Why America is on the verge of committing atrocities against our neighbors

People have to be 'coached' into evil with propaganda. Trump and Musk have turned what our right has done for decades up to 11.

During Trump’s first regime, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE by Sinclair Lewis became the book people waved to signal, “Yes, ‘it’ is happening here, and we better stop ‘it!’” 

Those book wavers seemed to understand that Trump is a special case in America. They saw from the jump that he wanted to expand on the fascist elements that have always existed in our country despite our flowery rhetoric about freedom. By now, it’s indisputable that the Elonald/Nerd Reich/Project 2025 version of authoritarianism is thoroughly monarchial in a way that should make Americans wretch. It used to be that we largely agreed that if you wanted to wear a crown in this country, you better have a birthday party at Burger King in 1987.

But this Trump regime wants to oppress anyone who does not pledge allegiance to Elonald’s boot on their neck. And that includes white people, not just the poor ones. And their progress toward that goal should alarm all decent Americans.

Yes, the people who were worried about Trump's desire to impose American tyranny were right in 2017, and they are right now. But I still don’t think there’s any fundamental understanding of why this can happen here or why the threat is so much worse today.

We’re on the verge of abandoning democracy and our allies abroad. We are barreling toward an explosion of concentration camps at home. And we are threatening our neighbors over absolute bullshit. Yet we see only the sparks of the mass resistance these horrors deserve and will be required to stop them.

“It” is happening, and we’re letting it happen. If we want to change it, we must at least understand why and how it is happening.

50 years of right-wing lies turned up to 11

The American soul has been tenderized for decades by a right-wing propaganda machine that used coded language to turn workers against workers and undermine the progress of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement.

But under Trump, opportunistically seizing on the psychological wound of exactly one Black president, that coded language has increasingly echoed authoritarians who have moved their population in horrific atrocities against their neighbors, both within and outside our borders. This propaganda is so effective that most people don’t even realize they’re swimming it.

Why the obsession with “the border” when immigration remains America’s greatest natural resource? Why the focus on trans people when they want nothing but the most basic human rights, and medical evidence proves that they're just seeking the most effective care available? Why was there an urgent desire to gut the government when the government’s economic response to the pandemic gave us the best economic recovery in the world?

It’s all right-wing bullshit, variations on well trod themes that had a limited audience until two pop culture events radicalized our politics.

Gamergate (if you haven’t heard of it, it’s pretty much what you’d expect) turned the right-wing tech boys in Silicon Valley into “Men’s Rights Activists,” and Trump took basic right-wing garbage and gave it mass appeal with his WWE-style approach to campaigning (and governing). Both of these entities are experts in both marketing and scale.

We’ve been doused more and more in this dopamine-agitating messaging every year. And now we’re so drenched that leading Democrats have been deluded into thinking there’s some logical way to engage the right’s big lies that won’t just make the lies more powerful.

Why “it” is happening here

If we want to keep “it” from happening here, we must first realize that “it” could happen anywhere.

We want to believe that the Nazis, for instance, were uniquely evil and each of them decided at once to commit the worst and most efficient atrocities of human history due to that evilness. Unfortunately, that’s absurd.

It’s as ridiculous as believing that the Jews or the Romani people or the Catholics or trans people or gay people or undocumented immigrants or German citizens during World War I were a unique threat in history of the sort that must be put in camps.

That’s one of my two big takeaways from the latest episode of “Next Comes What” by Andrea Pitzer, which I helped produce. You can watch it above. And that realization that “humans are humans” has put a deep groove in my brain that will forever change my thinking.

I’ll let her explain it because I’m probably getting it wrong:

I want to expand on Andrea’s comments with this section from a lecture she gave about ONE LONG NIGHT, her global history of concentration camps:

When I was writing this book, my brother said, it must be really depressing to realize this is just where humanity goes, this is just Who we are as a species. And it's like, no, no, no. I said, did you read my book? Because the answer is actually it takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of propaganda. It takes years of work to get people to accept it and to maintain those systems.

When Nazis rolled into France, they tried to make a mini Kristallnacht in France. And there's these amazing letters where they're like, the French seem to hate the Jews, but they don't tolerate, like, they won't kind of get on board with, like, doing really, really bad things to them. And they, it was like, we're really baffled.

And the answer, in my sense of looking at the historical record, when I looked at all these documents, They hadn't had a chance to do the same kind of propaganda that they seeded in those five years before they did the massive roundup targeting Jewish people as a whole population They had not had a chance to do that and while there had been a lot of antisemitic political writing in France before that there was not the kind that motivates people to lock up and execute and exile That was just not it.

So I don't think humans naturally just do this. I think they have to be coached into it.

So how are Americans being coached into this?

These machines create fascists

AM radio was terrible. Fox News was worse. X is a machine that creates Nazis.

If you want a simple explanation about why the Trump of 2017, the greatest threat to democracy we’d ever faced in the White House, was far less of a threat than the Trump of 2025, the simple answer is Elon Musk.

Elon spent close to half a billion directly to elect Trump. He effectively self-funded the whole campaign. But we must never forget the $44 billion he harnessed to turning America on the Trump path by purchasing Twitter. That's what changed history. Using that platform, he re-normalized Trump among the economic elite, hollowed out by recriminations to an actual coup attempt, and erased the consequences of Trump’s never-ending criminality.

When he turned the closest thing we had to a town square into what Marcy Wheeler calls a “Machine for Fascism,” he fundamentally shifted reality. The site that most of the most prominent newsmakers in America use for news became warped by his intentions and his new features that are terrible for business yet wonderful for fascism. And many, if not most of these people, still get their news from Elon Musk—it’s a 24/7 thing for millions of Americans addicted to the kind of hate that has become Elon’s favorite product to sell—even at the expense of the company that car company that created his fortune (through massive taxpayer subsidies).

The Putin Path

America of 2025 is being coached into atrocities and complacency simultaneously.

The second colossal point I hope you get when you watch this week’s “Next Comes What” is that the parallels between the America of 2025 and Russia of 2012 are too powerful to ignore.

Andrea introduced Putin’s “return” as an example to consider when thinking about how to survive this mess in our first episode:

Putin’s Russia also figured prominently in our recent episode on corruption:

If you know me and my work on Ball of Thread, I believe Marcy’s assertion that the attack on our 2016 was at least this century's most successful intelligence operation. Putin is using Trump to avenge the Cold War and set democracy back a century or two. And Trump is glad to be used.

As Andrea says in the latest episode, they’re cooking from the same pots with the same ingredients. Authoritarians always want the same things and use the same essential tools to achieve them.

The problem isn’t America’s people. People are people. What’s unique about this moment is the amount and quality of the propaganda. Until we get that, we will never begin to shake the malaise that can keep the mass mobilization we need from happening while it still can.