Content Warning:
We are dealing with literal Nazis here, so extreme misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia,
​and discussion of rape and other forms of violence are never off the table.
Really I’ve been meaning to write this thing for a while. The recent outcome of the Presidential election just provided a convenient exigence. It’s barely been a week—as of writing this—and there’s already been a considerable uptick in extremely bigoted and fascist rhetoric, both online and otherwise.

​Just after the election, at Texas State University, a demonstration was held where two large signs were held up. The first: “HOMO SEX IS A SIN” emblazoned on both sides. The second read “WOMEN ARE PROPERTY” on the first side, and “Types of Property: WOMEN, SLAVES, ANIMALS, CARS, LAND, ECT…” Online, the phrase “your body, my choice”, (sometimes varied as “your body, our choice”) has gone viral after Nick Fuentes used the sexist appropriation of the feminist slogan “my body, my choice.” Just before the election, the “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe cracked extremely bigoted jokes, not only calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, but making racist comments about Black Americans and transphobic remarks as well. Hinchcliffe also supported the genocide of Palestinians, while simultaneously making antisemitic remarks; “The Palestinians are gonna throw rock every time,” he said, in reference to Palestinian demonstrators throwing stones at Israeli occupiers. To complete the “joke”, he used the long standing antisemitic trope of Jewish people and money, quipping that the “Jews have a hard time throwing that paper.”

It shouldn’t even be needed to point out that all of the things I just listed are absolutely disgusting and horrifying. I flinched even typing those things out. Unfortunately, all of these things are also not simple random acts of malice. Rather, they are part of an intentional strategy, one determined to propagate a fascist worldview. This strategy has multiple facets, so I'm gonna go over some bullet points here:
How the Far Right Recruits
  • Plenty has been written over the years about the “Alt-Right Rabbithole” and how people “escaped” from it, but often what is overlooked is how this process of recruitment actually works, with most articles providing a hand-wavey mention of “algorithm” at best. While algorithms can, and often are, part of the process, they are far from the whole story. To understand this process, we need to understand our victim. He is most commonly:
    • White 
    • Male
    • Aged somewhere between 13 and 30
    • Is or was not the popular at school, often was bullied
    • Cishet (as far as he knows; a refusal to come to terms with one’s sexuality/gender is often a strong motivator for people to get sucked into these things)
    • Holds somewhat niche interests, just enough to make him “feel” marginalized even if he is not; REALLY likes anime and video games (honestly not a bad chance he’s a furry); spends the majority of his time in front of a computer screen
    • Probably hasn’t had the best romantic success
    • Crucially, there is something important going on in his life; Something large enough that he’s begun to very drastically re-evaluate his choices in life and his identity and beliefs, where he feels vulnerable; it could be as major as a family member passing away, it could be as minor as moving to a new house. It could be that a new group of people are moving into his traditionally white suburban neighborhood, and that he is faced with the decision of responding with acceptance and understanding or with fear and bigotry. Either way, he’s confused about himself and his position in life somehow.
    • Also crucial: He isn’t happy. He’s either emotionally numb or severely depressed in some way.
    • Before recruitment, he’s most likely apolitical or just the common brand of “liberal, I guess?” that most kids his age are.
    • Basically, he’s suffering under late-stage capitalism, same as all of us. (In fact, if the conditions are right, occasionally he—or maybe newly discovered they or she—goes down the path of becoming a leftist.)
