Some of y’all may have seen the new article about the impending AMOC collapse, and I’m here to explain what’s going on here.

Ice Floats

Solids are generally denser than liquids because they’re low-energy versions of the same material, so they settle down, collapse into a lil pile instead of sloshing around. Denser materials sink, and less dense materials rise, as Archimedes pointed out 2,400 years ago. So what’s the deal?

Well, first of all, read “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut. Trust.

Anyways, when water molecules solidify they form a crystalline structure. Crystals are solid matter that arranges in an ordered, repeated pattern, like puzzle pieces that only fit one way, and all the puzzle pieces are the same, creating a consistent shape. For water, this structure locks them into a pattern that spaces them out more than when they’re a liquid.

Sticking with our puzzle example, the completed puzzle cannot fit in the original box. Once it’s locked into place, it can’t be compressed down enough. There’s only ONE way the puzzle can be correct, and it has a certain width and a certain length, and they are more than the width/height of the box.

Like that.

But What About Salt Water?

Adding salt changes the whole deal - Instead of being cold fresh water, which rises as it draws closer to icehood, it is cold salt water, which has higher density and a lower freezing point. It sinks.

So in the ocean, as water gets further North, it gets colder, which causes it to SINK. If it was fresh water, it would instead RISE.

Because of salt, water behaves itself for once. The bobbing of water up-and-down as it cools and heats creates AMOC, a global ocean current that distributes salt and heat from the equator to the North. This current keeps England from feeling like Siberia. Without the AMOC, Europe would simply not support anywhere near its current population.

The Problem

Arctic Ice is made of fresh water. That’s why it’s ice, and floating. But, because the planet is getting warmer, polar ice caps are melting. This means fresh water is leaking into the northern point of the AMOC, making it less salty.

And with less salt, the cold slushy water does not sink as far.

Which slows the bobbing motion.

Which slows the current.

Which slows the distribution of salt to the North.

Which adds to the problem of less salt in the Northern cold part of the AMOC.

Eventually the whole thing collapses, having catastrophic consequences for the entire planet. And once it stops, it’s not something we can just start up again.

The fossil fuel industry and the politicians they have purchased are choosing a future of pain, mass death, and starvation for humanity’s future. And they are doing it for money.

This is one of countless ways we are hurdling towards apocalypse. It is too late to prevent. But it doesn’t have to get one day worse.

There’s only one path forward - We have to get OFF of fossil fuels. It will be difficult. It will be expensive. But it will never be cheaper or easier than it is today.

Whether we do it or not isn’t a choice. So let’s do it right now.

It’s not that simple bro

Yeah, I know, I just bought a car. The society we live in isn’t one where individuals can opt-out of fossil fuels. The only path forward is to change the system. We can’t individual-choice our way out of this.

The question cannot be “how do I reduce my individual carbon footprint?” because “carbon footprints”, like “littering”, was invented by the fossil fuel industry to prevent us from stopping them from killing us.

The question needs to be “how do we, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, change the system we live in into one that stops spinning off apocalypse scenarios? How do we, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, strip these people of their power and influence and end the use of fossil fuels?”

What will it take?

The first step is the same as to all of our problems: Humans have to start talking about it. In person. With our local communities. Outside of the supervision of the Oligarchs who got us here and the tools they’ve made to replace human connection.

We can do it, but the only way out is through.

It is 11,000 years ago. The Ice Age is ending, and the people of Beringia are being pushed out.

Beringia was a subcontinent. It is 620,000 square miles. Humans lived there for 10,000 years, about as much time as has passed since they left.

The ice is melting. The subcontinent connecting Asia to North America is being submerged, and the ice in Alaska that walled off the Americas is melting too, so the people of Beringia split. Some went to Canada, some went back to Siberia.

Problem solved.

About 800 years ago, the Mexica came down from the Southern United States seeking more fertile land and better climates. They went on to found what would become Mexico City; A mere 200 years later, Europeans showed up, slaughtered a bunch of the locals, and started drawing borders.

Now the climate is once again changing, more quickly and severely than ever in human history. And as climate becomes deadly and creates food shortages in much of the world, humans are responding to it the way they always have - By moving. This includes the Mexica returning to their ancestral home, of course.

This time, though, something has changed. They are stopped by Border Patrol.

This Apparently Necessary Thing We Apparently Need To Be Safe Is Brand New

The way 21st century Americans think about borders is shockingly new.

The US had open borders until 1875, when the Page Act was introduced to prevent Chinese women from coming to the US. This was followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, a ban on Chinese folks.

The federal government still did not have the legal mechanism to deport people until 1891. This law created a 1 year probationary period for migrants - If they broke the law, they were deported. After that time, they were considered legal residents, as long as they weren’t Chinese. It was always okay to deport the Chinese.

In 1917, the Immigration Act was passed. This raised the probationary period to 5 years, and included Mexico and Canada in immigration regulations for the first time. To reiterate, this is the first time a person could not freely cross America’s land borders. This law also defined the “Asiatic Barred Zone” , which expanded the usual anti-Chinese immigration policy to include much of South Asia.

Border Patrol is finally created in 1924, 102 years ago.

1929 is when the Undesirable Aliens act passed. This is the law where the Southern border begins to move towards what it is now, and the purpose was explicitly to keep out “Undesirable Aliens” (hence the name). By this they meant Mexicans. Undocumented entry was criminalized for the first time.

What followed was a lot of back-and-forth: Legalized seasonal migrant labor, hard numeric caps, amnesty, round and round. I’ll spare you the details, this section is already too long.

Since 1996 (only 30 years ago!) the situation has hardened into what it is now. In 2003, ICE was created. And now we are here.

Our border laws were built and expanded because of racism. To keep The Wrong Kind Of Person out of the country. This is a fact. Possibly this is the first time in human history that immigration law has not been explicitly and intentionally racist.

Perhaps there’s some non-racial reason that, in 2026, the federal government is welcoming White South Africans as refugees with little-to-no screening based on definitely, provably fake conspiracy theories while catching legal residents from Mexico on their way to their legal immigration hearings to toss them in concentration camps.

But probably not.

The Consent Of The Governed

Democracy is ostensibly premised upon the idea that the government’s legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, and that if you are being ruled by a governing body you should have some say in how that body governs.

There are a lot of things that move us closer to or further from that ideal by shifting who has ultimate power and authority over how the country is run.

The right to vote, for example, shifts power to the people.

But when the government can decide who is allowed to vote, it shifts the power in their direction. Or when they can draw the districts however they want. Or when they can make voting harder/easier in different areas to bias turnout. Or when they control the information we have access to, using illusion to get us to vote against our interests.

Or when private organizations pressure the formal state into outsourcing governing to private organizations run by oligarchs who make some of the biggest decisions about what we can and cannot do without any elections at all.

