Personally I don’t care to characterize em as lunatics, because that word really only serves to categorize them into an entirely different realm of brain function, and I feel like that’s counterproductive and misrepresents how fascism works. It’s not that millions of people lose their minds and frothingly support fascism, it’s that fascism is capable of presenting itself as something else, or necessary, to an otherwise normal in-group base using a number of psychological weak points, many of which have been exacerbated in the Internet age with little popular understanding.

To name one example, I think of some folks I knew in my hometown, brilliant engineers, electricians, people with extreme talent in one specific thing, living in places where diversity has been historically squashed so they’ve only known a snow globe’s worth of the world. And, especially among the older generation, they’re simultaneously not very social media savvy but also way too online… Once they’re given a nebulous external force to fear, the final stop of that train should be a surprise to no one.

I don’t say this to absolve fascists of personal blame, because well and truly fuck 'em, they are responsible nonetheless. But fantasizing that their brains are just broken and don’t function like ours is missing the point. Everyone’s susceptible to a grift, social media bubble, or wishful thinking of some kind. And when you factor in trauma as a politically neutral psychological force, human behavior suddenly becomes a lot less “stupid” and a lot more… frustrating. Pretending we’re not weak to analogues of many of the same things is doing ourselves a disservice. We need a better standard than just doing what they do when they talk about trans people like we’re space aliens incapable of reason.