It’s worse than that. They’re penguins on an ice floe. All the penguins want to get into the water; none of them want to get eaten by a leopard seal. They mill around until a penguin gets brave/hungry enough to jump in (or one gets pushed in), and the rest of them wait to see if he gets eaten. If it survives, all the rest of the penguins jump right in after them.

With fascists you have a bunch of folks nudging people toward (but carefully avoiding openly calling for) violence. They push right up to the line, inch by inch, as close as they possibly can without technically crossing it. They do it until someone trips over, and then they all watch to see if/how that person gets punished.

The absolute instant that law enforcement ever stops punishing these people in a meaningful way we are going to see some crazy shit. That crazy shit will suddenly become the new normal, and the fascists will start pushing a new, more extreme line.

I think there would be a lot more urgency around this if more regular people could hear how conservative gun owners talk to each other when they think no one else is around. There are a lot of real normal-seeming guys who have reached a casual acceptance that any day now it will be time to “do the things.” Which is a fun little euphemism for murdering anyone they feel isn’t conservative enough, white enough, or Christian enough. They haven’t affiliated themselves with a larger extremist group yet, but are none-the-less arming and training themselves toward the goal of joining right in when it’s finally time to “do the things.”