It is much easier to list examples in our system that shifts power to governing authorities because currently governing authorities have so much overwhelming power. And the way to fix it is to dissolve policies which shift final authority onto the powerful and away from the people who are being governed.

The government should not be allowed to decide which of the people it governs “count”. Government legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed - All of the Governed, no matter where they were born or where they came from.

Rome, like the United States, used the concept of Citizenship to create a permanent laborer underclass that did not have to be treated with the same respect and who did not get any say in how they were governed.

Fascism creates a “Dual State”, wherein a certain group of people by virtue of who they are are treated outside of the rules of the “normative state”, allowing them to be rounded up and sent to camps (like the one in Dilley, Texas) without, random example, the Due Process all people are guaranteed by the Constitution.

We rightly view these things as authoritarian. When the government can decide who “counts”, the government is in charge, and not the people. Such a system is necessarily oligarchal.

This would be a really good time to pop over and read my fascism post, which describes how deciding who counts is THE core methodology fascism uses to turn Liberal Democracy into an authoritarian Fascist state.

Citizenship is something governments grant you. Rights attached to citizenship are Government gifts, a model that is innately authoritarian. Human rights are objective. You are a human, with or without a government, and the only way to create true democracy is a model rooted in the shared humanity of the entire community being governed.

When you feel like you need to support policies which let the governing authorities decide which of the people they govern counts because otherwise it isn’t safe, consider that you were fed that narrative by people who stand to gain from an oligarchy.

This whole situation is LITERALLY all our fault

I don’t want to dig into the full history here because it's long and overlaps with future articles I’m outlining, so, brief overview.

In the 80s, we deported a lot of gangs (including MS-13) from Los Angeles to El Salvador. When they got there, these hardened criminals found a government on its knees. A US-backed Civil War had left them weak to the organized crime we dropped on their doorstep, and they found a chain of weakened post-civil-war countries (courtesy of the United States) all the way to their criminal connections back in the United States.

In addition to causing the organized crime problems, we also are largely responsible for their climate and famine problems, read my post about this. As I said in that post:

Climate Change is happening. People are dying because of it. The people affected are not the people who caused the problems. And when our victims beg at our doorstep for a place to live, we send them to concentration camps.

They’re Here Because They Have To Be

People are coming because they feel like they HAVE to. Escaping the gangs we created in the war-torn countries we helped war-tear, escaping the climate and environmental problems caused by our government and US oil companies, they are leaving because they have nowhere to go.

This is a good place to stop and read the poem “Home” by Warsan Shire.

People do not generally WANT to migrate away from their homes. They move because they HAVE to. And that’s how people get trafficked.

How ICE Works For The Cartels

Deporting individual migrants does not prevent them from migrating, but does make it easy to exploit them. The border is the product sold by the cartels, and our harsh defense of the border helps them raise prices.

Imagine you’re fleeing home to somewhere you think will be safe. There’s not enough food at home. Most of your family is dead, including one of your children, who you lost on the journey.

You finally get to the border and it’s locked down. If they catch you, they might kill you. Or maybe you’ll be sent, without trial, to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Maybe they’ll steal your remaining children.

And then you meet someone who will get you across - For a price.

It’s steep, it will take more than you have, but you can afford it. You’ll have to find a way to work when you get in, but you don’t have another choice.

Suddenly, in the middle of the desert, the car stops.

The driver says he will proceed - If you agree to pay 10x the initial price. Otherwise, he leaves you to die in the desert.

You agree. What else can you do?

You arrive in the US. You know you can’t pay them back, and so do they.

Don’t worry, they say. You can work it off.

And you do. Every hour, every day, sex work to bring money into the cartel. You can’t resist. You can’t escape. If you even try, they’ll call ICE, who, best case scenario, will send you back home where you’ll still owe the gang money and the gang will have even more power over your life. And it will still be the same starving, unlivable environment it was before.

Human trafficking is a direct consequence of our border policies.

Also - Legitimate businesses have used the same tactic, calling ICE to take their undocumented workers away as punishment for union organizing.

The Right To Choose Your Government

This is the first time in human history the average person is not able to choose their government.

This is framed as a basic cornerstone of democracy, but before modern immigration laws if you didn’t like your government you could just leave and be ruled by a different one. Vote with your feet.

Now every government tracks you specifically, and you cannot leave unless two governments talk it out and decide to give you permission.

As a consequence, within just the last century humanity has completely lost access to one of the most fundamental rights in our history, the only defense we’ve ever had against climate change - The Right To Roam.

Newton’s First Law Of Motion

Newton’s First Law of Motion is simply that an object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion, at a constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an external force.

Imagine you’re laying down in a truck bed, tossing a tennis ball back and forth in your hands. Even though the ball spends time in the air when it isn’t touching the truck, not being moved forward by the truck, it doesn’t suddenly fly to your feet at 60mph.

It maintains speed WITH you and tosses easily as though you were stationary on the ground.

Now, imagine you throw it a little too high – It goes above the cab of the truck, gets hit by the ”wind” (actually stationary air you’re driving through) and flies to your feet. The friction of hitting stationary air caused it to slow down. An external force took your ball away.

That’s Newton’s First Law of Motion.

The Coriolis Effect

Imagine a spinning basketball, on the point of a finger. Every time it revolves 1 entire time, each part of the ball has kept pace. It’s not like some of the basketball bumps are arriving at different times. They’re all arriving together.

But a bump in the middle of the ball isn’t traveling the same amount of distance as one towards the bottom of the ball. The one at the bottom of the ball, close to the finger, is only traveling a little bit. Tiny little spins, maybe an entire revolution as small as a penny.

Meanwhile, the bump in the middle of the basketball is traveling THE ENTIRE WIDTH OF A BASKETBALL. Since they’re both finishing their revolution at exactly the same time, the middle of the ball must be moving FASTER than the top or bottom of the ball.

Earth works the same way: as it spins, Ecuador is moving MUCH faster than places like Scotland. Because of Newton’s First Law of Motion, the air above Ecuador and Scotland is keeping pace with them (otherwise there would constantly be a wall of air hitting you at a speed which is definitely lethal).

So anything that moves North or South is moving at its initial launch speed, but the different speed of the ground and air as it travels creates a bending effect.

Part of this is air friction: Like the ball you threw from your pickup truck bed, when the air is moving differently than the object, the object’s path bends.

But even WITHOUT wind, the speed change of the ground beneath creates a bending effect, as we will see below.

So, imagine you’re facing standing at the equator facing North and throw a (magical) paper airplane straight ahead. It flies for hundreds of miles. (Diagram and analogy stolen from here)

The Earth is spinning from West to East. This means that, as the plane flies North, the air around it and ground below it are moving more slowly than it is. This will slow it down, eventually ensuring it keeps pace, but not instantly.

