This is the article which I do not recommend.

benthams.substack.com/p/how-contin...

I suppose that, even as padding for an article that has no substance, this is somehow less embarrassing than the parts where he tries to engage with authentic human-written examples. In those, he proves that he simply cannot parse fairly basic sentences.

You'll have to follow me back or open your DMs

All of that said, don't get your hopes too high. Never place your faith in politicians, they will always let you down that's their job.

We should wrapping up right around the time Trump passes an Enabling Act after the midterms. Final session will be held in the internment camps.

Fascism is an historical force that mobilises the latent material of middle-class resentment that one can see in memes like this. There are other, less horrific, possibilities for that latent material. But in a moment of deepening crisis, it's easy to see what kind funnels will appear to channel it.

If people who do not contribute to the "national body" are labelled as "parasitic" and "superfluous," there is actually a horrific if natural end to that designation—even if the proponents of this narrative want to think of themselves as separate from those "nasty" kinds of politics.

Of course, this image and others like it go back decades, and most people who think like this are not fascists. The point is exactly that is a vague enough meme to last beyond the shifting of political realities, while still connecting "common sense" right-wing instincts to eliminationist ends.

Some of this is generational as well. Mine had some funny and negative things, but I can at least genuinely say that becoming a Nazi was outright impossible. Excluding that was an a priori bedrock of my politics from the start. Much of Gen Z grew up without those guardrails, which is a little scary.

On some level, people like this never changed their politics even if they shifted leftward. The special hatred that they have for liberals and anarchists and the like makes a lot more psychological sense once you identify the kinds of people who would have journeys like this.

Ideas like "red fascism" and "totalitarianism" have some problems as self-sufficient political theories (despite my pfp). But there's definitely some truth to them as sociological rather than theoretical observations, at least among certain Leninists.