The internet is the foundation for the solution. This is the only thing that evaporates the illusions and divisions rulers create for their own benefit. Otherwise we end up with red scares, witch hunts, inquisitions, and all the other same crap from history. Unfortunately they’re chipping away at it - centralized social media is a powerful propaganda tool with no constitutional restraints, as is online censorship and surveillance.

Fascism is a massive violent manifestation of ignorance. The only real solution is to undo the brainwashing of humanity - their brainwashing with religion, their brainwashing to accept abusive hierarchical rule, all of it. Everyone must fully understand.

People responding with “guns”, “WW2” - we did that already, 70 million people died, and here we are again. Why and how did it come back? What is the actual source of the problem? Treating this problem as only solvable with mass murder isn’t exactly putting you on the moral high ground. What conditions give rise to acceptance of fascist beliefs, or the acceptance of a fascist leader? What are the mental, social, cultural, behavioral traits of the people that do accept that? How can those traits be prevented from forming?

A key element to defeat things like fascism, which build themselves on the popularity of fear, is that voting can’t be free-for-all. Voting should require, or be weighed with, some sort of licensing, testing of sane mind, awareness and understanding of at least current events, review of known association with dangerous anti-society parties, etc.

This is inherently anti-democratic. Who decides who’s qualified to vote? Is it you, with your infallible understanding of every issue?

OK, so a bit over a third of the population doesn’t care enough to vote. Not for anyone - D, R, or any third party. Let’s assume they’re mostly uneducated. What happens to the polling results when you compel them to vote?

I think compelling voter turnout is the last thing you should be even considering. The first real problem is education - nobody understand anything about government - not what fascism is, not how the economy works, not what imperialism is, nothing of real substance. The second problem is this “lesser of two evils” bullshit that has even the slightly-more-educated half of the population voting for mass murderers, which you can’t resolve in first-past-the-post majority rule elections, at least not with the stupid mindset everyone has right now. Electoral college is a similar problem. And what about the problems with “representative” government both failing to represent and manipulating public will for the benefit of powerful lobbies? How about systemic reform that removes their power?

You thought about any of these things?

Really sleepwalking into the plot of The Matrix, aren’t we.

Ideally without 60-70 million people dying. (looks up “how to unbrainwash people”)

Were the communists responsible for Hitler’s electoral victory? Asking for a friend.

Arms but only in the hands of the state. Specifically the American state, the heart of the dystopian global empire. What could possibly go wrong.

Problem is that well-intentioned rules with discretionary boundaries end up with unethical enforcement. See: the bill a few months ago that federally defines “anti-semitism” as including “criticism of the state of Israel”. Actually that’s not even a discretionary boundary, that’s statutory. The reasoning behind the First Amendment in the first place was to avoid authoritarian censorship, including these kinds of games where “reasonable regulation” of speech is used to shoehorn in authoritarian censorship.

This is the straw man:

Way I see it, you have two competing overarching theories, “spontaneous order” and “orchestrated order”.

I mean “order” in the sense of “enforced form”. The shape of things, namely, a broader, shared agenda of government and major corps. And I’m not assuming it, I’m describing the content of theories.

You didn’t explain how that was inaccurate. You just said they were using a “mental model”. Why are they using that mental model, though? It’s because they need somebody to be in control.

I did explain it, actually.

This has actually been studied. Sociologists have studied conspiracy theorists, and they are often people with control issues.

Correlation and causation issue? Point to the studies, show their methods and conclusions (although IMHO don’t bother).

Not attacking a strawman, I asked him to clarify and then talked about the context.

“Conspiracy theorists” often look at an event that’s heavily covered by the media, that serves a perceived state interest, and investigate it further. Particularly if it receives disproportionate emphasis, like the various mass casualty events that were referenced so often they’re just referred to by dates (“9/11”, “7/7”, “Oct. 7”, etc.). Sandy Hook served a perceived state interest (popular disarmament), and people perceived “weird things about it”, so to speak, so interpretations of the event differed. Sometimes people try to explain the formation of these theories in terms of fulfillment of an emotional need (“they can’t accept this would just happen so they need to pretend someone is in control”), which is just inaccurate. They have a mental model, whether accurate in a given case or not, where there’s an antagonistic power structure of some kind orchestrating events or narratives for its own benefit, and are simply applying that lens to understand new events and narratives.

At the end of the day, it is a fact that the U.S. government does things like this in general. You look at declassified CIA documents from the past, they are very open about overthrowing governments, manipulating public perception, and all sorts of other shady behavior. But they’re not open about them as they’re doing them. So we’re left with the difficulty of figuring it out for ourselves.

Which facts. How does the world work, in your estimation.

Way I see it, you have two competing overarching theories, “spontaneous order” and “orchestrated order”. You look at the U.S./Western empire, with its totally hierarchical command structure, and a big “?” at the top above SCOTUS, Congress and the Presidency, who all inexplicably follow the same agendas opposed to the will and benefit of the people, it seems to me a perfectly reasonable conclusion that somebody is in control. I don’t think it’s the Freemasons - this was kind of an old trope throughout American history (see the early 1800s Anti-Masonic Party), but knocking out individual dumb theories for who’s in charge doesn’t disprove all of them.

IMO, “conspiracy theories” are a natural attempt to explain observed reality (inequality, mass conditioning/brainwashing, global militarism and empire, etc.). They can be informed by falsehoods and/or manipulated into harmful movements (MAGA for example), but again, doesn’t disprove the entire idea of society being controlled. The only way you get to such a disproof is by an exhaustive analysis of every social institution demonstrating it’s not being controlled. Going, “these things just happen on their own” without any further detail is hand-wavey.

Have you considered you can really accuse anyone you disagree with of “being idiots who can’t or won’t face the facts of reality”? Maybe reality is as hideous and our society as controlled as they say, and you’re the one can’t or won’t face the facts of it. That kind of discourse doesn’t get anyone anywhere.