When the tennis ball you threw from the truck bed struck the air, it didn’t INSTANTLY TELEPORT to a completely stationary position behind the truck, right?

No. It kept the energy from the truck, the energy from your throw, and took on the energy of wind-friction, and moved in a way that added all those forces together.

Back to our plane – This means that it keeps that eastward speed from where it launched, so it moves faster than the slower-turning ground below it. Rather than ending up in a place directly North, it curves right, and ends up further East than you are.

Even though you threw it perfectly straight.

When you throw North in the Northern hemisphere, it curves to the Right, which is East.

For the same reasons, In the Southern Hemisphere, moving objects curve LEFT - so a southward path curves East, and a northward path curves West.

But what if you’re in the Northern hemisphere throwing South? Then the plane is moving MORE SLOWLY than the ground.

So, different parts of the Earth move at different speeds because the Earth is a sphere where different parts have to complete a rotation at the same time, despite the rotation radius being wildly different. On Earth, this bends winds, ocean currents, and more. And that’s the Coriolis Effect! We did it!

Why Air Escapes From A Balloon With So Much Drama

Imagine you’re in a conference room. It SERIOUSLY overbooked. You’re interested in the content, that’s why you’re there at all, but you’re hot, sweaty, there’s nowhere to sit down, there’s people ALL THE WAY up in your business.

A door opens – Hallelujah. Usually you’d stay and mingle, network, exchange business cards.

But it’s just too uncomfortable. There’s too many people. You shove and elbow a little trying to get out; The courtyard floods with people.

You moved from a high-density area to a low-density area.

Balloons work the same way – We force all those air molecules in there, under pressure, being constrained by tight rubber that wants to be much smaller than it is. The rubber edges of the balloon are strained and stretched by all the tightly-backed air, there’s too much in the balloon for it to exist at its natural size. It’s high pressure.

And when you open it, that air is FORCED out by the pressure difference between the balloon and the outside world. The air is pushing claustrophobically outward as quickly as the balloon is angrily forcing it out.

High pressure stuff moves to lower pressure areas whenever it can.

Air Pressure and Heat (aka How Lava Lamps Work)

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, there’s something on top of you.

Air. A whole you-shaped pile of it, going all the way to the top of the atmosphere, weighting down on you like a blanket.

If you go under water, there’s even MORE stuff on top of you – Not just an entire atmosphere’s worth of air, but also some amount of water. Water is heavier than air, so only 33 feet of water is the same weight as the entire atmosphere. So at 33 feet underwater, you have 2 atmosphere’s weight of stuff on top of you. At 66 feet, you have 3 atmosphere’s worth of stuff on top of you.

So if you warm something up, suddenly there’s a LESS DENSE substance occupying the same space, and it needs to make ROOM. But where? There’s all this stuff on top of it, trying to keep it in its shape. Like the balloon, the atmosphere, ground, all the stuff around the heated object is containing it, and it seeks to escape to a less-dense area.

Not to the left or right, what would be the point? There’s already dense stuff in both directions, and the same amount of stuff on top.

No. Heat rises. Heat always escapes up, Heat is always being shoved up. Because it is pushing upward, trying to escape the “balloon” by reducing the weight of what’s above it, crushing it into place. It’s propelled by the flood of colder stuff that takes its place below. It is claustrophobically trying to escape the atmosphere while the atmosphere is angrily contracting around it, a tandem effort to ESCAPE that pushes heat higher.

As it climbs, its temperature/energy is traded with the stuff around it, cooling it down. Eventually the heated matter peaks, the heat disappates, and it starts to sink back down to the ground.

Let’s Talk Trade Winds

The basic science we’ve discussed so far creates a lot of effects for air, water, and other planetary systems that cross from North to South.

For our purposes today, we are going to talk about Trade Winds.

The sun shines more directly on the equator. That’s why it’s so much hotter there.

As it heats up the air and water below it, that heat rises, taking the air molecules with it. They rise up, to the top of the atmosphere. Then they hit the “ceiling” and are pushed out-of-the-way by the clamoring masses of desperate air molecules rising behind them. So they have to spread OUT, to the North and South, trying desperately to find room to exist until they cool down.

They do, eventually, cool down, and when they do, they sink back downwards.

So the hot air hits the top and suddenly pushes OUT AND AWAY from the equator. Then it sinks back down to the ground. The next generation of heated air is escaping UPWARD, and it sucks the newly cold air TOWARDS THE EQUATOR.

Now we’ve closed our circuit: A conveyor belt of air that moves up, out, down, in. And with that out/in, our old friend the Coriolis Effect makes its comeback.

The “Out” is so high in the atmosphere that it doesn’t matter, and the transfer of wind energy/heat won’t perfectly align with the movement of wind anyway. It’s the In that matters for us humans here on the ground; That air, moving IN, curves Right if it’s in the Northern hemisphere and Left if it’s in the Southern hemisphere – Either way, it moves *West*.

And remember: Even after cooling, it’s still warmer than air farther from the equator; So as it moves West, it spreads heat along the way in its scramble for balance.

As it moves West it has to distribute that heat somewhere in its mad scramble for equilibrium.

Those Western surface winds, carrying heat West, are called Trade Winds.

Walker Circulation

As we’ve discussed, Warm surface water and trade winds carry heat westward across the Pacific. That piles up heat in the Western Pacific, where the air becomes hotter and rises more powerfully.

More heat in the Western Pacific means air rises faster than in the East; This creates a vacuum that helps pull IN the heated low air sweeping across the surface.

It’s a feedback loop: Trade Winds sweep West. They make West hotter and push hot air up. This hot air going up also creates more suction pulling the Trade Winds. Meanwhile, back East where the Trade Winds used to be there’s a vacuum behind them being filled by the Western air.

This cycle is the normal state of affairs people on both sides rely upon. When this is happening more than usual, it is La Niña.

El Nino

The Western Pacific has a maximum capacity. It can’t just store an endless amount of heat. Eventually, there are no vacancies at the inn.

When the West hits capacity but keeps receiving heat from La Niña, pressure builds; Eventually, it overflows.

The Walker Circulation cycle weakens, stalls, or reverses. Heat pools in the East instead, triggering extreme weather and disrupting the delicate climate rhythms Earth depends on.

It’s natural and inevitable, but with other changes to planetary climate, it’s become untenable. Time to talk about those other changes.

Earth is HOT 😉🔥🌶️🔥🔥

• Earth’s average surface temperature is 1.3°C hotter than preindustrial levels

• Since 1880, global sea level has risen 8-9 inches. Partly due to glacier melt: glaciers have lost about 273 billion tons of ice per year since 2000, and the rate is accelerating: 36% higher in 2012–2023 than in 2000–2011. In 2025 alone they shed roughly 400 billion tons.

