian politics later relies on. And this is the work I want to do here: to study, map, and name the water-carrying fantasies the far-right manufactures, the affective economies they tap into, and the political work those fantasies perform.
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, imaginative, forward-looking, and grounded in the belief that a more just world can be built through solidarity.
I’m an independent researcher (seemingly constantly) flirting with more postgraduate studies, and in the absence of supervisors and peers to keep my thinking in line, I’m trying to commit to a structure in this work: first, identifying the historical void a fantasy requires; mapping the affective economy that makes it soothing or seductive; then examining how it is performed or signalled online as a mode of belonging, norm-enforcement, and recruitment; and finally tracing who benefits from the fantasy.
I don’t want to just list what a bunch of online weirdos are up to and gesture to you to “Get a load of this guy!”, I want to tease out what political projects it advances and what power it consolidates. Rewriting the past has become one of the contemporary right’s most powerful political technologies. Policy fights are 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 isn’t 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.
— Leena
