leena

That’s so kind of you to say! Thank you for sharing

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

A primer on hetconning for new readers: hetconned.substack.com

I’m interested in fantasy as a political technology, and the markets the contemporary right are setting up to sell those fantasies to further the wider right-wing project.

Hetconning is the frame I’m using to map and examine them.

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ICYMI: I wrote about white nationalists appropriating medieval aesthetics and how it primes them for being unwittingly grifted into serfdom by the techno-feudalists of the dork enlightenment.

I blame badly written fantasy novels.

Oh, and all the fascism.

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…

The centuries of migration, revolt, religious fragmentation, and administrative failures that actually defined medieval Europe need to be ignored in order to sustain this fantasy. Queer kinship disappears. Non-productive lines disappear. Religious deviation disappears. Women's labour (outside inheritance) disappears. There are no succession crises. No assassinations. No rebellions. No famines. No paranoid courts or collapsing dynasties. The medieval ruler appears as a calm white-collar administrator, optimising his territory. When medievalist aesthetics on the street coincide with neo-feudal governance proposals circulating among the elites, the quiet part starts to get louder. Many of the men who mobilise Norse imagery and claims of a 'pure' white lineage appear to assume embodying this fantasy would position them as rulers rather than subjects . Given Yarvin's outsized influence on the billionaire class and his proximity to figures in the current US government, it is far more likely they would find themselves positioned as subjects rather than lords. What looks at first glance like a shared fascination with medieval symbols is better understood as a convergence of interests. Neo-feudal reactionaries want to roll back democracy and reinstall hierarchical governance. White nationalists want a story that reframes violence as a necessary part of collecting their rightful inheritance. Medievalism supplies both. It offers elites a language for privatised rule and unaccountable power, while offering foot soldiers a sense of belonging within a mythic past that flatters them as heirs and special little boys. Dorothy Kim's analysis is useful here precisely because she identifies the possible harms (and stakes at play) here. "Almost all the major nodes" of the alt-right, she writes, "are attached to specific iterations of the medieval past," and the message is not symbolic: it is "intended to incite violent racism, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, Islamophobia, and anti-Semiti…

work, persuading people to tight tor a world in which they will never rule, only serve. As for how we can be useful pushing back against this disenfranchisement, Kim concludes in that same piece, "Our old-style position that objectivist neutrality is where medievalists should be no longer works." We need to shirk this pressure to be cold and objective and lean more heavily on human narratives when telling our histories. The more we tell stories about queer life in medieval times, stories about dissent and pluralism and mavericks and schisms and complications and ever-so-modern and relatable messiness, the more we can fight back against the people who want to dismantle democracy and return us to the dark ages. - Leena Thanks for reading hetconned! Subscribe for free here: く Subscribed 1 More like the Dork Enlightenment, amirite. 2 I'm not linking his stuff directly, because I can't stomach it. 3 If you have a child's understanding of the world. 4 lol. Imao.

Special Little Lords Medievalist nationalist fantasy, inheritance as ideology, and the neo-feudal dreams of the tech right LEENA VAN DEVENTER FEB 03, 2026

On January 6, 2021, a crowd attempted to overturn the results of the US presidential election by force. They breached the Capitol, assaulted police, and moved through the building searching for terrified lawmakers. Some carried zip ties and wore tactical gear. But others dressed themselves in a more medieval story, with furs, horns, and runes. To the unfamiliar, these costumes and props probably registered as some oddball theatrical flourish, or childish attention-seeking behaviour. While that's technically not too far off the mark, the particulars of these choices are worth noticing. The medieval references visible during the insurrection had been circulating for years in far-right organising spaces, both online and in person. Crusader slogans appeared at rallies in Charlottesville in 2017. Norse runes and Viking imagery have been common in white nationalist fitness circles and mixed martial arts clubs (and their merchandise ecosystems) well before 2021. We even see the idea of an ancient Britain being invoked by racists intent on stoking tensions about immigration, sometimes boiling over into physical violence. On January 6 it functioned as in-group signalling: a way to recognise comrades inside the riot, and to place yourself inside a mythic narrative of siege and redemption. By the time the Capitol was breached, this symbolic repertoire was already familiar to those using it, and to those who research those using it. One such researcher, Dr. Helen Young, describes how "medievalist references littered the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th." Early media coverage struggled to describe what it was seeing, often treating the medieval imagery as a weird eccentric spectacle. Young refuses that framing. In her account, these references functioned as signals, intelligible to an audience already steeped in far-right mythologies of civilisational decline and beguiled by the promises of their 'rightful' (racial) inheritance.

