Alex Jones and the Daily Stormer managed to make it from the fringe of the right wing discourse in 2016 to being represented at the federal levels in a matter of five years - this trend bodes poorly.

Yes, I think people don't understand that these fringe elements aren't independent entities, they are actually part of the larger GOP network whose job is to animate and mainstream the fringe. Breitbart wasn't just a news site, it was a Mercer project. https://twitter.com/scottstant/status/1357848358753366017?s=20

Milo Yiannopoulos and his campus tours of 2016 didn't just happen on their own, he was a Mercer project. I think there is the appearance of independence on the part of lot of the influencers and platforms, but that they are more centrally operated than we are meant to see.

The GOP rank and file aren't supposed to know this, because they are meant to feel like they are part of a decentralized insurgent movement. That's exciting to them. We aren't meant to know this, because then we might ask to what end all this activity is being coordinated.

So, what is the end goal of this propaganda network? As far as I can tell, it's to prepare people to murder their neighbors like Rwanda or the Balkans to usher in right wing authoritarianism. That's the direction the propaganda is pointing people to.

Now, there were always people willing to do this. They've always been there. But what makes now different is that after five years of an intense propaganda campaign, there are a lot more of them and they are being fully embraced the Republican party.

I'm not interested in fighting about John McCain, as so many people are fond of, but I would point to that famous moment where he told a voter that Obama was not in fact a secret Muslim sleeper agent. Today, most Republican politicians wouldn't dare fight the fringe like that.

In fact, what we have now is the opposite - instead of working to contain the fringe out of embarrassment, decency or decorum we now have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert leading it and lending legitimacy to it via their holding federal public office.

This all ends in violence that will make the capitol attack look small, just like the capitol attack made Charlottesville look small. How much violence, and in what form, is to be determined. But when one side has embraced violence as a viable avenue of politics, it’s certain.

The people who will try to warn you about this will be dismissed as hysterical and alarmist and doomsayers, just like when they tried to warn about trump ushering in fascism, or that there was a coup attempt underway. This is all quite predictable and repetitive.

We have a little breathing room, I don't know how much. Months, maybe even years. Acquire skills, acquire resources, make connections with people. But if you've even scratched the surface of how we got here to begin with, you know that we have not destroyed the enemy network.