On Resisting Gatekeeping and All Fascism including Creeping Technofascism

A recap of our recent reporting plus bonus musings.

Mar 08, 2025

While our Substack highlights our recent ourtownreno.com articles, a lot of our work takes place on our socials (we are mainly on Instagram, Facebook, a subreddit, X, and the much more civilized Bluesky and Threads) with short posts, recaps, photo series, promos, takes on local happenings, alerts, summaries of city meetings and occasional videos, coming both from the community and our rotating team of diverse student reporters.

Of late, we’ve noticed more and more gatekeeping and wannabe policing from comments, as to what we should or shouldn’t post about, or as to who knows what about Reno and has authority over its narrative, discounting other views and perspectives, even if these genuinely exist, from some young people calling the Biggest Little City the dirty R to having difficult experiences then and now in the local music scene to being worried about a former Newsmax figure hired by local tv.

That’s been the whole point of Our Town Reno from the start: to tell local stories and give perspectives being mostly ignored in local media and feeds. Another anchor of ours has been to stand up to and point out any indication of fascism locally.

If this comes with a flood of fascists outing themselves in the comments, so be it. There are so many comments sometimes, we can’t keep up or stop looking.

Holding up the dam is not easy, and if you look into the fascism coming from Washington, D.C., it’s taking on serious technofascism shading, with the prominence of Elon Musk.

Musk has both admirers and detractors locally, and the Silver State is part of his story, with $330 million in tax breaks given here just two years ago for Tesla’s expansion.

Many might not know Musk’s maternal grandfather was a member of the pre Second World War technocracy movement in Canada, expressing racist, anti-Semitic and antidemocratic views.

Musk himself weaves these ideas with constant trolling including using AI for disinformation, the pursuits of anti-human extreme efficiency, luxury prepping, crypto nihilism, exorbitant corporate greed and space exploration megalomania. Some of these aspirations can be traced to a new movement called Tescreal which stands for "Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective altruism, and longtermism.”

We much prefer our simple #helpeachother hashtag and promoting the mutual aid heroes and sheroes of Reno, while continuing to be on the lookout for local fascistic conduct, whatever version it comes in.