Invoking Crusader imagery attempts to condense a long and complex history into a single moral claim: a white, heterosexual Christian Europe is under attack by outside invaders, and requires violence to protect it. This is another example of the wider Restorative Past Fantasy, and it's one the right-wing project uses to justify violence as a defensive manoeuvre. Any claim to inherited authority depends on lineage. Lineage, in turn, requires the regulation of sex, reproduction, and heritage, with heterosexual marriage positioned as the mechanism through which continuity is secured and legitimised. This is how a selectively-remembered past is engineered to police the present. The hetconning at work here begins by engineering a uniformly heterosexual past, one organised around biology and inheritance, then flattening and whitening that history until genealogical lineage can be treated as a form of property. Once that sense of entitlement is in place, the present is recast as a dispute over rightful ownership of an ancestral inheritance. Since the Nazi elevation of a mythologised "Germanic" past in the service of white supremacy, medieval material, particularly Scandinavian myth and legend, has repeatedly been pressed into service as evidence of a supposedly pure, pre-contact white Europe. This framing persists despite extensive historical evidence of cultural exchange, migration, trade, and intermarriage between ancient and medieval societies across Europe.

Medievalist scholars (and even re-enactors) have been warning for years that white nationalists have been deliberately appropriating medieval aesthetics. Sierra Lomuto stresses the responsibility the academy has during these appropriation attempts, noting "When white nationalists turn to the Middle Ages to find a heritage for whiteness-to seek validation for their claims of white supremacy-and they do not find resistance from the scholars of that past; when this quest is celebrated and given space within our academic community, our complacency becomes complicity." Taking this responsibility seriously in her own practice, she adds, "If we have a Richard Spencer in one of our classes, we can be sure he will not leave better equipped and more justified to spread his white supremacist hate." The mistake, structurally, is to treat the medievalism on display on January 6th as either (a) a juvenile aesthetic or (b) a sincere love of history. The "Q Shaman" (also known as Jake Angeli, but whose real name is Jacob Anthony Chansley) put his historical ignorance on full display when, as Richard Fahey writes, "his caricature more closely resembles the ahistorical symbol of the Minnesota Vikings' football team than anything remotely resembling what a medieval Viking might have looked like." This aesthetic is engineered for circulation. Which begs the question, what work does that circulation perform, and who benefits from it? It smuggles in a set of assumptions about how power ought to be organised, particularly advocating for a return to feudalism. On paper, removed from its dirt and shit and disease, a system of medieval kings, lords, vassals, and subjects offers a world that feels ordered, hierarchical, and calm, especially to alienated people.

For the non-substackers:

okay i got a little steamed in this one

New hetconned: Special Little Lords

The medieval imagery of the alt-right on display at rallies and the January 6 insurrection lines up neatly with neo-feudal ideas circulating among tech elites about inheritance, hierarchy, and rolling back democracy.

hetconned.substack.com/p/special-li...

New: Masculinity wasn’t “simpler” before feminism. It just went unchallenged. Today’s reactionary nostalgia touted by the manosphere turns men inward, shrinking life to the management of their own bodies instead of fully participating in civic and social life: hetconned.substack.com/p/masculinit...

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

New: Masculinity wasn’t “simpler” before feminism. It just went unchallenged. Today’s reactionary nostalgia touted by the manosphere turns men inward, shrinking life to the management of their own bodies instead of fully participating in civic and social life: hetconned.substack.com/p/masculinit...