• 2024 was the hottest year on record, driving stronger ice loss, floods, droughts, wildfires, and displacing 45,800,000 people.

• Surface ocean pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 since 1750: This represents a 30% increase in hydrogen ion concentration. IE, Ocean is more acidy. Bad for wildlife, especially the kind with shells

The Atmosphere is THIRSTY 🥵🥵🥵

• Droughts are way up globally, even from places outside of this area and separately from El Niño. From 2018 to 2022, droughts rose globally by 74%.

• In 2022 alone, 30% of the world’s landmass experienced moderate to extreme drought conditions.

• The atmosphere is “thirstier”: air itself is pulling more water, leaving less of it for rain, lakes, and so on. The land is getting a dramatically reduced share of the planet’s water.

• El Niño is a big factor creating particularly severe drought and weather conditions in this area, but another factor is that Central America exists on Earth, which is warming and experiencing increased drought conditions EVERYWHERE.

Less Room For Additional Heat in the West

Remember, El Niño happens when the Western Pacific is at capacity on heat.

But with a changing climate, the area is much closer to capacity at its baseline.

As a result, El Niño is happening more frequently, more severely, and for more time.

So Famine and Death

Because it deserves to be its own separate article, I cut the notes and slides detailing how we’ve known this is coming for over 100 years and how wealthy oil barons kept it feeling uncertain and controversial, but quick timeline: It’s been 202 years since we discovered the greenhouse effect. 167 years since we proved atmospheric greenhouse gases and 130 years since the first scientific paper predicting global warming.

It has been 38 years since NASA scientists testified in Congress that man-made climate change is happening.

It has been 3 years since literally no Republicans were willing to raise their hand and agree climate change is happening and man-made. 0. None. At the first Republican Presidential Primary Debate.

The reason this is controversial is because very wealthy people make more money spreading lies and doubt. If you listen to the Drilled podcast, you’ll learn the whole backstory here, including the fact that literally the same named individuals who spread these lies about climate change also worked with Big Tobacco spreading similar lies.

There’s also a book called “Merchants of Doubt” that lists tons of examples of this over the last century.

Climate Change is happening. People are dying because of it. The people affected are not the people who caused the problems. And when our victims beg at our doorstep for a place to live, we send them to concentration camps.

SCIENCE IS ALWAYS EXPLAINABLE

I had to start with Newton’s First Law, but I explained this to you. All science is like this. The little bricks make the big bricks, but none of it is confidential or arcane. If something sounds suspicious, controversial, confusing, media data overload, remember that you can just learn how it actually works. And as you build, every step will make sense.

Most science happens in the public domain, and a lot of private science is published by the Patent office.

If you dig deep enough into the science itself, there’s no reason to be confused by wayward claims about climate change or vaccines or anything else. It’s out there.

Okay, the end. Thank you for coming.

Growing up they were the ultimate villains. Basically every 90s hero eventually fought Hitler, usually with a time machine. Hitler was unquestionably evil. The Holocaust was unquestionably evil. I’m sure we’ve all seen videos of his German speeches, and had it explained to us that he was a great speaker, and convinced people to follow him. He wrote a book, Mein Kampf.

But what did he say?

Like… What words was he writing and yelling that were so persuasive?

This was never explained to me. Not in school, not on tv, not by adults in my life. To hear them tell it, the speeches must have just been Hitler saying “I’m bad, I want to do bad things, and I hate Jews!”

He was bad, he did want to do bad things, and he did hate Jews.

But fascism isn’t just any authoritarian antisemitic government. If Hitler had given speeches that only included the average American’s understanding of his worldview, he’d have been laughed off the stage.

Fascism is a real ideology. Fascists exist now. People who call themselves fascist have existed as a continuous ideological tradition since before World War 2, and their ideas are not a mystery.

I’m not neutral on this issue and won’t pretend to be. If you’re the kind of person who tunes out when you see someone’s biases, you won’t like this very much. My position is you should never trust anyone who tells you they’re unbiased, because they’ve already lied to you once. So I’ll be pretty open about mine.

Anyways, what did fascists believe?

Make Germany Great Again!

In the 1920s and 30s, this slogan was a cornerstone of Nazi organizing. Hitler rose to power on the promise to reduce unemployment, overturn the Treaty of Versailles, and return Germany to its former glory.

Who did he blame for its descent? Well,

Immigrants

Immigrants are Enemy #1 for Fascism.

Carl Schmitt was a Nazi philosopher who lived in Nazi Germany as a member of the Nazi Party and whose political philosophy provided the legal framework for Hitler’s authoritarian power-grabs. Since then, his work has become an instruction manual for fascist movements to dismantle liberal democracy from within, and he died in 1985 as an unrepentant, enthusiastic Nazi. He is also a major inspiration for:

• Peter Thiel, the billionaire and J.D. Vance’s mentor who orchestrated his political career - source, source

• Curtis Yarvin, the Silicon Valley blogger who is a heavy influence on both Thiel and J.D. Vance - source

• Adrian Vermeule, the influential Harvard Law professor who has explicitly advocated that we follow Schmitt’s roadmap to authoritarian power. This roadmap is explicitly part of the administration’s plan (in particular Vance) to defend Trump from SCOTUS checks on his power, source

All roads lead to Vance on this one. Do with that what you will.

Anyways, Schmitt pointed out that Liberal Democracy has a critical weakness - In group/out group. Friend/enemy. You cannot simply give the vote to every human in the world, there have to be lines. Borders, metaphorical and literal.

And the most obvious border of all is the one around the country.

Fascism seeks to seize authoritarian power by toxifying public opinion against out-groups. Fascism uses the people’s fear of the out-groups to expand their own power, for safety. Initial authoritarian actions target marginalized out-groups, allowing the general public to deny or downplay what’s happening. It’s unusual circumstances, right? Something must be done about those people. It’s not safe. They’re breaking the LAW.

Immigrants came from outside the country. They look different. They speak differently. They influence the local cuisine, music, culture. In Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco pointed out that fascism is traditionalistic, which means an innate discomfort with cultural change. And immigrants usually already have reduced rights, so it doesn’t feel strange or unusual when the government starts violating their rights, even when those rights are explicitly codified in the Constitution.

Easy first targets. It doesn’t take much to toxify public opinion against them. Nativism is a cornerstone of fascism.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” - President Donald Trump

Women (Part 1)

Fascism has a very specific relationship with masculinity. As Umberto Eco pointed out, fascism cannot exist without machismo, which he defines as:

“…both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality”

Or, as Mussolini put it,

“War is to men as maternity is to women” - Mussolini

Fascism is hyper-masculine. Fascism claims modern society emasculates men and prevents them from their natural roles, in part by making them share those roles with women and by treating (what fascism conceives of as) traditionally masculine behaviors as harmful.

