The 24/7 lies of the MAGA cult are not an American novelty, nor a partisan curiosity. It is a structural feature of any fascist brain drain. Projection is not a bug of the system; it is the system.
If you examine the anatomy of fascism, whether in Benito Mussolini’s Italy or Adolf Hitler’s Germany, you will find the same ritual choreography:
Accuse the enemy of precisely what you intend to do.
Declare yourself the sole guardian of the nation.
Frame any resistance as treason.
Insist that extraordinary powers are required to combat the very threat you have invented.
Projection serves two indispensable purposes. First, it manufactures moral permission. If “they” are already cheating, corrupting, subverting, infiltrating, poisoning the bloodstream of the nation — then any action taken against them is not aggression. It is self-defense. Garbage fascism always casts itself as the last barricade against chaos, even as it dynamites the foundations. Hitler screamed about Marxist subversion while planning the abolition of independent labor. Mussolini railed against parliamentary corruption while extinguishing parliamentary democracy. The accusation is the rehearsal for the crime. Second, projection fuses the leader and the followers into a persecuted tribe. A fascist cult does not merely support a strongman (really weak man) who is too morally frail to man up and admit he lost elections; it identifies with him. If he is accused, they are accused. If he is indicted, they are indicted. Thus, every charge must be flipped, inverted, hurled back with doubled fury. To concede a single point would be to puncture the fiction of collective innocence.
This is why you so often hear the language of victimhood from cults that dominate their political ecosystems. “We are being silenced,” cry those with television networks and godzillionaires at their disposal. “The system is weaponized,” declare those openly promising to weaponize it. The contradiction is not embarrassing; it is essential. It keeps the faithful in a state of siege.
Fascist politics thrives on permanent emergency and emergency requires an enemy monstrous enough to justify anything. If such an enemy does not exist, it must be conjured, or better yet, mirrored. The enemy is said to be corrupt, decadent, treacherous, authoritarian, perverse. Conveniently, those are precisely the traits the cult itself exhibits. The denunciation prepares the audience psychologically for imitation, because they, of course, need to be told what to think. As one must also note the psychological seduction at work. Projection relieves followers of doubt. Any uncomfortable evidence about their own side can be dismissed with a shrug and a “The other side does it worse.” Moral equivalence becomes moral anesthesia. This is why the dynamic feels cultish and why rather than looking at any of their own 100% Nazgûl agents of empire, they immediately go to "the Clintons", or "the Obama's", or "the Biden's" who are half Nazgûl agents of the empire.
Fascism is not simply a set of policies; it is a moral inversion machine. It tells adherents that loyalty is virtue, that cruelty is strength, that criticism is conspiracy. And it trains them, relentlessly, to see their own reflection only in the distorted caricature of the enemy. The phrase “every accusation is a confession” captures this inversion neatly. In fascist cults, accusations are not arguments. They are previews. And previews, as history rather bloodily demonstrates, should be taken seriously. So fight the empire by sharing or promoting real journalistic pro democracy bottom up media, donating to pro-democratic candidates - especially ones who don't take blood soaked AIPAC money, doing whatever slacktivism you can online, and way better, getting out there through real activism in the real world.