The title is from a sketch comedy set (YouTube link) in which a pair of SS officers begin to suspect that they are the bad guys. It’s funny because it’s true. For every person who consciously chooses to be an evil prick, there are countless others who follow without giving it much thought.
For me, the past 10 years or so of U.S. politics has driven home a lesson implicit in the history of prior millennia, i.e., that with the right prep work, any population can be molded into monsters. As Popehat on Bluesky points out, these guys are building molds right now:
They’ll call it “Moms for Consequences” or something dumb like that. And this incel-whisperer asshole will be on the advisory board:
Popehat describes the pathology that motivates a wingnut plutocrat-funded think-tank and asshole incel-whisperer to appoint themselves contraception cops and puts the scheme in its broader context:
It would be wrong to see this as just a prudish or Victorian or even sincerely religious attitude about sex. It’s about control. It’s about the authority of the state intruding into more and more parts of life, and about making more and more people complicit in the abuse of power.
The Nazis’ increasingly all-encompassing laws didn’t just serve policy goals. They served to normalize the idea of the state having authority in every segment of life, and to make more and more people complicit in enforcing that authority. That’s what totalitarianism means.
The Nazis passed anti-Jewish laws that forced more and more people to be complicit in enforcement and part of the machine excluding, shunning, and abusing Jews. The American Right wants abortion laws, IVF laws, contraceptive laws that will make more and more doctors, nurses, etc. complicit.
The fundamental concept is that most people, rather than stand up and say “I’m a terrible person if I go along with this,” will go along and rewrite their mental map to agree with it rather than think themselves terrible.
The anti-trans movement illustrates this. They KNOW there are very few trans kids, but they want to make as many people as possible — coaches, teachers, administrators — complicit in policing and excluding them. Same with the push for censorship of books.
Exactly so. Moms for Liberty, the Alabama Supreme Court, the Heritage Foundation, Rufo, et al., are totalitarians. They’re the baddies. There are many ways to oppose them, including at the ballot box, but the first step is to refuse to be complicit — to resist normalization of this bullshit on every level.
I feel like we’re due for a good old-fashioned “it’s none of your fucking business” backlash to these totalitarian busybodies. Could be just wishful thinking on my part because I believe so strongly in my bones that these moralizing freakazoids should stop demanding to inspect strangers’ underwear. I dunno.
Open thread.