  • Now that we understand who he is, now we can understand how he is taken to where he will end up, and this generally end happening in two ways:
    • He finds the Nazis. This can be as simple as him deciding one day to type 4chan.org into his browser. This is actually surprisingly common, and 4chan itself is such an enigma that I’m going to talk about it in full depth in another section. While the random stumbling into a chan board is more common than one might think, the most common source of recruitment actually starts on YouTube. YouTube is a huge platform—in fact the second most searched website only after Google—with a huge variety of people with varying content, ideas, political views, following, ect. It also happens to be a platform that our subject consumes pretty regularly. What ends up happening much of the time is that he gets recommended to these “personalities.” These people can be pretty variable; we’re talking everyone ranging from Jordan Peterson, to Ben Shapiro, to Blair White, to Stefan Molyneux, to Paul Joseph Watson, to Steven Crowder, to Matt Walsh, to Lauren Southern, to Tyler Oliveira, to a youtube channel called “Hoe Math”. While the content of these people can be wildly different, what they usually have in common is that they sell right wing politics, not as politics, but as something else. In Tyler Oliveira’s case it's faux-journalism; for Jordan Peterson it’s phony life advice; for “Hoe Math” it’s dating tips and justifications for why your lack of romantic success actually isn’t your fault. Personally, I have a lot of trouble seeing any of these people as charismatic in any way, but our subject does. And while he’s watching their content, he’s being sold something to solve his problem: Anger. He doesn’t actually notice that he isn’t happy, he just notices his lack of immediate sadness. The hole in his heart is filled with hatred. Of course, this content doesn’t make him happy; it makes him frustrated. If you are told that you are going to die a virgin and that all of the immigrants are coming to kill us, you aren’t actually happy. But he doesn’t know any other place to vent his fear and frustration except at the very source he got it from. This dynamic is the same as the one that keeps people in abusive relationships; indeed, that is all radicalization is, an abusive relationship. It usually starts off pretty small; it’s hard to create a bigot by giving them the bigotry all at once, that usually just scares people away. Instead, it's spoonfed to him slowly; most people who start down the rabbit hole start as single-issue voters, who are slowly made to swallow more and more “pills” as they descend down the layers. The layers themselves can vary in order a great deal, but are usually something like:
      • Anti-femenist/Anti-SJW rhetoric/Free Speech “being attacked”
      • Queerphobia/”Grooming”/Autogynephilia/Gender Essentialism
      • More radical misogyny/Gender “Traditionalism”/Manosphere
      • Birtherism
      • Sandy Hook “Truth”
      • Pizzagate
      • More radical racism/”The great replacement”/Race realism
      • QAnon/Generally more batshit conspiracy theories
      • The Jewish Question
    • During each layer, our subject believes that he is at the final stage of his journey; every layer behind him is silly unenlightened centrism —asleep—while every layer before him are the illusions of overreacting liberals, so negligible that no one takes them seriously. While this is happening, the algorithm sees that he enjoys this type of content, and recommends everything related. Since creators from each layer tend to have contacts with each other, YouTube is going to recommend him progressively deeper layers; even if they disavow one another in theory, all YouTube sees is that they show up in each other’s metadata A TON.
    • The Nazis find him. This can happen through a content creator/streamer, especially ones with a predominantly white male audience: they decide to do something edgy, and a portion of their audience reacts positively. This attracts more Nazis to the audience, and gets the creator to do something more egregious. This vicious cycle continues until a dynamic forms where the creator is both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience. This phenomenon has been well attested with the YouTuber PewDiePie; Does this mean I think PewDiePie is “literally a Nazi?” Not necessarily. But he certainly sent a lot of impressionable kids barreling in that direction. Another way the Nazis will come for him is by colonizing a fandom he belongs too. The motivation for this can be external—maybe a TV or movie series casts a character that is female, nonwhite, queer, neurodivergent, ect.—or it can be external—a bunch of channers decide to join a forum and spam bigoted jokes and comments. In either case, there’s a dynamic that’s really key here: The weaponization of “apoliticism”. If a fandom starts to have a Nazi problem, it is going to receive progressive criticism of said Nazi problem. This is the perfect opportunity for the fascists to slice the fandom up, and drive out dissent. They will say “the Nazi shit is a joke, obviously. Why are you making things political?” Now, sometimes, this can backfire, and the fandom emerges even MORE progressive than when it started. But more often than not, what this results in is progressives and minorities slowly being forced out of the community, either exhausted from having to be a keyboard warrior in a space they used to use to nerd out with their friends about something they liked, or genuinely and rightfully worried about their safety with all of the hateful and bigoted comments being thrown around. And our subject? Well, when forced to choose between leaving a fandom he’s loved for years or staying and only having to tolerate a few edgy jokes (this is from his perspective, not ours, of course), he’s going to choose the latter. It’s the same dynamic as when he hears a racist joke at his school; he can either choose the option where he enjoys the experience of laughing with his friends, or he can choose the option where he must leave and reassess who he hangs out with. The former option brings people together, the latter tears them apart. And nine times out of ten, our subject is going to take the path of least resistance rather than stand up for what is right. From here, the Nazis can give him the aforementioned “pills”, bringing him down each layer. The irony is that all of this is MUCH more “political” than casting a character that isn’t strictly a white guy.
