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.
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