@joepie91 It seems like this is really a recruiting question. I don't really care that much about keeping people from becoming fascist if they're just going to remain a useless centrist. That leaves us stuck doing all the work with people who are already most of the way to fascism. I'd rather focus on recruiting moderates who have already come most of the way themselves.

@freakazoid It sort of is a recruiting question, but more about preventing recruiting from the right. They are fishing in the same 'moderates' pool, and the whole right-wing media empire is set up to do exactly that, and it's why more and more folks keep becoming right-wing extremists.

Sure, recruiting for leftist ideology is generally a good idea (as long as it's *actually* leftist and not someone's disguised scheme to gain power...), but that alone doesn't do much to prevent eg. racist violence. We also need to deal with the other end.

@joepie91 I feel like we're putting the cart before the horse when the vast majority of racist harm doesn't come from fascists. In fact, many of the people perpetrating it in the Fediverse consider themselves antifascist.

@joepie91 I haven't stopped thinking about this thread at all today, and the more I think about it the more convinced I am that the call is coming from inside the house. Our problem isn't fascists. Our problem is that the left is in utter chaos, while the right has found unity around figures like Trump. Meanwhile, the American "left" is unifying around a center-right figure. Sure, maybe defeating Trump will slow down the march of fascism slightly, but I doubt it will slow it much. I'm not even convinced Harris is actually in it to win, but I guess we'll see who she picks as her running mate.

@freakazoid (I will get back to this thread later, I want to give it my full attention before responding)

@joepie91 The whole practice of "redpilling" fundamentally relies on society already having done most of the work of turning white people, especially men, into fascists. To try to pull those people in the other direction, we essentially have to swim upstream. And to get them where? Not somewhere they're useful to us. Probably just to somewhere they're helping push people toward fascism from further upstream.

Meanwhile, the left is fairly terrible at recruiting. My journey toward anarchism was long and slow, largely because of roadblocks put in place by people on the left. One of the biggest was someone demonizing small business owners for not wanting to go bankrupt due to the society-wide problem of homelessness. I understand their point of view better now, but I still think it's a terrible approach. I'm still blocked by a whole bunch of anarchists over the silliest shit (along with plenty of justifiable reasons in other cases).

The only thing that tends to change people's minds is patient, persistent disagreement. It's a lot of work, and we need to focus on those it's most likely to be effective with.

@joepie91 You say you're not saying we should go into fascist spaces. And they don't come into left spaces in order to recruit, or even really to try to prevent us from recruiting. They go into spaces that are already dominated by white males who are ripe for redpilling. They come into left spaces to disrupt, to harass, and to collect intelligence for further disruption and harassment.

And their harassment often exploits weakness on the left, the big one being that many left spaces are ALSO very white. Even if we may not be recruitable for fascists, there's a decent chance we'll do a poor job of protecting non-whites among us, as we're doing right now in the Fediverse.

I guess what I'm saying is that our biggest bang for the buck almost certainly lies in getting our own house in order.