This post was written as a sort of response / reply to this article, by Hilary Agro, during a discussion with a number of friends.  A few of them suggested I share it elsewhere.

As someone who used to be fully inside the fascist hate machine, what this article proposes comes from a place of great love and respect for humanity, but a lack of deeper understanding of how the fascist system works.  likely because they have never been inside it.

Their assertion that we need to offer fascists an 'out' instead of using shame / dehumanization against them is half correct.  For people to change, there does need to be an opportunity for them to get out of whatever groups they are in, but further than this, there needs to be a reason for them to leave in the first place.  In all my life, the only thing I have seen that forced people out of right-wing-isms is personally hurting those they like or respect.

Very broadly speaking, modern fascism is a collection of behaviors that reinforce upon people various contradictions, and then prevent them from resolving the contradictions.  I have heard these referred to as "phantasms."  It's essentially just self-sustaining delusion; firm belief in something that is fundamentally untrue, and a mental pathway for creating further contradictions in order to sustain the primary contradiction, instead of realizing it makes no sense and resolving it.  A common example is racists having One Minority Friend but still being racist / transphobic etc; their friend is the "Exception to the Rule."  They don't learn stereotypes are wrong, or that hate isn't helpful to anyone.  They just decide that the pseudoscience bullshit they believe is still correct and cannot be challenged, so to fit the fact that they've met someone they were told to hate that they actually like into their worldview, they make up things internally to justify it.  "He was raised by the Right People," or "He's still [minority] but we believe the same stuff" etc etc.

The reason I say this author's point is only half correct, is because we cannot force them to want to escape fascism.  Most of them are not in situations familially / culturally / friend-group-wise that they are capable of the minimum self-reflection required to help themselves.  We are not in situations where we can be the person that they love that can be hurt by their words, to force them to introspect, because we are not friends with the kinds of people who are fascists.  For this reason, for most people, helping fascists is far too much trouble, and will inflict serious mental strain if they are to attempt to befriend them.  Even then, if you are a newcomer to a fascist group, if that group itself is not like.  a friend group where people are just suffering from constant use of irony, it is nigh impossible to change it from the inside out.  devout fascists have whole dictionaries of thought-terminating cliches at the ready to counter anything insightful anyone says, both for themselves and others.  And even in the best-case scenario, a single fascist in a group of otherwise healthy people, you will still need to ingratiate yourself with them in order to help them.  it is not an endeavor we can simply take on for strangers.  It is something that has to be done on a very, very personal level.  It's the kind of years-long effort that hollywood loves to make cop movies about, all to "get" one person, or a small group of people.  It's not an effective way to combat the fascist cultural malaise.

I have at least one friend who escaped the brainworms specifically because of people rejecting and shaming them for being a fascist.  They were a fan of Splatoon, and when they brought their weird "i hate everyone" attitude into that community, they were rejected for it outright.  It was again a case of them hurting someone they respected.  But this still is something that happened organically. They sought out a new community on their own, and developed respect and desires on their own.  And to get to the point of branching out socially they had to be closer to a Healthy Human Being than the typical 4chan fascist.

And for the ones that are too far gone, who will never listen, who want to remain unhappy forever, there is no helping them.  There is a point, an environment and mental state, where they are incapable of helping themselves, and nothing anyone external can do can disrupt the environment they are in, to allow them to change their mental state, to pull them out of the miasma.  To that end, these people can only be described as "enemies."  Rejecting and depersonalizing them will perpetuate their firmness of faith in fascism, but if they are not already in the state where they are seeking to improve themselves, to resolve contradictions instead of making more of them, accepting them will only hurt yourself and everyone around you, because they will spread their ideology like a disease.  Reject fascists and call them freaks and losers and idiots.  Deny their premise.  Get uncomfortable when they bring up racial pseudoscience.  Make them feel unwelcome for even presenting this as a valid theory.  Do not attempt to argue on principles, because they have none.  Do not attempt to use logic, because they will just make things up to justify their points and perpetuate the argument ad infinitum.  Their goal is simply to Win or to piss you off enough that you give up stop trying.

For these ones.  For the ones that have nothing in their hearts or minds but hate.  They are our enemies, and we would only do ourselves a disservice to offer them anything but the vitriol and rejection they give us.  They would have us hanged for existing as we are, nevermind the things we believe.  They would see us killed and laugh about it.  They already laugh at suicide.  These are not people to be redeemed.  The only ones that can redeem them - that can change them - are themselves.  And if they can not or will not do this, their downfall will be wholly their own fault.  Fuck em.  You win every gunfight you never get into, but you can't win one with words, after the shooting starts.

The system made them like this, and to that end, the world around them shares some responsibility for them being this way, but they too are responsible for their behavior.  there is overwhelming force pushing against them ever changing their minds, but despite the mental miasma, the depression, the veil of irony so thick there's no substance left to be found in it, there is a person beneath all of this, who can choose, given the culmination of their circumstances, to continue as they are, or to change.  Continuing to stay the same is safe.  It's painless.  Until it's not, and they are *forced* to change.  If they are offered help and reject it, if they are shown there is a way out and decline it, if they are told they are being an awful piece of shit and rebuke whoever told them;  They cannot be helped.  And despite what made them believe the things they do, they have pitted themselves against those who would otherwise be closest to them. They are at fault not for becoming a fascist, but for remaining a fascist.  Some may remain this way because their internal compass never realizes it's done anything wrong.  They never hurt anyone they care about, or they simply never come to care about anyone at all.  at that point, the blame of rejection falls on their material circumstances, and the person themselves who perpetuates their own circumstances.  We can always blame and seek to fix the core causes that create fascism, but individuals, too; thinking, feeling, conscious - hold blame for their own actions.

Another friend of mine also shared their own thoughts, which I think sums up very well what it is that we 𝘤𝘢𝘯 do, for society and the world, which, in short, is to 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘵𝘺.

there's lots of little things that have happened over the past 40 years that individually seem innocuous, but all come together to make a pretty ugly quagmire. A lot of it deals with learned behaviors and neural plasticity. Too many people of the last two or three generations were brought up being taught that unquestioning faith in their leaders is the way forward, and then were never taught how to think critically. And at the basest level, human physiology supports that way of thinking.

All of this came about from the shift in evangelicalism teaching the Bible as a history book and that salvation comes from faith alone. Public education funds being used to give vouchers to send kids to private (religious) schools. No Child Left Behind teaching to the test instead of teaching kids how to figure out the answers themselves.

I'm kind of in agreement with you that most of these people are just lost causes. We will not change them. What we have to change is the education system. Do exactly what they accuse us of and get to them young - teach them to think, expose them to people who aren't like them, so when they encounter that bigoted shit, they naturally go "that doesn't seem right" and are driven to find answers for themselves.

Ultimately, this is what revolution is for, because changing society broadly requires changing the structures that sustain it.  It also reveals another of fascism's various tricks, which is that every accusation is an admission.  Accusing your enemies of precisely what you're doing.  That way, they will reject the accusation, not do the thing, and you get to keep reaping the rewards of whatever dirty tactic it is you're doing yourself but saying that they are.  Just as the Fascist American government has set up our education system, which manifestly primes children to be fascists.  The American Government frequently does this with other countries in reference to surveillance.  See the US's historical stances on China, for instance, despite what it's been doing with the PATRIOT act, and more recently Flock / Axon etc.

All of this is to say, fascism isn't unfixable, but the products of fascism are not something that is welcome in broader society.  Fascists are the only ones who can fix themselves, and if they never want to fix the behaviors that hurt themselves and everyone around them, then they are an enemy of the people as any other.