  • Why? Why do all of this? Why operate in this strange enigmatic manner? Well, the answer is two words: Plausible Deniability. The Nazis didn’t go online around 2013 to “get hip with the kids.” They went online to cover their asses. Gamergate in 2014 was a notable proof of concept for this new form of organization. And you could also make the argument that Charlottesville in 2017 was an attempt to take the alt-right offline and into the real world (an attempt that ostensibly backfired, claiming the life of a counter-protestor and turning the media against them). The last step of a traditional hate group is to be assigned a mission: the members then go on with the group to commit some horrible act of violence, lose all credibility with the media, and lots of the members would be killed in the aforementioned act or go to prison. Of course, this is also the part where the liberal establishment completely fails to finish the job by retaking the narrative, allowing the existing members to lay low and then start back up where the last group left off. But with that aside, going online and having this radicalization process, the fascists create an echo chamber of hatred. It’s sadly unsurprising how many young men go on to commit mass shootings; yet it’s very hard to argue that any one of the conservative content creators/personalities told them to do it. This system takes these vulnerable men, makes them incredibly angry, and then does nothing but leave them to stew in their own vitriol. This isn’t just a political recruitment strategy. It’s a hateful machine that churns out lone-wolf terrorists.  
  • ​Jesus, I guess by bullet point I meant “4 page 1500+ word ramble that would easily survive as a standalone article”. Then again, the inability to compress nuanced truths is something that I am going to cover in another point.
4chan and Irony Poisoning 
  • 4chan is a weird place, one hard to fully explain. I guess I’ll provide the layman’s history: 4chan started in 2003 as an imageboard mostly dedicated to discussion of various interests, like anime, video games, cooking, music, among other things. 4chan works by hosting various decentralized “boards” that are dedicated to different topics. For much of its early existence, 4chan was… fine? Mostly? The thing that set it apart from its contemporaries like SomethingAwful and Futaba Channel was the distinct lack of moderation (allegedly, Christopher Poole—4chan’s creator—set up the website after SomethingAwful banned hentai, which, uh… really gives you an idea of the website’s philosophy. To be fair, such a thing was also sort of par for the course for an imageboard in the early 2000s.) This lack of moderation led 4chan to develop a distinctly edgy and distasteful kind of humor; slurs were abundant, and bigotry was sort of the norm of humor. Despite this, it tended… mostly harmless? Don’t get me wrong, it was by no means pleasant, and this type of humor is what drove any women or people of color or other minorities off of the site; but in all honesty, it was pretty comparable to the type of shit that white boys would say in locker rooms after a sports game. Which is to say, not good! At all! But not insanely out of the norm, and not very genuine to the actual beliefs of the posters. There was a general feeling that everyone was “doing for the lulz” and “trolling” instead of presenting some actual coherent kind of worldview. This led to many notable memes that spread internet-wide originating from the site, some even quite wholesome, like LOLcats and Rickrolling, both staples of the early internet. Around the early 2010s, this started to change. The jokes weren’t really jokes anymore. The boards started showing more and more Neo-Nazi sentiment. In 2014, dozens of women received targeted harrassment and rape threats from users of the site as part of Gamergate campaign. In 2016, the site’s users were instrumental in the election of Donald Trump, who paid them tribute by tweeting references to many site specific memes. The site has only gotten worse since then; I avoid touching it like the plague, even when trying to conduct primary research. Besides the abundance of porn (which has been built into the site’s DNA since the beginning), scrolling through page after page of horrible slurs and extremely bigoted memes and images makes the site beyond uncomfortable to be on for the majority of sane people.
