Fascists Are Pathetic:

It is maybe more accurate to say that the public-facing part of the federal government is identifiable at this moment as a specific and repellent type of American Guy.

Instinct and panic and a gnarled suite of anti-values will do the work from there; you can't trust him for much, but you can trust that this guy will point that vehicle's enormous snarling grille at a smaller vehicle being driven by someone the guy in question has identified as a target. They would be doing this, or spending hours every day fantasizing about doing it, even if they had not been told that their right do it now supersedes every other right in public life.

This type of person exists in American life—"our neighbors, friends, and loved ones," in the words of Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin—in sufficient enough numbers that everyone who does not want to become a character in the incoherent first-person shooter video game that plays over their every waking moment knows to avoid them. They are all around us, but contra Sen. Mullin they are not really our neighbors or friends; they do not quite fit that concept, and cannot really buy into it. They are self-deputized; their personal defects make them unstable in a way that leads inexorably to car crashes.

Before they put on plate carriers and masks and threw themselves into the dirty business of terrorizing their neighbors and breaking their families, they were still identifiable as who and what they are and always were—seething, unappeasable, deliriously and defiantly pig-stupid, and absolutely a threat to the peace and comfort and flourishing of everyone and anything else. The masks only make them easier to see.

They are two sides of the same coin, or the same side of this particular personality type—baffled, brutish, plainly terrified and out of control, incapable of self-regulation or basic self-soothing, never learning a single thing and making as big and violent a mess as they can on principle.

The original justification for the surge was an incomprehensible viral video by a conservative influencer, but it has since become both a campaign of indiscriminate punishment and cyclical content creation and omnidirectional retribution—a frantic tantrum unconvincingly dressing itself up as an act of stern paternal discipline, and a screen-addled movement of hair-trigger illiterates that has lost the ability to do anything but react, generating new scenes to react to.

Some people who did not know anything, and who kept themselves scared all the time, and who held a grudge against the whole rest of humanity because of how ignorant and frightened that bigger world's existence made them feel, handed weapons to other people who felt the same way, and told them to figure it out. All that war and the ways in which the rot it made weakened various important structures and edifices, the terrible use reactionary cynics found for that rot, the toxins that invariably showed up in the groundwater downstream from all that violence—all of these things made the culture stupid and cruel in new ways, or maybe just in very old ones. All of that made this awful moment, too.

Every day, those pissy goons go out looking for trouble, and every day people who never previously imagined that they would do such a thing tell them to fuck off, absorb outsized violence for doing so, and resolve to do it again the next day.

They are going to lose, and not just because they are outnumbered.