People are always talking about the alt-right, neo-Nazis, KKK, etc like “ugh, these losers, no one takes them seriously, don’t call them Nazis when they’re nothing like REAL Nazis” and like...who do you people think the “real” Nazis were?

They were, for the most part, not the most popular kids on the block. Kind of hard to make friends when your ideas are all repugnant! Hitler himself was a failed art student, minor soldier who puffed up his own credentials, who was apparently homeless for a while

He was not his own definition of an Uber-mensch. His friends weren’t either. They were the dregs. And it took years for them to gain any actual power. But they did it by normalizing the horrible things they were saying

The early years of a slow motion slide into fascism doesn’t look like goose-stepping soldiers in Hugo Boss uniforms. It looks like reasonable people with important platforms saying “hey, everyone should have a voice, let’s explore their ideas in open debate”

Because they’re GOOD at using our own tools against us. Especially freedom of speech.

The reason I jump straight to asking “do you want women to be enslaved and distributed to lonely men” to people talking about “sexual redistribution” as a solution to incels isn’t because I think they sincerely believe that right this second. It’s because it’s the endpoint.

Hitler didn’t start with “kill all the ‘undesirables’.” He started with “separate them from ‘normal’ people” then “deport them” then “deport them to labor camps” and THEN “straight up murder.” Each step, once it had gradually been accepted by the population, greasing the ramp.

So the important thing to do is not to let them get on that ramp in the first place. Not one step. Whether that step is “what if we considered abortion legally murder” or “what if we redistributed sexual access to women” or “but what if there ARE genetic racial IQ differences”

None of it is just a harmless intellectual exercise. Not when we know where those trains of thought go when allowed to continue unchecked. There is no debating any ideology that invalidates the full personhood of any living, breathing human being.

Also this “those aren’t REAL Nazis, they’re just losers” argument sounds an awful lot like admiration for the original Nazis, so. Cut it out.