On the one hand, this is glib, QAnon isn't just a rebranded Nazi cult. https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/ On the other, it's too close for comfort, and something has gone terribly wrong with our education system, because people should know this.

People shouldn't be able to graduate from High School without knowing about the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the important role they played in the Nazis' propaganda arsenal. If they had been taught that, they would see the echos for themselves and reject it.

But we seem to be sending a lot of Americans out into the world without any knowledge of history, and in a case like this, it's dangerous: It seems to be the case that under certain forms of social stress, ideas like this gain purchase--ideas, in particular,

about elites, in particular, of extraordinary depravity, who sexually defile innocent girls, drink their blood, and secretly control everything "behind the shadows." Why is this idea so compelling to people when, under certain pressures of modernization perhaps,

people seek to understand a world that seems to them broken and corrupt? I'm not sure. But I know it's damned dangerous, because once you've got the blood libel involved, it's an excuse for genocide.

It has happened once, and it would be foolish to imagine that this version of the Protocols is so dumbed-down, so uniquely American in its kitsch and in its Satanic-sex-panic pedigree, that it isn't dangerous.

It doesn't have to be as dangerous as Nazi propaganda to be dangerous enough that we should worry a great deal about it. Just noting that it's stupid on Twitter isn't enough; the people who've gone down this rabbit hole need to be deprogrammed,

and we should probably start trying to figure out now, *before* they start trying to kill us in large numbers.