Fascists, when you strip away the theatrical suits and the jargon, are not only professional liars but terror engineers. Their business is not merely trying to win arguments with rapid fire lies; it is manufacturing a climate in which people feel so besieged, so atomized and frightened, that they will surrender their freedoms for the promise of safety. They want your imagination hostage. Fear is the lever they try and pull to make moral and political reasoning inert; fear makes weak and spiritually undeveloped people, the bottom floor of which would be the lemmings in de-spiritualized supremacist religious cults, clutch whatever talisman is offered—whether it be a uniform, a charismatic demagogue, or a fantasy of ethnic or cultural purity. Once fear is doing the thinking, consent is engineered rather than earned.
After they cultivate that fear in their core cult they aim to spread it to the larger population, such as members of non supremacist religions, or secular folks, in highly specific ways. They invent enemies and inflate small problems into apocalyptic narratives; sound familiar? They turn complexity into a simple story with villains and a promised clean solution. They stage spectacles like unwatchable cringe worthy rallies, paramilitary displays, dramatic denunciations - that function like ritual to normalize aggression. They flood the information space with lies, half-truths, and conspiracy so that trust in institutions and in one another corrodes. They weaponize humiliation and shame, making people afraid to speak, to question, or to reach across divides. And crucially, they cultivate the false fantasy that violence or authoritarian rule is a noble instrument of regeneration—this is how they sacralize intimidation.
But here is the crucial, empowering truth: they are trying to scare you because your fear is useful to them. Fear is fuel. Whatever terrifies you, they will try and amplify; whatever solidarity you allow yourself, they will try to fracture. So the answer is not bravado and not denial; it is clear-sightedness. When you study their techniques - endless gaslighting, name-calling, scapegoating, backwards conspiracy, lack of empathy, internal weakness - you demystify them. Once a trick is recognized as a trick, its power evaporates. The magician loses the audience when the audience finally looks behind the curtain and gains gnosis that the false emperor has no clothes.
Now when a specific pathetic excuse for a human being says "he hates the left" what he is really saying is he fears the left. Because hate is just fear. So never be scared, or defeatist because fear narrows the mind and shrinks the possible. Courage, in the political sense, is not the absence of fear but the refusal to let fear define the terms of your life. Continue to build your life in ways that are robust to intimidation: continue making durable ties of friendship and community across cultures, faiths, and belief systems, continue cultivating institutions of mutual aid, start your own pro-democracy media, support non corporatized independent real journalistic media, support real education, and practice humility and curiosity. These are the real bulwarks against authoritarian temptation. Fascism does not succeed where people have thick, overlapping networks of trust and a lively culture that can absorb and transform shocks.
Humor, irony, ridicule—these are not frivolities; they are social immunities. Satire punctures the grandiosity of demagogues; art expands the field of possible futures; philosophy teaches us how to tolerate ambiguity. When we refuse to reduce ourselves to the binary frames offered by fearmongers, we reclaim the narrative. We say: the world contains more than your enemy, your scapegoat, your emergency. We insist on complexity, on moral imagination.
History is not a single arrow marching inevitably toward darkness. There have been countless victories over tyranny and they're will be many more: labor movements won protections for workers; civil rights campaigns unraveled legalized bigotry; subterranean networks have protected the persecuted in dark times. Those victories were not the product of some grand, heroic violence but of persistent, creative, and often humble forms of resistance: decentralized media creation, strikes, legal fights, boycotts, culture-making, sanctuary networks, mutual aid. That is the ongoing template for answerability. So do not meet their spectacle on their terms. Do not let your life be rearranged into eternal vigilance against invented monsters. Learn their methods, deflate their myths, and invest your energy in the fabrics of ordinary human life that they seek to degrade. When the politics of fear encounters a culture dense with empathy, wit, and durable relationships, it loses its purchase because fear shrivels in the presence of a sustained, creative community.