What Are We Fucking Doing Here Guards! Seize her!

If you could sub and share with people you think would like it that would be super appreciated! I really want to share this with other people who think about these online freaks as much as I do.

I'm also blogging more casual (non-hetconned) stuff here: yeahrighto.substack.com/p/what-are-w...

This is why so much contemporary masculinity discourse collapses inward, away from politics and toward self-management. The promise on offer is not transformation but relief: a way to feel resolved without having to renegotiate power, responsibility, or collective life. Masculinity becomes a private renovation project, something to be optimised through habits and discipline, while the social arrangements (and labour) surrounding it are ignored. As Raewyn Connell puts it in her book "Masculinities", "therapeutic methods of reforming personality treat the individual as the unit to be reformed... The project of remaking the self may represent containment, not revolution." What is framed as depth is often a narrowing. The problem is shrunk to the size of a single man's psyche, and anything that insists on structural change can be dismissed as unnecessary complication. In this light, the fantasy of a simpler masculine past reads less like nostalgia and more like a child crossing his arms and pouting because he's been asked to do something hard.

Next draft is almost done (probably publishing later this week maybe), the second Restorative Past fantasy listed in there, the (fake) idea that feminism has "complicated" masculinity, or ruined or diminished it in some way (usually by withholding our labour). Here's a splash:

“Traditional Family Values” and the Labour They Conceal (Home)making America Great Again

And my third post is the first example of deeper dives into that Restorative Past fantasy, specifically about the tradwife phenomenon and how it requires a huge amount of hetconning to convince anyone 'Going Back' is in any way a good thing for women: hetconned.substack.com/p/traditiona...

The Restorative Past fantasy The belief that there was once a coherent, pure, morally legible past, and that the present is a fallen copy.

The second post is an example of a type of fantasy I'll be exploring in more depth (with more granular examples needing their own posts), and that's the Restorative Past fantasy, the (fake) idea we need to "go back" to when things were "simpler": hetconned.substack.com/p/the-restor...

Hetconned: understanding the temporal engineering of the contemporary far-right Why the far-right keeps selling us a past that never existed

The first post is explaining the umbrella concept a bit more, where I position hetconning as a kind of temporal engineering and a key political technology of the modern right-wing project. hetconned.substack.com/p/hetconned-...

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

ICYMI: I've been blogging about a framework I'm using to map the fantasies the right-wing are selling in a post-truth world to advance their creepy little agenda. 'Hetconning' is the retroactive straight-washing of history to frame queerness as a modern intrusion, & crucial to so many culture wars.

the next restorative past fantasy i’ll be going into is neatly segued from this: how feminism apparently “complicated” masculinity.

“Traditional Family Values” and the Labour They Conceal (Home)making America Great Again

And the first of the deeper dives within the restorative past fantasies is out: “traditional family values” hetconned.substack.com/p/traditiona...

Hetconning is a required political technology to do this work, its used to insist that the nuclear heterosexual family is a social unit as old as time, and that things were “simpler” and therefore better before we “complicated” things by having opinions about who we married or how many kids we had.

"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

I think waving away the tradwife phenomenon as a frivolous aesthetic concern or an issue of personal choice we should keep our noses out of is ignoring a much larger consolidation of power this gives momentum to, and the momentum continues despite the inherent hypocrisy behind it:

"Traditional Family Values" and the Labour They Conceal (Home)making America Great Again HETCONNED.SUBSTACK.COM

The affective economies of tradwifery are complex and layered, men are soothed by all the unpaid labour they enjoy but also by their new position as “stabliser”, where they can reframe control as care. Exhausted women are soothed by opting out of social negotiation by submitting to their husbands.

“Traditional Family Values” and the Labour They Conceal (Home)making America Great Again

First one under the larger umbrella of restorative past fantasies, “traditional family values” explores tradwives and the hetconning required to sustain them: hetconned.substack.com/p/traditiona...

