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I made a joke about this video in my last tweet but it’s actually a really useful example of how radicalisation works.
On the face of it, it’s shocking: a respectable looking lady, an elected official, reading ‘Hitler was right’ off a sheaf of notes.
On the face of it, it’s shocking: a respectable looking lady, an elected official, reading ‘Hitler was right’ off a sheaf of notes.
In public, with witnesses and cameras. Reading off a prepared script. She wasn’t caught in a drunken indiscretion or filmed covertly having a private conversation. She carefully and precisely reads it into the microphone. There are caveats, but she means it.
And this is how people get radicalised into authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is usually just the status quo on steroids. It seeks to preserve and regress the current balance of power and cultural norms. Political leaders sell people the status quo against a binary opposite.
So normal people go along with it. They start with just wanting to press pause on a world they are comfortable in and raise the drawbridge on the scary forces of change that might upset that. They see it as a choice between a ‘common sense’ world where abortion is baby killing...
...gay and trans people are unnatural and black and indigenous people should be thankful for their civilising influence. Toxic, but not particularly abnormal or uncommon. So the political leader sells them this, but with a little thorn in the roses. They say something cruel...
...something un-PC, something offensive. And even if you’re not on board with that, you feel kind of stuck. The other side seem to want things that you’ve been told are actively dangerous and a threat to you so you can’t go with them. So you stay on your side and try and ignore..
...the cruelty. And because the only people left on that side are other people who can ignore the cruelty, you’re exposed to a group of likeminded people who distort your sense of what is normal and acceptable. And you keep siding with the people who said the cruel thing.
And then you’re struck, because what you didn’t realise is that it’s a lobster trap. It’s really hard to come back from supporting someone who is that openly cruel. So you justify it to yourself. Maybe Hitler wasn’t that bad. Maybe the Jews lied. Maybe Mexicans are rapists.
And most people, when presented with a crossroads where something has gone to far, will not backpedal. Because the other thing this radicalisation process does is strip you of your friends and family. Because even people who are also conservative think you’ve gone too far.
So you can pick a humiliating climb down where you lose all of your new community and maybe can’t get your old one back, or you double and triple down. And most people when faced with that threat to their ego? Especially if they are old, rich and white? They triple the fuck down.
Then you have a group of people who only trust their own feelings because everything else is a threat to their ego. That’s where the extreme delusion and whackadoodleness comes from. It’s why they often contradict their own narratives in the space of a sentence.
Because they are constantly having to lie to themselves to avoid reality. And I’m not suggesting that everyone radicalised is an innocent lamb to the slaughter. The hate and the anger and the privilege and self righteousness has to be already there, ready to be nurtured.
And that’s where statements like ‘Hitler was right’ come into play. They are like misspelled emails from a Nigerian Prince; if they make you cautious or suspicious, they aren’t for you. They don’t want smart, moral people who might betray them. It’s a sieve. It weeds people out.
There are lots of other routes to radicalisation but this is often how they get the soccer mom and patio grill dad crowd. The people who just seem like normal humans. They start with a wedge issue and then they make it impossible to turn back.
So speeches like this are not a faux pas. It doesn’t make the person giving them a tactical genius, it’s more like how your school bully just knows where the buttons are. It’s an instinct. It’s not a slip up or a mistake or misjudgement. This shit was very successful for 4 years.
