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I just saw another video of Theo Von clearly struggling with his support of Trump. I’ve seen so many others in that same position. On one hand, yeah, it’s easy to call them idiots for not seeing it sooner. But on the other, I get it. You go from being a comedian to suddenly part of this powerful inner circle, and that kind of validation is intoxicating, especially for someone with addiction issues who’s always chasing a high.
What frustrates me is how we, especially on the left, tend to fumble these moments. Instead of recognizing that some of these people might be waking up, we rush to humiliate them. We waste the opportunity to build something better just so we can rub their faces in it and get our own little high.
That’s something that really pisses me off about the left: the way we seize the worst possible opportunities and completely ignore the critical ones. Right now, yeah, some MAGA influencers are doubling down. But others? They're starting to crack. And instead of isolating them even more, maybe we should be thinking about how to help them speak about their shift in perspective.
I agreed with everything you said except the show them mercy part. They are worthless animals not fit to be called humans and liberals again and again giving them chances is why we are here.
They don’t deserve chances. They deserve public mockery, shame, and if we can get things right again, exile.
That's the kind of attitude towards fascists that leads to complacency and a belief that it couldn't happen here or we're better than that. The most important thing to understand about a fascist is that they're a person like you. No one is immune to the risk of falling into it. All it takes is the right circumstances to incentivize a person, and there's a decent chance they will take up fascism.
If we hold that Nazis were monsters, or subhumans, or some other kind of beast entirely unlike us, we will never dig deep to understand what makes fascism appealing or what needs it serves, and we will miss the warning signs in ourselves and those around us should we start sliding towards it. I think most Americans missed their own country's capacity for fascism until it was right on top of them, because they had spent decades imagining the Nazis as some special kind of inhuman monster. That attitude is dangerous. Fascists are ordinary people like us.
You got it all wrong, pal. Tolerance is what lead to complacency. They need the same treatment thrown back at them ten fold.
If they lose a job, cheer. If they are homeless, tell them to ask daddy Trump for help. If they are isolated from family, play the small violin.
And why the fuck should we keep trying to understand them?
I'm not saying we should tolerate fascists, or expend all our energies trying to understand why a hateful person is hateful. But we have to recognize that they're not monsters or subhumans, they're people. Cruel and hateful people, but people like us. Those tendencies are in us all, but in some people they become totally dominant and in other people they shrink until they're almost not there. But they're there.