  • So, what happened? Many people engaged in edgy humor when they were teenagers, yet the vast majority of them didn’t grow up to be Nazis. Well, there’s another aspect that made 4chan unique that I also failed to explain, and that is the option to be completely anonymous (anonymous users on the site are often called “anons” for short). This essentially means that you can say or do anything with virtually no social consequences. If you have a shitty take, no one will even have a username to tie that shitty take to. In fact, it's pretty much impossible to tell who is who, and if they are being serious or not. An “argument” on 4chan may just be a single user stirring the pot, or a couple of users trolling the rest of the board without genuinely believing any of what they say. No code of ethics, no accountability, no expectations. In other words, 4chan really is the “free marketplace of ideas”, in a way. A filthy Darwinist petri dish of thought where only the strongest survive. The key word there is “strongest". Note how I didn’t say “most true” or “most popular,” because that isn’t what matters here. The only thing that matters is being shocking and highly opinionated somehow. Whether the ideas being expressed are actually believed by their poster is pretty much irrelevant. A lot of us, in our adolescence, are enticed by the idea of believing in something, but don’t know what to believe in; so we pick a position, and then see if we like it by defending it. Our opinions—political or otherwise—usually solidify by the time we reach adulthood. 4chan is unique in that this solidification never happens there. Instead, perpetual irony and uncertainty make any genuine discourse extremely rare to come across or recognize if found. Instead, anons simply believe what is most convenient to believe in the moment to win whatever argument they are having. This, naturally, leads to Schrödinger's Douchebag: after making a controversial statement, Schrödinger's Douchebag decides if he was trolling/kidding or not after gauging his audience’s reaction. Schrödinger's Douchebag only believes what is advantageous for him to believe. Forming a coherent worldview from all of this seems nearly impossible. It would be simple to conclude that 4channers (and internet reactionaries by large) have no ideology except for arguing with and annoying liberals. And in fact, this assumption is VERY useful. If you approach engagements with the alt-right under this pretense, you will get MUCH farther than if you take them at their word. But, while the aforementioned sentiment is accurate, it isn’t completely honest. Nihilism isn’t super popular, and it also begs the question; why liberals, specifically? (it's not like it's hard to upset conservatives). Because there must be SOME kind of worldview guiding these people. One answer that comes to mind might be a more practical one: Piss off a feminist or trans rights activist, and the worst they may do is post a well-written video essay about you; Piss off a Nazi, and they might stab you. But perhaps the more clear answer that comes to mind is that their guiding principle is bigotry. Bigotry, more commonly than not, is the lowest common denominator to all of these beliefs. They don’t know what they believe in, but they DO know who they hate. And they are willing to take up any belief just to hurt them. When defending a white nationalist who was arrested, they support freedom of expression, but when it comes to a trans woman, this support evaporates. When christianity  is worming its way into public education, they claim to uphold freedom of religion, but when it comes to muslims entering the U.S., this claim dissipates as well. And most crucially, that isn’t a problem for them.
  • So why did chan boards attract far right extremists anyways? Well, with the incomprehensibility of sincerity, chan boards are arguably BUILT to attract them. They are one of the few places you can say fascist things and blend in perfectly. And in a place where “winning the argument” is the most valued prize, Nazi rhetoric is going to prevail EVERY time. Usually because, at this point, the person on the other side of the debate is thinking “it is probably in my best interests not to engage further with this for my own sanity and or safety.” Of course, this isn’t what the chan board user sees. All they see is that, if this rhetoric keeps winning arguments, there must be something to it.
The “Appearance” of Winning
​and the Simplicity of Truth 
  • In contrast to the long and inaccurate word-salad ramble of the radicalizing influencer, this one revolves around soundbites that are as easily digestible as they are false. As a lefty, I say this with love, but the left has a fatal flaw; Whenever we encounter a nutjob who is spouting hateful bullshit and has no idea what he is talking about, we have the urge to engage with him. We have this fantasy of putting someone in their place, rebutting all of their points and totally schooling them on the real situation by using knowledge and data. Sadly, arguments on the internet (at least, PUBLIC arguments, I should clarify) don’t work like this. Because, as it turns out, that shitty and easily debunkable arguments are not a bug, but a feature. Because, in the world of public discourse, winning matters less than giving the appearance of winning. And in that world, having to explain yourself makes you look weak. Many engagements typically go like this:
    • Reactionary says something short, quippy, and wrong.
    • Lefty provides detailed explanation debunking the claim of the reactionary
    • Reactionary is entirely unphased, nitpicks a tiny piece of the explanation, and makes an egregiously false claim about that.
    • The cycle goes on.