Fascists promise to restore men from their state of humiliation and put women back in their place, in the home, where they belong. They’ll be happier there anyway.

Their view on women cannot be separated from their views on maternity and White Supremacy. To quote Mussolini again, from his 1927 Ascension Day Speech:

"If we shrink, gentlemen, we won't make the Empire, we'll become a colony!

And also,

Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding. The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.”

You might recognize this as Replacement Theory, an ideology which was known far-right fascism until it was popularized by Tucker Carlson. You might also recognize it from the 14 Words, a Neo-Nazi slogan:

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children

And so the need to turn women into subservient breeders is framed as a survival necessity, and feminism is portrayed as a way the Jews undermine the White Nation (more on this later).

You see a lot of this from modern MAGA - When they express concern for women it is either as a resource (“they’re coming for your women!”) or paternalistic concern that having to exist outside of their traditional roles is hurting them. There is no room for a free woman making her own decisions on if she’d rather stay home with kids or become a biologist. To fascists, the latter is being harmed by feminism.

The reason these ideas don’t sound like anything unusual is because this facet of fascism is a more traditionally conservative idea taken to an authoritarian extreme. Furthermore, not everyone who shares an idea in common with Fascism is Fascist. But you simply cannot discuss fascism without discussing masculinity, feminism, and gender. It is baked-in.

Takeaway: Fascism views men as maligned by post-Enlightenment gender role fluidity, and is seeking to restore their dignity and return women to their appropriate place as subservient to men, where they’ll be happier.

Obviously there’s more to the fascist view here than a traditionally conservative gender binary, but we need to talk more bout fascism to get there. Which is why this section is just Part 1 of Women.

P.S. - Some women are open to this view because working under this system sucks and a romanticized tradwife aesthetic that emphasizes gardening and no worries! But which does not talk enough about the absolute horror-show pre-feminism Western womanhood was. There were decades in the US where the average woman was taking opiates to get through the day, where women were routinely lobotomized to make them docile. Read The Yellow Wallpaper, a short horror story from 1892 that hit a nerve among women at the time. 1892!! Anyways. Society sucks, we all want to escape into something better, reducing yourself to the servant of another equally lost, stressed, and confused adult in the same society is not escape. End of P.S.

Queer Folks

Obviously, queerness in all forms undermines the Fascist gender framework discussed in the previous section.

At the turn of the 20th century, the West was starting to examine queer folks with a more open-minded, science-forward lens. It was because of this movement that the Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) was founded in the Weimar Republic

Per Wiki, the Institute “pioneered research and treatment for various matters regarding gender and sexuality” including gay, trans, intersex folks.

You might think you haven’t heard of it, but you have.

That’s right! The book burnings! While there were minor book burnings across Germany and Austria, the biggest by far was the May 10th Bebelplatz burning, which included all of the books out of the Institute and burning them in a big pile. Most of those books are about queer people.

That research is lost to time. When culture decided to start caring about this again, we had to start over, instead of leaning on a century of research. Because of the Nazis.

Like most of the groups listed here, the rest of the West was mostly on the same page with the Nazis by the time this happened. Queer prisoners (identified by a pink triangle, Nazis loved to use sorting badges on their victims) were treated as legitimate criminals and transferred to prisons to serve out the remainder of their Nazi-era sentences. This was the official policy of the U.S. Army. After the war, queer Holocaust survivors were denied victim status and reparations given to other targeted groups.

I want to be clear here-

Anyways.

There’s two common themes you’ll see as we go through this:

1. Fascism was not just a thing that happened in Italy and Germany. It was happening all over the West, as a global conversation primarily between the US and Europe, and most of what caused us to recoil away from it was seeing the Nazis follow through.

2. Fascism emerges from Liberal Democracy under certain conditions, and it is built out of ideas and trends that are always with us and which exist independently of fascism.

Let’s keep moving, we have a lot to cover.

The Left

To Fascists, the Left is the Big Bad. If you read “The Doctrine of Fascism” by Mussolini, like 2/3rds of it is just him attacking the Left.

Fascism is a right-wing populist ideology. Fear of the Left is a unifying Right-wing thing, but Fascism, the only right-wing populist -ism, gets its start by seizing populist tactics and momentum from the Left.

As Hitler said in an October 1923 interview with The American Monthly,

"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?" "Socialism," he retorted… "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists."

As Mussolini said in “The Doctrine of Fascism”:

...Fascism [is] the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying…Marxian socialism, the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else.....

Fascists didn’t exactly adhere to the Liberal Capitalist model of ownership either (at least on paper), believing that everything should be owned by and run for the Nation, the Volk.

The fascist vision of the Nation is a weird concept, so I’ll start with Mussolini’s explanation in “Doctrine of Fascism” (this is terrible and you can skim it and get to my explanation below, but I do have to reference it):

Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and ending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self same line of development and spiritual formation. Not a race, nor a geographically defined region, but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality.

In so far as it is embodied in a State, this higher personality becomes a nation. It is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for 19th century publicity in favor of national governments. Rather is it the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity. - Benito Mussolini

Okay, that was a lot. Let me explain.

Nationalism is another key cornerstone of fascism. And their conception of the Nation isn’t a collection of individuals who add up to a diverse group of people, they think Liberal Democracy and its voting system have created that illusion.

Mussolini says that, while Liberal Democracy measures the will of the Nation by asking the largest quantity of its members, Fascism measures the will of the Nation by asking the highest-quality individuals (as measured by fascism), riding all the way up to the highest-quality individual of all, the dictator/fuhrer/whatever.

The Fascist Leader is the Will of the Nation incarnate. He is always acting on their behalf, always in alignment with their will. Anyone not aligned with that Will must not be a true part of the Nation, right?

For example, the Left.

Leftism questions everything Fascism holds sacred. It rejects nationalism, rejects gender/race/economic hierarchy, and embraces immigrants. Then as now, the most marginalized individuals in a society are the ones who are most likely to seek reform, and so radical Leftist movements were often being spearheaded by people the Nazis were targeting, like the Jews (you can see this phenomenon now - Queer people dominate in US political movements).

Leftists, like those other groups, are sand in the gears of the Nation. The Nation has to be pure in order to act as One Body. Those who aren't in alignment with the Nation must be purged.

That’s another hallmark of fascism, by the way -

Leftists are a diverse range of people who are often from marginalized communities who are actively working against every single thing fascists are trying to do. And so, of course, they are a major enemy of Fascism.

Okay! The Jews are up next, and that’s obviously going to be a doozy so, strap in.

Jews

The Nazi mythology around the Jewish people is bonkers and if you’ve skipped any sections before this point, go back and read them. You will need them. Antisemitism is kind of the connective tissue for a lot of other Fascist nonsense. I strongly recommend “Safety through Solidarity” by Lorber and Burley for more information on the history of antisemitism.

