I am in the same boat as you and basically left/lost all my former friends over it.

I had the combo of being an internet dork who used to go on 4chan long ago, followed some of its derivative nonsense, and also has a degree in poki sci and econ, and years of data analysis work.

Nearly all my friends mocked and scorned me for being extremely concerned with this dubious yet growing trend that can roughly be summarized as all the /hopefully/ ironic racism/nazism of the terminally online crowd of the mid 00’s gradually becoming less and less ironic, talking points and memes migrating over to other platforms, being espoused by actual politicians…

…the whole process mirrors in many ways how fascist movements have grown in other societies.

But nobody wanted to hear it.

By the time I was openly calling out various rhetoric as literally fascist, all these idiots with no understanding of political science did the exact thing that is the next step in the social process: viewing this as alarmism and /me/ as extreme.

This even happened to my own family members. My dad thinks Jan 6th was done by Antifa, except for when he thinks it was an inside job by the FBI.

And he makes fucking ghost guns with no serial numbers in his garage, and is the most stereotypical mediocre white man you can possibly imagine.

Oh well. Fuck em all, I am better off without their constant belittling and ignorance.

Now more than half of them just actually are fascist in everything but self-identification, 90% of their rhetoric and positions they support align with either Nick Fuentes or Fucker Carlson, or the goddamned Praying Medic.

So, hooray, I was right. Sucks losing nearly everyone to the fascist mind virus, wish they would have listened seriously to anything I said, but by now I hate them from how abusive they were toward me.

Anyway, yes, also likewise, I could not possibly have predicted how utterly incompetent the leaders of this movement would be. The… the shit that Trump has done is truly mind bogglingly moronic, an even further indictment that in general American ‘conservatives’ may actually be more stupid and cruel than literal actual Nazis in some respects.

Anyway, I await the theocratic republic of america commiting pogroms against lgtbq and non christians, as well as infighting between various christian sects in i dunno 5 to 10 years, regardless of whether or not they won or lost the next civil war or if it somehow does not happen.