  • If you actually listen to the words being said, it's not even close. The reactionary is constantly changing the subject and moving on to new points, essentially conceding that he lost the previous argument. I mean, how could anybody take this guy seriously; but that’s not what’s important. If you squint your eyes, the reactionary gives the “appearance” of winning. He’s in the dominant position, dictating the direction that the argument goes in, even if he isn’t necessarily convincing anyone of his argument. And understanding this is crucial to understanding his motivations. We on the left have this conception of debate much as Socrates did; a guided discussion with the goal of arriving upon the truth. This is NOT how the right sees debate. To them, debating is an opportunity to project confidence and power.
  • The short quippy remarks the reactionary makes appeals to a common mindset of Conservatives; that the truth is short and easily recognizable. The truth MUST be something simple. Liberals and leftists are making everything way more complicated than it needs to be. Of course, this isn’t true, because the world is not simple. Some things are complex and nuanced and need to be described thusly. But to them, leftists are lying because they are overcomplicating the world. It’s much harder to believe that “climate change is caused by the Earth emitting longwave radiation that is absorbed by greenhouse gasses in the upper atmosphere which reduce cooling, and human caused emissions are increasing these gasses and worsening the effect” than it is to believe “It’s because of sunspots.” In the latter, it’s something natural, and something we don’t have to worry about. In the former, it’s something bad that we must get up off our asses and do something about. Believing the truth is simple makes it easier, even when it isn’t candid.
  • This tactic isn’t just limited to the internet. If you remember the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Trumps’ rhetoric was full of short, quippy, wrong statements, where Harris had to debunk each of his claims calmly. In the moment of the debate, I thought Trump had made a complete fool of himself, and that with all the stuff he was spewing, no one in their right mind would vote for the guy next to the calm and collected Harris. But in the end, Harris’s rhetoric wasn’t the most memorable. Long after the debate, “They’re eating the dogs!” is what most people remember.
  • So next time you find yourself eyeing a comment someone made on your post with an idiotic and easily disprovable argument, you might be now tempted to go into the debate KNOWING all of this. To project your own strength, to point out that truths are not always simple, to project power to your own audience. But, doing this is simply legitimizing their tactics. Don’t give them that opportunity. Simply tell your audience the truth without acknowledging them. For if you engage, you have already taken the bait; hook, line, and sinker.
The Overton Window
​and Mainstreaming
  • There’s a good chance you know this one already; it’s long been pointed out by people much smarter than me. The basic premise goes like this: The “overton window” is the realm of beliefs that society finds acceptable within the political spectrum. Want to shift the window in any given direction (lets say, more to the right)? Simply normalize and mainstream extremely batshit radical beliefs. Sure, you won’t get people to believe them, but that’s fine. What matters is that the person who was decently far on the right before now looks a moderate in contrast to the extremists at the furthest end. The window can only be so large as well, meaning those that were on the left end of the window before are pushed out.
  • So how do you mainstream Nazis? It’s easy; be present and LOUD. The same principles actually govern progressive politics; the reason that queer visibility is so important and helpful is the same reason that Nazi visibility is so dangerous and dreadful. If you make a person visible, they will start to be seen as normal by society. So what do you think conservatives are trying to do with the recent influx of rape threats and anti-abortion attacks and endorsements of Neo-Confederate and Neo-Nazi sentiments? They are trying to platform rapists and racists and make them feel “normal”. Or at the very least, an acceptable fringe, making the racist and misogynistic conservatives that aren’t quite as far right “normal.” We can NOT allow this to happen.
Mondays, amirite? 