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…

"Traditional family values" as a timeless structure The invocation of "traditional family values" relies on a sleight of hand so brazen it almost dares you to call it out. What is presented as some ancient moral inheritance is, in practice, a mid-twentieth-century artefact, assembled from Cold War anxieties, suburbanisation, and postwar consumer capitalism. The nuclear family was not discovered in scripture or handed down from antiquity; it was aggressively marketed as a stabilising unit in an era terrified of communism, queerness, women's labour, and racial integration. To call this arrangement timeless is not ignorance but strategy. The hetconning here is laundering a historically specific social form to appear as though it has been here for an eternity. Masculinity as something feminism "complicated" The claim that masculinity was once simple before feminism arrived to ruin it mistakes enforced silence for peace and order. What reactionaries mourn is not a coherent identity but the absence of challenge. Earlier masculinities were no less contradictory, brittle, or anxious; they were simply protected from interrogation by law, custom, and violence. Feminism did not complicate masculinity so much as expose its restrictions and costs, particularly for women, and the men who could not or would not conform. The fantasy here is a wishful daydream for unaccountability. By framing feminist critique as needless complexity, the past is rewritten as a place where men didn't have to be accountable to their community, and men were free to self-select exactly what form their "protection" of women would entail, without their pesky input. Medievalism and nationalist inheritance Modern nationalist medievalism depends on a cartoonish compression of time, where centuries of migration, intermarriage, religious conflict, and imperial violence are flattened into a single, mythic lineage. Claims of rightful descent invoke a fantasy Middle Ages populated exclusively by the speaker's ima…

authority are treated as heirlooms stolen by outsiders rather than contested and continually remade. The medieval past functions less as history than as a costume cupboard, supplying armour, crosses, and banners that lend gravitas to contemporary exclusionary projects. Digital nostalgia for early internet cultures Nostalgia for the early internet often reads as a lament for lost innocence, but what is being mourned is more accurately a loss of dominance. The "frontier" web remembered by its loudest defenders was smaller, whiter, more male, and far less accountable. Harassment, piracy, and exclusion were not aberrations but structuring features, invisible only to those they did not target. By framing this era as a fallen Eden corrupted by moderation, diversity, or platform governance, critics recast structural harms as creative freedoms. The fantasy of the early internet performs the same work as other restorative myths: it transforms a space of unequal power into a lost commons, and the expansion of participation into a mortal decline. "Return to the gold standard" and allied slogans Calls to "return" to the gold standard or similarly archaic economic arrangements operate as talismans rather than proposals. These slogans gesture toward a fantasy of monetary purity, where value was supposedly stable, labour rewarded fairly, and the nation insulated from global complexity. What they omit is that such systems were historically accompanied by brutal inequality, restricted participation, and frequent crisis. The appeal lies not in feasibility but in moral theatre. Gold becomes shorthand for discipline, restraint, and masculine seriousness, opposed to the perceived softness of contemporary economic management. As with other restorative fantasies, the past is less a workable model than a rhetorical weapon used to delegitimise the present. Retro-aesthetics and sanitised eras Retro aesthetics perform ideological laundering through style. By isolating the surface textures of …

allow consumers to enjoy nostalgia without reckoning. The diner, the dress, the muscle car, the pastoral homestead all appear without the labour exploitation, racial terror, marital coercion, or imperial violence that made them possible. This is not accidental. Aestheticisation drains history of consequence, turning periods defined by struggle into mood boards. In doing so, retro culture trains us to desire the feeling of the past while rejecting any responsibility for its conditions, a perfect preparation for a hetconned world. I'll no doubt add more as I go. The restorative past fantasy is not a single story but a generative one, capable of attaching itself to wildly different political projects while performing the same work. Other fantasies I'm mapping include beliefs about a purified or "primal" self buried beneath modern interference (The Purified Self fantasy), in clean-slate fantasies of escape and rebirth (The Clean Break/Year Zero on Mars fantasy), in meritocratic stories that moralise inequality (The Meritocratic Ascension fantasy), in secret-knowledge Qanon narratives that promise order through codes and research (The Secret Knowledge fantasy), and in zero-sum accounts of gender that cast women as a scarce resource to be claimed (The Scarcity of Women fantasy) =. These are not discrete pathologies. They are expressions of a shared impulse: to resolve the instability of the present by imagining that the answer already exists somewhere else in time. The aim of this project is not to catalogue every version of that impulse, but to look them in the eye. Once these fantasies are named, they become easier to recognise as they circulate, mutate, and harden into policy 2. This recognition doesn't dispel their appeal, but it does interrupt and undermine their claim to inevitability. And in a political moment that trades so heavily on the feeling that nothing else is possible, I think that interruption matters. - Leena 1 (I have several more in mind but I got bore…