Nationalism -

Jews were a diaspora without any kind of anchor state, nation, or homeland. Their very existence undermines the Fascist narrative. This is also why Nazis targeted nomadic groups like the Romani; Similar to queer folks, European nomadic groups don’t get much attention as Holocaust survivors because Europe still hates them

Leftism -

Like I said in the Leftism section, political activists tend to come from marginalized communities because they’re less likely to be satisfied with the status quo and more likely to try and change it. Self evident why, and also easily observable in modern activist movements.

Immigrants -

Jews were decidedly and openly NOT originally from Europe. There are records of early-Nazis saying things like “go back to Palestine!” and the Nazis made a deal with early Zionists to mass deport Jews to Palestine to help with their Jewish state project (the Havaara Agreement). So there was very much a “these foreigners need to go home” vibe on top of the rest. At least at first, before the Global Cabal framing gained more momentum.

World War 1 -

Germany had a militaristic culture it had inherited from Prussia (Northern Germany, the country which preceded Germany), which was founded by the Teutonic knights, who came there for the Baltic Crusades. And yet they had grievously lost WW1 and been made destitute by the Treaty of Versailles. How could this have happened? Non-Germans must have corrupted Germany from the inside; In particular, the Jews. Germans couldn’t have lost, so their failure was orchestrated by the betrayal of non-Germans within their borders - So the rumor went. You’ll see DNA of this in the Final Form of Fascist Antisemitism. Honestly this post deserves a much larger section on World War 1, but it will have to be a future post.

So, right away it’s obvious why Jewish folks would not be a fascist’s favorite people in the world. But fascism as it was originally conceived in Italy was not explicitly antisemitic; Many early fascist members and donors were Jewish (marginalized communities are more likely to be politically active, remember?), and it was more than 15 years after the March on Rome until Italian Fascism was explicitly antisemitic.

It’s hard to imagine fascism without it, but one must remember fascist ideology came after fascists had already gained power and momentum and developed in phases (more on that later).

So how did they become so woven in? There’s one man to thank for antisemitism’s prominence in Nazi thought.

Henry Ford, obviously. Who did you think I meant?

Hitler loved Henry Ford, he had a life sized portrait of Ford in his office. In 1938, the Nazis awarded Ford their highest honor, a medal he refused to return despite public pressure in the US.

And why wouldn’t he? The Nazis were the culmination of everything Henry Ford had worked for his entire life. He published a rabidly antisemitic newspaper called “The Dearborn Independent”, where he published selections from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a document forged by allies of the Russian Empire to stoke antisemitism against the revolutionaries, many of whom were Jewish (marginalized community, more politically active than average, you know the drill).

The Protocols claimed to be meeting minutes from a Global Jewish Cabal manipulating the world in, you know, conspiracy-esque ways.

They’d hoped to undermine the Russian Revolution. It didn’t work, but it did leave a grenade on the ground.

Ford picked up this grenade because he hated Jews. He hated Jews so, so much. So he took these documents and released them in his newspaper, and then he took pieces from his antisemitic newspaper and the Protocols to create one single Antisemitic narrative in a 4-volume set entitled “The International Jew”.

International - The title hits on something fascists particularly dislike about the Jews, and is core to the White Supremacist depiction of the Jewish people.

Let’s talk about that.

White People are It. To a fascist, white folks are smarter, more ethical, and just better. Not even like, all white people, they have a more granular hierarchy. Men are also superior to women, in a way that is decidedly not granular at all.

But a glorious White Patriarchy Nation is obstructed and undermined. Modern society has pulled us so, so far away from that. And how? Glorious White Men lost to spinsters, foreigners, ethnics? How?

The answer? An Enemy Race. Equal and Opposite to white folks, with a different nature, trying to make us like Them.

Jewish people, it’s Jewish folks. The buildup was making me feel icky, but I hope it worked for you, oh reader.

To a White Supremacist, the Jews are everything Whites aren’t - International. Nationless, even. Feminist. Leftist. And they work behind the scenes, manipulating the passions of the lesser races, luring women into unnatural lifestyles, and trying to shatter national unity and dissolve borders.

Everywhere Jews went, they encountered ethnic persecution not unlike what every other migrating ethnic group experienced. But Europe invented antisemitism and exported it to the world. Now it is so ubiquitous it doesn’t make sense to think of anti-Jewish ethnic prejudice as distinct from antisemitism. All Jewish stereotyping and persecution is now antisemitic in character, everywhere.

The Holocaust began as a mass deportation, but as we learned in 2025, a mass deportation is hard to pull off, and you end up needing to store your victims somewhere. So you put some camps in Germany (or Texas) for holding, and then send them to die in camps further away in, say, Poland (or El Salvador).

The escalation of treatment correlated with an escalation in rhetoric - As the narrative shifted to make them the Global Enemy of all Whites, Nazis stopped trying to deport Jews and started trying to hunt them down and slaughter them.

And it couldn’t have happened, except in steps. And it might not have happened if reasonable Germans had risen up at the beginning, when it was just a conversation about mass deportation.

Which is why it is critical to understand its essence, its strategy, and what it looks like on the way up, when it’s having to appeal to voters.

Because every fascist movement begins in a progressive liberal democracy, and gains power by winning votes.

Women Part 2!

We have to go back to women. You might remember I got out over my skis in the women section earlier:

And so the need to turn women into subservient breeders is framed as a survival necessity, and feminism is portrayed as a way the Jews undermine the White Nation (more on this later). - Me, Earlier

Well, now it is later, and the puzzle pieces should be falling into place, how fascism’s arms all feed one another.

The Jews want to undermine their equals, Whites, and take global power. To do so, they inflame other races against Whites and spread ideologies like feminism. With women working, instead of having children, and with men being emasculated, Whites become easy targets. The only way to win is to fortify the boundary around the White Nation. Empower men to be masculine again and women to be feminine again. This way Whites are strong and can resist the Jews and their puppets.

Note: I’ve used White Supremacy/White Nationalism/Fascism/Naziism as synonyms here, worth noting they’re not exact synonyms, and German conception of the Master Race did not perfectly map to White as American fascists see it. But not in a way that matters for our purposes.

We did it! Done with this section! Holy cow, what a thing that was. time to make a sandwich.

How Fascism Gains Power

So we know what fascism IS. But how does such a bonkers ideology end up running a country? How do they win votes? How do they get people to give them power?

Elementary, my dear reader.

Fascism Climbs In Phases

Fascism does not begin as it ends. It emerges and morphs and changes to climb the ladder, amputating the pieces it no longer needs and growing new traits as it evolves its way to power. A writhing cancerous mass that bubbles up from pre-existing faults in Liberal Democracy, seeking to corrupt it into an authoritarian dictatorship by a charismatic leader.

