This woman did not awaken beneath a cabbage leaf 4 years ago and stumble wide-eyed into a MAGA rally. The slaveholders at the end of the Civil War also cried as the humans they had enslaved were freed. She is a member of a death cult. Her pain is dangerous. https://twitter.com/MysterySolvent/status/1351965595760259076

There absolutely needs to be some kind of a social structure in place to handle transitioning these people back to reality, but, I mean, they have to want to do that work. We cannot coddle or negotiate with their delusions.

Until then America is in a very uncomfortable position.

There are measures that can be taken. We took them in Germany when defanging the threat of fascism at the end of World War II. But they grate against many American sensibilities.

We were able to put aside those sensibilities when walking out of inspections of Dachau and Auschwitz with human ashes greasing our boots and clogging our throats, certain in the knowledge that this evil must be torn from the Earth root and stem.

We've avoided that here. Very narrowly. For now. The threat is still present, and very real, and it desperately wants another try.

I fear that as a result we are also going to avoid finding that same resolve. I fear half a million dead of plague still hasn't shocked us enough.

To be clear, I'm suggesting we need a program to rehabilitate those who can be rehabilitated. But we must also eradicate fascist ideology from this continent by force so it cannot threaten us again.

Trials for those who ran and staffed the genocidal camps on our borders. For those who deliberately exacerbated the plague for profit. For the leaders of the Q conspiracy.

Provisional citizenship for people acting to implement those causes or who served as integral lower-level agents thereof, with restricted rights of public expression, until it is clear they are no longer dangerous. Which in some cases might mean for life.

It's fucking appalling and un-American, I agree.

But they got concentration camps up and running and had gotten as far as letting people die of malnourishment and performing forcible sterilizations this time. And they did it because we pretended we could coexist with them.

You can only coexist with fascists until they recruit enough people to get the power to do what they want, because what they want to do is kill you. That is an existential threat.

We cannot afford again to hand these people a bullhorn and stand back and pat ourselves on the back for giving them the tools to carry out a fair debate.

They kill your children.

That's the cost of them duping enough useful idiots like Crying MAGA Lady way up at the top of this thread. They yell fuck your feelings while immigrants are sterilized, plague runs rampant, and they run your daughter over with a car.

Is her pain real? Sure. But she's crying because she doesn't get to hurt my friends. Because she doesn't get to watch her (imaginary!) enemies tortured for their (imaginary!) crimes.

If she wants to come back to the real world, okay. Come on back. I can even feel sad about the shambles she made of her life.

But don't tell me I should ever trust her again. I shouldn't. I shouldn't have to. I won't.

What she believes cannot be tolerated in a functional society. Full stop.

I'm looking back up at the thread now and I notice that "provisional citizenship" tweet has a lot fewer Likes than any of the others.

I don't blame you. That's a fucking terrifying idea and it can turn around and blow up in our face so, so, so easily. So easy to misuse.

It's the kind of administrative tool the fash would absolutely love to co-opt. Moreover, it stands in absolute stark opposition to all American ideals of freedom and equality above everything else.

I can only say again: we did it in Germany after the Nuremberg trials, and we were not gentle about it there, having seen the absolute end of the road fascism wanted to build. We had deep misgivings about it then.

But we knew this wasn't speech we were restricting, it was death.

Active proponents of fascism cannot participate in shaping our government or culture. We cannot stand it being pushed in our politics. We cannot stand its rhetoric being pushed through our social networks, formal or informal. Or in academia.

If you were one of the Q ringleaders or major amplifiers, those venues of public participation need to be closed to you. We just tried letting the marketplace of ideas regulate itself and it killed 400,000+ of us before we got it back under control.

I will freely admit this is a shitty idea and I hate it, but I don't have a better one, folks. I only know climate disaster is on its way and we can't afford to fuck around with this again.