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. LEENA DEC 19, 2025 Share ... America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. -John Le Carré Image of Nazi book burning in 1933

In contemporary political rhetoric, it's striking how rarely we're invited to imagine something new. To consider futures possible. More often, the imagination is directed backward, toward return. The language of restoration dominates, promising the recovery of something coherent, moral, and natural that's supposedly been lost. I use The Restorative Past fantasy to describe this broad mode of temporal engineering. It encompasses projects as varied as tradwives and "traditional family values" narratives that frame masculinity as newly endangered (as though men are about to be suddenly raptured out of existence), nationalist appeals to a pure or rightful inheritance, and the soft-focus nostalgia that sanitises violence and exclusion in both digital culture and public life. What unites these examples is the conviction that the past already contains the answer, and that it's the role of political institutions is to restore and police that order. The appeal of the Restorative Past fantasy lies in its ability to convert political disagreement into a mission of moral repair. If the problem is decline rather than inequality, then the task is not redistribution or transformation but correction. Something went wrong. Something was introduced that did not belong. Remove it, and the world might make sense again. Queerness is one particularly convenient target for this work, and hetconning is a useful political technology to help get it done. There is no historical basis for the idea of a uniformly heterosexual past. Queer lives are threaded through the record, sometimes submerged in euphemism or omission, but never wholly absent. This fact unsettles the story of heterosexuality as a natural default, revealing it instead as a social arrangement that has always required active maintenance. By presenting exclusion as a correction, hetconning reframes that same maintenance work, recasting violence and erasure as necessary acts of upkeep. The removal of queer people from public life …

This is not only a matter of belief, but of affect. Restorative fantasies offer relief from the instability of the present. They promise escape from the ongoing work of negotiating difference, and the discomfort of social change. They transform disorientation into grievance and grievance into purpose. In moments of crisis, that offer can be compelling. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Berlin enjoyed a dense and public queer culture, supported by bars, publications, advocacy networks, and research institutions, most notably the Institute for Sexual Science. This visibility became a focal point for reactionary narratives that framed modernity itself as decadent and corrupt. Queerness became a scapegoat for broader anxieties about social change, sexual freedom, and the erosion of traditional authority. When the Nazis consolidated power, they didn't just criminalise queer people. They destroyed archives, burned research, and dismantled the institutions that put queer life on the public record. I hesitate a little here, as direct comparisons between Weimar Germany and the contemporary United States are... indelicate. Different century, different institutions, different scale. But the continuity that matters here lies in the boring mechanics of administration, where power advances not through heroic spectacle but sometimes in the banality of office paperwork. In early 2025, as part of a sweeping rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the Trump administration began purging government materials and websites of language deemed ideologically suspect. The instruction was blunt and mechanical: search for prohibited terms and remove them. Among the matches was a Boeing B-29 bomber preserved in the historical record under its name, the Enola Gay. The record was flagged for removal because the word "gay" was caught by a broad, indiscriminate Ctrl-F sweep. History was reduced to a searchable database in which certain strings of characters had become una…

The Restorative Past fantasy, for the non-substackers:

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

My first deep dive for the hetconned files: The Restorative Past fantasy. The belief that the past was pure & that we need to “retvrn”. Hetconned is me trying to understand the temporal engineering of the contemporary far-right and why their project relies on selling us a past that never existed.