  • This one is used to dismiss left wing “idealism”, even when its implementation may be quite pragmatic, by claiming that problems that CAN be solved are simply “human, nature” or “intrinsic to society”. Essentially it gives the reactionary an excuse NOT to listen to any of your points. So when a leftist argues “Hey, we should solve poverty and homelessness,” the reactionary goes “Aw geez, I’d love to. Not the biggest fan of poverty or homelessness myself either. But the sad thing is that these things are simply parts of our society. If you want to help, you can donate to the Salvation Army or something.” The truth is that, with a comparatively little amount of wealth redistribution and publicized housing, poverty and homelessness CAN be solved. We have both the means and resources to solve both issues in the United States. We are just barred from doing so by capitalism. But the reactionary pretends that poverty and homelessness are just as unsolvable annoyances as having to go back to work on monday. It reminds me of the classic quote from brazilian socialist Hélder Pessoa Câmara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
The Pickup Artist 
  • Say that you’ve been arguing with a guy online. I’ve already explained how it's usually not advantageous to go out of your way to be a keyboard warrior, but let’s say you didn’t know better. This guy is arguing against socialized medicine, and not just for the usual reasons; this guy has some pretty nasty things to say about jewish people. He also has some nasty things to say about you! Every day, you have to debunk every single little thing this asshole has to say, all while he ignores you and keeps making ad hominem attacks against you. It's a draining and awful feeling for you, but you can’t just… leave it hanging. So you log on day after day and type your replies as furiously as he attacks you. And then, one day, he stops attacking you. Still hates socialized medicine, still being wholly anti-semetic. But now he acts like you know better, that you’re better than that, being misled. And for some reason, having this guy’s respect feels kind of… cool. In a very weird fucked up way, it’s like he sees potential in you, and it’s kind of nice… Do not be fooled. This is an onboarding tactic. To use the language of pickup artists, this is negging—where the victim is undermined and insulted so that they are made vulnerable and susceptible and crave the attention and validation of the other party—and love-bombing—where the victim is then shown affection to lower their defenses and allow themselves to be controlled by the other party. If someone does this to you, don’t get it twisted: You are being groomed.
The Dog Whistle 
  • This one is a classic. Embed your extreme and bigoted in seemingly innocuous phrases/images/symbols/etc. There’s the simple ones, like the numbers white nationalists use; 1488 is a reference to the 14 words—“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”—and the 88 is alphanumeric for HH, or “Heil Hitler”; 1350 is a reference to the purported percentage of African American in the US population versus the purported percentage of violent crimes they commit (a statistic that is both untrue and avoids nuance, but then again, nuance and factuality aren’t very big concerns when you’re a Neo-Nazi). These symbols are used frequently, but at this point they serve little purpose because of how many are familiar with them. The vast majority of people can “hear” the dog whistle. Dog whistles tend to be most effective when their origin is as convoluted and revolting as possible. Now, I did include a content warning at the beginning of this article, but for this example I’d like to reiterate that the following content may be shocking and/or upsetting to many.
  • Without further ado, I’d like to use the example of Gamergate again. Gamergate, if you aren’t aware, was a targeted mass harassment campaign of feminist media critics/game devs and virtually anyone that defended them. It was a huge misogynistic backlash against the progress women were making within the games industry, which had been highly male dominated since the 80s. For now, what you should know is that one of the mascots that emerged from Gamergate was that of “Vivian James” (whose name was supposed to sound like “video games” apparently? Yeah I think it sucks too.) who was depicted as a female gamer with a green and purple sweater. Green and purple. Why was it important that Vivian James had a green and purple sweater? I’ve already told how 4chan is a hellhole that calls the most shocking and disgusting things “humor.” Well, around this time, users on 4chan began posting a graphic GIF of the Dragon Ball character Piccolo being violently raped. The GIF actually got posted so much that it simply became known as the “Daily Dose” (does it make sense why I don’t touch that site now?) Piccolo’s color scheme is, well, green and purple, and the “joke” (if you can even give it the dignity of calling it that) became abstracted to the point that anytime purple and green were used in an image, it became an obvious allusion. This is, obviously, fucking horrible. And for the movement saying that “we aren’t sexist, we just care about ‘ethics in games journalism’” to have THAT be their MASCOT? It’s a middle finger to us. They are saying “We know, and you know, but you’ll never convince anybody else.” And unfortunately, they’re right. If you go into a court of law and try to explain to a 60 year old judge that the colors of purple and green are a rape joke, is he going to believe you, or is he going to think you’re making shit up? Dog whistles allow fascists to hide their intentions in plain sight.
Demoralization
  • I’m aware that this article is obscenely long. Reading all of this might have made you feel… bad. Writing it did, to some degree. But knowing thy enemy is important. And this brings me to my last point. Nazis KNOW how distasteful, uncomfortable, dangerous, and disheartening they are to everyone else. And they weaponize it. They inflate their numbers, and build a machine to mislead us into believing that they are more powerful than they actually are, getting us to give up hope and stop fighting back. We can’t let them get away with this. We need to keep kicking. Now, I’m not saying that “if you get harassed, suck it up.” No, the damage that reactionaries do is real and should be acknowledged and validated. But we also need to keep up our impetus, to never back down in the fight against the far-right. Because once hope breathes its last dying breath, fascism prevails.
​Sonja Wilberding