Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Jordan S. Carroll. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. 120 pp.
Review by Lorenzo Fabbri
29 May 2025
Adapting a comment attributed to Upton Sinclair, George Carlin once joked that when fascism comes to America, it won’t arrive in brown or black shirts. It won’t come with jackboots. It will come wearing Nike sneakers and smiley-face T-shirts.
We see now that when fascism comes to America—if it hasn’t already—it will show up wearing a Colonize Mars T-shirt and driving a Tesla, a car purposely designed to resemble a spaceship from science fiction.
What makes Speculative Whiteness: The Alt-Right and the Future of Racial Capitalism by Jordan S. Carroll such a compelling study is its demonstration that the connection between the alt-right—arguably the dominant political force in the US and perhaps globally—and certain strands of science fiction is far from superficial. Carroll focuses on how speculative fiction—particularly the works of A. E. van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein, Jerry Pournelle, and Larry Niven—has been appropriated by closeted fascists to support white nationalist, techno-libertarian visions. Tropes of an Earth devastated by the subjugation of the white race to lesser peoples; dreams of rebooting settler colonialism on new frontiers; and fantasies of bold, risk-taking white men fulfilling the manifest destiny of their race—these are not merely recurring motifs. They constitute a shared ideological horizon between the radical right and sci-fi imaginaries.
Carroll frames this relationship primarily as one of weaponization: science fiction is used by politicians and pundits to transform white supremacy from an unspeakable proposition into a necessary and even inevitable project. One might go further and suggest that alt-right ideology gravitates toward science fiction not only for strategic purposes but because both emerge from the same epistemic framework—twin expressions of the discursive logic of racial capitalism.
In this worldview—shared by tech-libertarians at the heart of the current fascist revival and authors like Ayn Rand and van Vogt—speculative capacity emerges as the defining trait of whiteness. White people alone, they argue, are endowed with a dual speculative potential: the courage to take existential risks and the imagination to conjure futures that redress history—futures untainted by DEI foreign agents and anti-white, anti-male “aliens” (p. 13). Speculative Whiteness shows with precision how, in this imaginary, there is nothing more to nonwhite people than what they already are. Their potential is exhausted.
The category of potentiality has a long and troubling history in Western thought. From Aristotle to G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger, from Francis Galton’s, Herbert Spencer’s, and Thomas Robert Malthus’s Social Darwinism to Nazi death camps and American eugenics, it has served to discriminate between forms of life—assigning different beings their place and rank in the world. Within this logic, some lives are capable only of survival; others possess the power to transcend it, to thrive, to achieve greatness.
This same paradigm surfaces in both popular science fiction and white supremacist thought, culminating in a racialized hierarchy of the living. In the fascist view, nonwhite people are locked in a state of modal impoverishment, cut off from the possibility of transformation. Whites, by contrast, are the ones with the power to mutate: they are, quite literally, mutants. Not confined to the here and now, they are imagined as racially destined to inhabit a grander space-time continuum, to explore vast historical and spatial possibilities.
Speculative Whiteness deftly dismantles these self-serving illusions of grandeur. The future envisioned by the alt-right—a world ruled by white nerds, “slans” in van Vogt’s terms—is ultimately a return to a dismal past: war, violence, misogyny, homophobia, and racial exploitation (p. 31). Hence, the alt-right’s new man is not courageous or forward-looking; his speculative potential is, in fact, null. Carroll persuasively demonstrates that while white supremacists and tech-libertarians incessantly invoke futurity and boundless potential, they are fearful beings, terrified of futurity itself—of the possibility that humanity might truly mutate into something better than what has been.
This also explains their aversion to Star Trek’s world making. That universe offers a glimpse of what we might become once we abandon what bell hooks calls the “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.”[1] Carroll makes it clear: the alt-right’s true nightmare isn’t dystopia, but utopia—the possibility that everyone, regardless of color, gender, sex, religion, or origin, might, in fact, live long and prosper.
[1] bell hooks, Writing beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (New York, 2013), pp. 4–5.
