Why Do the Fascists Hate Everyone So, So Much?

When You Want to Annihilate Everyone Else in Society, Maybe the Problem Is…You

There’s a question which I keep asking these days. Maybe you do, too. It’s simple enough, and yet it’s surprisingly complicated, strange, and…ugly. Why do they hate us?

You know what I mean already. Just think of the state of the nation or the world. It’s being rocked by fascist tides again. Who’s under attack in America these days? Who’s not? Women, kids, the LGBTQ, teachers, trans kids, their parents. It’s a long, long list — and it’s expanding at light-speed as they come for everyone. To take their basic rights and fundamental freedoms away. Not in metaphorical ways, but in real ones — freedoms of expression, association, privacy, movement. Women given the death penalty for marriages. Teachers turned into felons for saying the wrong word. Kids who can’t change their names.

Why do they hate us?

Hate is a strong claim, and yet it’s easy enough to see, or at least it should be, that in the manifold attacks on basic freedoms above, isn’t just the subtext of hate… But the real thing. Open calls for “eradication,” speaking about those of who are just pleading for decency as if we’re a “virus.” If all this isn’t hate, then what is? Surely hate doesn’t have only to be the next step, which is genuine material annihilation. It begins here.

So. Again. Why? Why do they hate us so much?

I’d like to begin with an observation. A telling one, at least to me. They don’t hate us because we actually threaten them. We don’t. I’ve used many examples recently, some funny, some absurd, some just ludicrous. We’re not out there trying to ban…Ron DeSantis’s new book…even while he’s banning plenty of others…because only in America can you ban books and publish one of your own. We’re not out there trying to stop anyone going to the church of their choice — go right ahead, it’s a fine thing — or join the GOP or teach their kids whatever they like or read books they want or name themselves whatever they want. We are not interfering with their lives. We have no interest in that. In any way, shape, or form.

Here’s the telling part. It’s so true, so factual, so clear that we’re not interfering with their lives — that we don’t threaten them — that they have to make up crazy, completely ludicrous fictions about us. In order to portray us as threats. They have to make up tall tales about us. They have to turn us into monsters in order to feel threatened.

So teachers and gay people become “groomers.” Parents of trans kids become perverts. Liberals are part of a pedophilic Satanic conspiracy, where the blood of innocent kids — pure and true ones — is ritually drunk for eternal life’s sake, the potion of immortality. Or that we’re out to “replace” them, put microchips in them, and put them all in camps, in a plot driven by the UN.

The lies get more and more absurd and ridiculous. And yet every lie contains a truth, too. The truth in this one isn’t that we’re a threat to them. It’s that we’re not. It’s that they have to make up these insane, bizarre stories, myths, tell these lies, in order to portray us as monsters. That is how actually unthreatening we really are, because if you’re really genuinely materially threatened by someone, well, you hardly have to make up tall tales about them, do you? If someone’s really threatening you — taking something away from you, hurting you, harming you — you don’t have to resort to bizarro fictions, like, hey, they’re drinking my kids’ blood! They’re going to molest me! They’re going to put me in a camp! They have to make up these stories about us because the truth is that we’re…peaceful, harmless, people, fundamentally nonthreatening to them.

The Big Lies contain the truth, that we’re not threatening them in any way whatsoever, because, well, you don’t need to lie otherwise. If we were really threatening them, then surely some actual factual example could be pointed out, and not just some isolated one, but on a systemic level. But there isn’t one.