The phases identified by the authoritative scholar Robert Paxton in his book “An Anatomy of Fascism” are as follows:

1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor

2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage

3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite fascists to share power

4. Exercise of power, where the movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates.

5. Radicalization or entropy, where the state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did Fascist Italy.

Only Italy and Germany reached stage 5. Spain got close, but the Spanish Fascist leader was killed in the Civil War, and they ended up being a fascism-inspired but nonetheless bog-standard military dictatorship under Franco. Which also wasn’t great. But it was stable.

Fascism has never reached Stage 5 and stabilized. Fascists have had almost a century to workshop this, so maybe they’ve figured it out. Maybe the next time it happens we will be stuck with it for decades. Hopefully not, but we will take a look at modern fascism and how it has built on Germany/Italy later in this document.

The Faustian Bargain

Fascism has never hit Stage 4 without collaboration with traditional conservative elites - as Paxton points out, business magnates and clergy. These groups fear the Left, and Fascists work to make them fear the Left even more.

In Germany and Italy, Fascists would go to left-leaning neighborhoods (like those in Portland, Minneapolis) to provoke violent encounters. Then they would use those violent encounters to convince conservative elites that the Left is out of control and must be stopped. Fascism usually makes this leap at a time when the Left is growing, and Elites have a preexisting concern. Fascists show up and offer themselves as the artillery, and Elites see them as useful idiots.

But, and this is an important lesson for all of politics:

Fear.

The next time the fear hits you and you find yourself wondering:

“Why am I so afraid?”

Instead of doom scrolling or any of that stuff, get on the Internet and look up a picture of the skull of a cave bear.

Cave bears don’t exist anymore, but they’re much larger than all present day bears. [Modern bears are] small compared to cave bears. They were like the elephants of bears, and they used to murder the shit out of us.

And look at the skull of a cave bear and realize: That’s why I’m scared right now.

It’s because many, many years ago, my ancestors had to constantly be worried about this fucking thing charging out of whatever cave and murdering their entire family. And so now I’m sitting at home, in my air conditioned house where there are no cave bears, and I’m scared…

That’s why you’re scared.

-Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards

Humans were prey animals until we weren’t.

Humans formed herds and got big social brains and learned to build tools and work together and then, only then, were we able to climb to the top of the food chain.

Humans are anxious, scared little guys who are always looking for the threat to themselves and their tribe, however they may conceive of it.

Fascists feed on fear. They work to create more fear in you so that you will give them more power. They say things like “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs”, and attack the media viciously for fact-checking them, because they frankly do not care if it is true and are not aiming for truth. They are trying to make you scared. They are trying to get you to define your tribe as their Volk, and getting you to perceive marginalized communities as a real threat to you and your children.

The initial and easiest way to do that is with lies and exaggerations. If there’s nothing to be afraid of, make something up. If you have one guy who did one bad thing, paint it as a trend. Make people feel like they are being flooded with stories about scary things being caused by target communities, so many that it stops being a series of individual stories and becomes a general ATMOSPHERE.

That atmosphere is hostile to those communities, because it amplifies prejudice, and begins to guide state policy. In a Liberal Democracy, elected officials react to the fears of the Electorate, and fascism can start to see policies enacted before they have formal power.

In a hostile environment, mistreated individuals feel less obligated to the wider community, and become more likely to do the kinds of things fascists. Furthermore, as legitimate society closes to them, they feel forced to become criminals to provide a safe home for their children.

In fact, okay, detour

How Gangs Get Power

My source for this section is to read literally anything that has ever happened in Los Angeles.

As civil society, the State, and the police become more hostile to a community, they have to band together and find safety and security within.

Gangs often do ACTUALLY protect the people who participate in them from outsiders. Some gangs are even powerful enough to protect them from the police. And they provide an income stream independent of civil society, as it becomes harder to find employment. If you’re in a gang, others know that to mess with you is to mess with your whole gang. When the Rule of Law stops applying to you, and when the general population accepts that that’s okay, joining a larger criminal organization can feel like your only option.

The right way to dissolve gangs is to eliminate oppression and make everyone who lives here an equal participant in society.

Or we could do mass deportations. Like when we mass deported MS-13 and Barrio 18 and other gangs that started in Los Angeles to El Salvador, and they used their criminal experience and the connections they had back in the US to build an organized crime corridor through Latin America, overwhelming the governments who had been weakened by US-backed Civil Wars and coups. That went great. Let’s do that again.

Okay,

Detour Over

And remember - The individual stories stop mattering. I remember telling Trump voters that the cats and dogs thing was a lie, and I got an eyeroll and a “but still”.

The flurry of stories begins to take a shape that is so vivid that the individual stories stop mattering, and addressing them looks like nitpicking. Fascists flood the zone with lies until the underlying common story becomes assumed knowledge, and that narrative gains a momentum which coerces stories out of their targets that become the new flurry, which is harder to fact-check.

Earlier we talked about Carl Schmitt’s fascist playbook - Tightening the boundaries of what people consider their community, the in-group, the scope of people who deserve rights in a democracy. This is how it is done. Toxifying public opinion against a group through this mechanism.

Speaking of Carl Schmitt,

“Sovereign is He who decides The Exception”

Western Liberal Democracies are ultimately descendants of Rome, and Rome’s “temporary emergency dictator” logic is baked into how they operate.

In every Western Liberal Democracy, there is an Executive.

Declaring a State of Exception, for example a State of Emergency, gives the Executive the power to ignore the typical Rule of Law Checks & Balances baked into Liberal Democracy and act more dictatorially.

And Carl Schmitt pointed out that true power in such a system isn’t Rule of Law, but with whoever decides when the law applies.

The only answer is solidarity across the board. A willingness to fight and sacrifice to protect people who are nothing like us, people we don’t like, from authoritarianism.

Conclusion

It feels tacky to portray this as a battle of Fear vs Love, but it is. Fascists want us scared of one another, suspicious, willing to trade liberty for security.

But we can love one another. We can fight for one another. We can protect each other, and push back on authoritarianism together. We have to. If we don’t, as the poem says, they will eventually come for you too.

I didn’t know what image to use for this, so here’s my dog Sushi. Anyways,

You probably have a variety of things you feel certain about. Things which, if I were to question them, you would roll your eyes and make that… throat noise. You know the one. Skepticism’s war cry, an annoyed scoff.

Certainty is an illusion created by your brain. There are very few things that are actually proven, and they are mostly if-then statements where then premise is uncertain.

I think therefore I am. That’s the only observation I can rely on. I don’t know if the Earth exists, let alone if it’s round or flat. I don’t know if you think, or if you are.

