There are so many ways in which contemporary right-wing discourse is diseased that in my previous article on the topic I could barely scratch the surface.
I focused on how embracing myside bias justifies cruelty and amorality in dealing with one’s political opponents and disfavored groups. But it also fosters a victimhood mentality, which is similarly an outgrowth of rejecting liberal values on principle. Victimhood, on the one hand, and hatred, sadism, and cruelty on the other, feed into and reinforce one another. We’ve got to do it to them because they want to do much worse to us. How can we be expected to restrain ourselves when our enemies want us to die and will do whatever it takes for that to happen?
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I think this is also an outgrowth of a particularly toxic tendency on the right, which is to just reach for whatever argument is most convenient for creating their next content hit, without actually thinking about whether they themselves believe the argument or not.
A clear example of this for me was the reaction a lot of the right had to John Ossoff's comments on Natalie Harp. When John Ossoff accused Trump of wanting to "travel with Natalie", many commentators on the right expressed outrage at his misogyny, arguing that he was denigrating a hard-working young woman. Nevermind that many of those same commentators, in other more based contexts, would have expressed the idea that young women should stay home, or called for the 19th to be repealed. Arguments Are Soldiers. Many of the rightoids attacking Ossoff probably don't really believe that it's bad to denigrate women in the workplace, but the accusation of misogyny was just the most convenient weapon to hit their enemies with.
This tendency to chase the quick rejoinder is something everyone has, but its become baked particularly deeply into the culture of the right. Not just the Nazi wing, it's equally present on Fox and mainstream conservative commentary. Accusations of hypocrisy are a constant on the left, and left-wing commentators are constantly accusing each other of being hypocrites. But almost no one in Conservative culture seems to care or object if someone says a completely different thing than they said yesterday, so long as the thing they're saying is immediately harmful to the left.
This sometimes gives arguing with conservatives a feel of arguing with smoke and sand. Or like asking a low-tier GPT model with a very limited context window to make arguments against you. They'll complete the easiest next token of the argument, go for the most obvious rejoinder, but won't really think about how the argument they're making applies to their values in the long term.
One minute you're arguing with a libertarian free speech warrior who carries a pocket constitution and speaks of the importance the founders placed in a limited government and how crucial it all is to Western Civilization. The next, they're suddenly a maximalist who wants the constitution shredded to make way for a Christian dictatorship, with the government redefining the culture in a conservative direction. It all sounds good enough for an X post, but none of it fits ideologically together.
The victimhood tendencies of the fascist wing are surely genuinely felt in some cases, but I do think a lot of it comes down to this. Like the rest of the right, the fascists tend to reach for the most convenient argument. Sometimes that's a woke argument that makes them appear to be a snowflake, but they don't care or even notice. They're already onto the next content hit, the next autocompleted fill-in-the-blank post designed to make the libs mad. As Sartre said of the antisemites, these people just don't care very much about words.
This is the same rhetoric as wokesters who say you are attempting a lynching of a black person if yoy call the police about any crime involving a black person. Honestly there has always been a sort of similarity in style between left and right. Look at Germany un the 1920s. Two sets of victims fighting over exactly why they are victims.