Just because I am friends with, help, support, enable, lobby, and fundraise for fascists, that doesn’t mean I am one.

All the fascist stuff that I like and say? I do that as a joke. I’m not being serious.

And so what if I am being serious about some of it? Isn’t it my right to have my own opinion? Isn’t that freedom?

Yeah, I believe some oppressive and hurtful things, some of which actually threaten or harm others. But you have to tolerate that. It’s my right to have those beliefs, to share them with like-minded friends, and to lobby social media platforms for an even larger audience.

If in the course of that I should happen to ally myself with tens of thousands of other fascists, all of whom believe these harmful things, that’s our right! Of course politicians eager for power would cater to us, either pretending to or actually believing the same things.

It would be only natural for our fascist political machine to then seek more support and more power, and to feel entitled to increasingly violent rhetoric, since that rhetoric is what drew many to our cause in the first place.

So sure I guess the end result of more and more calls for violence from politicians and more and more calls for violence from people like me, fellow fascists, might end up actually causing the violence we’ve all been clamoring for. What would be wrong with that?

And so what if we slowly coerce more and more people into allowing us to believe these hateful, dangerous things, shifting the entire American political landscape? With just a slight tolerance at first we’d shift everything to the point where all fascism is acceptable.

But that’s not my fault!