Technically true, but obnoxious, right? It’s not useful to question the core assumptions necessary to navigate life.

Humans prune unnecessary information. We inherit assumptions, and we usually don’t question them unless we have a reason to. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a necessary thing.

We use (often subconsciously) learned assumptions and observed patterns to build a range of possible worldviews that we consider “reasonable”.

The problem is that a lot of the core assumptions we take for granted have been intentionally crafted for us by people who do not have our best interests at heart.

What good propaganda looks like

Humans are smart. That’s our whole thing. Tigers got their claws and stuff, elephants are all big, and humans are really smart. If you give a human reliable data and time to think it through, they’ll reach interesting and valuable conclusions.

Although we don’t admit it, we have a tendency to view ourselves as mostly immune to propaganda. When someone is trying to convince us of an idea, we evaluate if it sounds like propaganda. We screen it for the hallmarks of propaganda, and if we find them we react accordingly.

The problem is that issue-based propaganda we’re on guard against is the least effective form of propaganda and the least common. Real propaganda works by defining the **range of ideas you’re willing to listen to in the first place**, and the people who you’re willing to **dismiss immediately**.

Before the discussion even begins, there are things which, if said, will cause the other party to completely shut down, stop listening, and sort the speaker into a box.

The power to influence when and how that happens is much more influential than just lying to convince people of any given policy.

The Hallmarks of Propaganda

Socialism. Fascism. Conversations about the wealthy influencing the media or undermining our elections. Conversations about the environment.

There are so many topics that are hard to discuss without tripping over a trigger word. I’m a hippie, I’m a far-left nut, I’m a conspiracy theorist, I sling insults at anyone who disagrees with me, I’m an alarmist, it’s insulting I’d even compare anything happening in 2026 with the horrors of Fascism.

Often I get these reactions when I’m halfway through a sentence. If they’d just keep listening, let me finish, they’d hear a more nuanced take than they’re anticipating, and a justification for it.

But they are mostly listening to sort. As soon as I say a phrase that defines me as a certain Type Of Person, they can drop me in a box and ignore me. After all, they already know everything there is to know about that Type Of Person. If I’m that Type Of Person, I shouldn’t be listened to, and I have nothing new or interesting to say.

I can spend hours thinking through how I’ll frame this-or-that, but if I make one slip, that conversation ends. I have to buffer and disclaimer constantly to get my way through.

Every single time you’ve wanted to say an opinion, but FIRST had to clarify that you’re not one of THOSE people, you’ve felt this effect. I’m scared to even list examples, because all of the examples I’ll list imply trigger phrases that might lose me readers, but here are some (randomly chosen, from my own experience) from the last year:

“I condemn October 7th and Hamas, but…”

“Maduro is evil, but…”

“Obviously I’m not defending the Iranian regime, but…”

If my referencing any of those topics made you recoil and consider closing the page, that’s what I’m talking about.

Why would I have to say any of these things? If I haven’t said I support the Iranian regime, it should be assumed I do not. Most people don’t. They suck. I shouldn’t have to reiterate it every time I am trying to condemn Trump’s military action in the region.

The reason I do is because I constantly have to defend against being a certain Type Of Person against people who have been so deeply propagandized for sort-listening that they are hard, sometimes impossible, to talk to.

This aggressive sorting is the primary defense people use to filter out propaganda, but defining those trigger words and categories is how modern propaganda works to keep you from considering ideas outside of the approved scope. Which words and phrases you use to sort people into ignorable groups is not neutral or objective.

Hilariously, our understanding of propaganda as single-issue, to make you for or against the Democrats or Republicans, is itself propaganda. Good propaganda works to define the hallmarks of propaganda so that, regardless of what you hear, you won’t think outside of the propagandist’s box.

The Solution

Be aware of what you know and don’t know. Be conscious of your assumptions, even the obvious ones. You don’t have to question them, but be aware.

You are wrong. I am wrong. All of us are wrong in key, critical ways. Learning is the process of ferreting out the ways in which we are wrong to become less wrong, but still wrong. There is too much information in the world, and we are being exposed to curated selections by people who are trying to convince us of things that they, in many cases, do not believe.

Ego is the enemy, and humility is the solution. Certainty is ultimately ego - You are believing in yourself, and your ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect ideas and data, that there’s no reason to listen to another person.

Talk to individuals like they’re individuals. Note when you’re sort-listening, and stop it.

Remember that feeling certain or uncertain or confident or insecure is happening in your brain, and probably does not track with how well justified any of your beliefs actually are in reality.

Make the positive, necessary changes before others do, and stick to them even if others don’t. We can’t change anything if we’re all standing around waiting for each other.

Epilogue,

I’ll be posting examples and case studies in the future, so you don’t have to take my word for it. I spend a lot of time trying to talk around “trigger words” that will shut down the listener’s brain, and it’s exhausting, and I’d rather just call it out as it happens and trust that we can start to talk through some important stuff.

Ethical problems are interesting. Thinking through concepts like liberty, equality, justice are interesting. Articulating arguments in their defense is fun and rewarding. And if you talk frequently enough and compellingly about these subjects, it’s easy to convince yourself and others that you’re good.

Thinking and talking can be fun and rewarding. It can generate a positive self-image. It can generate a positive public image. It can be useful to advancing moral causes. But they are rarely as difficult as actually making good ethical decisions in your personal life.

Thomas Jefferson, the thinker, was incredibly influential on the concept of liberty that gripped early America and late France. Among the people passing ideas across the ocean, he wrote about liberty with a passion and persuasiveness that truly changed the world.

And he had slaves.

Thomas Jefferson didn’t just HAVE slaves. Thomas Jefferson applied his considerable creativity to maximizing the use of his slaves. A slave-driven smart house with secret corridors that allowed slaves to, for example, replace empty wine bottles. Thomas Jefferson was also a rapist. When he first acquired Sally Hemings as a slave, she was 14 years old. She had her first child by him at 16. The family denied it. Historians rejected it. It wasn’t until the 1990s that DNA evidence proved it.

And now, all of the characters who denied it previously insist that, of course it happened, but they were in love, of course it wasn’t rape.

As though an old man can own a 14 year old child slave and have a consensual sexual relationship.

As though, despite insisting there was no evidence to conclude he had impregnated this child for centuries, there’s suddenly enough evidence to conclude it was consensual.

It’s absurd. And it shows the lengths to which people will go to maintain a positive mental image of a man whose primary moral contributions were words.

It’s easy to be good in words. And if your words are good, it’s easy to convince yourself that your actions are a side dish, an occasional mistake, and not your whole moral character.

But what you do IS your moral character. Thomas Jefferson was a wicked slave owning child rapist. The death of the author was a blessing.

Developing ethical ideas is important. Spreading them is important. But, don’t be a Thomas Jefferson. Your words are just words.