u/Large_Produce6554

Why do the people who are most concerned about incredibly controversial topics (i.e. holocaust denial, promoting explicitly Neo-Nazi viewpoints a la Nick Fuentes, advocating for violence against certain groups of people) being censored online often the most vocal advocates about banning all books from schools and libraries that contain sex, queer people, or are told from the perspective of diverse characters? You would often see the same “free speech advocates” pressure schools to drop anything in their curriculum they perceive as “anti-white” or based on “critical race theory” (which can be quite subjective depending on their opinions). This also often extends to universities where certain members of the current administration are pressuring college admin to take harsher action against “cultural marxism” and “antisemitism“. These are also usually the same people who are advocating for people who have/are criticizing charlie kirk to be removed from positions of power.

If they are the “free speech advocates” they claim to be, why are they so adamant about banning everything they personally dislike?

I’ve been interning for a big company since September 2025. Not only do I really like the job (it’s a field I want to work in for my career), but I’ve had a pretty good relationship with my managers so far, as I’ve gotten mostly decent performance reviews, as well as verbal confirmation of a return offer.

The only thing is, I REALLY struggled a lot in first year and failed two courses back then. This completely tanked my cGPA - it’s recovered a bit since then but still awful, far below average. That’s why I was so relieved when the team I’m interning with never asked to see my GPA or transcript during the interviewing process - so they don’t know how bad my GPA really is.

One thing to note here is that I’m going into my final year of school after this internship, and my grades have been hovering around average (in my program) for the past two years - a slight recovery from first year, although it isn’t an exceptional upward trajectory.

Today, when I asked my team director (she’s fairly high up, managing ~40 people) if I could take a course this summer while interning, she said she would consider my request after discussing how I was doing in school with me tomorrow. This made my heart drop. I‘m terrified that she will ask for my GPA and maybe even ask for my transcript. I’m terrified that knowing my GPA will make her change her mind on my return offer.

I’m just asking for advice on how to respond if she asks for my GPA. I could highlight how I have been improving my cGPA by getting average grades for the past two years - but I‘m scared that it won’t look like an insanely good improvement.

I also wonder if I should avoid directly mentioning my GPA over the past two years, and just mention that it is around the program average.

Any advice on how to respond in this situation is appreciated.

I'm writing a story that involves people being kidnapped and forced to be biological computer-slaves while plugged into a neuron driven "computer" network. The more I write about it and expand the idea, the more I realize how utterly terrifying this would be to a real human being - effectively being endlessly tortured with no feasible way to escape. This is the first time I've been genuinely scared by a scenario I was writing about. It almost makes me want to end the story by having these characters die so that they are put out of their misery.

Anyone face a similar feeling where a character in your story goes through something so horrifying that you yourself feel disturbed?

I'm referring specifically to the parallels between the politics of the Weimar Republic (1919-c.1928) and the politics of the United States 2020-present.

I know what you must be thinking lol. This is such an overused comparison that it is almost cliche. But hear me out, this comparison is often made for good reason - but in my humble opinion, the current socioeconomic trends of the US reflect the Weimar Republic circa 1928-1929 (before Black Thursday) rather than 1933, as many anti-Trump liberals like to point out.

While most people know that immediately before Hitler's rise to power, most Germans felt that their nation had been humiliated and defeated, we often tend to forget that very early on in Weimar history (1919-c.1922) progressive, republican, and left-wing movements had greater popular support and momentum when compared to the nationalist-conservative movements (although the state bureaucracy remained very reactionary and monarchist) of that time.

To illustrate, the 1919 German elections saw the Social Democratic Party win 37.9% of the popular vote, the left-liberal DDP win 18.6%, and the far-left USPD win 7.6%. In comparison, the only major German reactionary party in 1919, the DNVP, won 10.3% of the vote. By November 1918, many Germans were sick and tired of the Hohenzollerns and their imperial war ministers (despite later Nazi stab in the back conspiracy theories), and let's not forget that the 1918 German revolution was driven in part by the frustrations of the German people. By 1918, there were mutinies in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, rapid increases in desertion numbers, all the while over a million munitions workers went on strike. When the "November Criminals" Phillip Scheidemann and Karl Liebknecht proclaimed their versions of a new republican government, many Germans felt hopeful about the chance of real societal progress and an increase in their standards of living. For the first time in many European countries, women had comparable legal rights as men, and people no longer lived under a form of dynastic monarchy. The revolutionary socialist mood in the country was exemplified by the Spartacist uprising of 1919, the Ruhr uprising (1920) and the "German October" uprising of 1923. With socialist/communist movements gaining traction in Germany, Hungary, Finland, Italy, the UK, and of course, Russia in 1919-1920, it seemed to many for a moment that the future might be red.

The revolutionary socialist mood of 1919 (at least in terms of the rapid societal changes it brought) can be compared to the spike in social progressivism and left wing movements in 2020-2021. After the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement became reinvigorated, and the discussion soon extended to a critical examination of societal hierarchy unprecedented in the West since the civil rights movement. The discussion of intersectionality initiated by BLM then extended to more explicitly politically progressive arguments such as capitalism's exploitative nature (i.e. "eat the rich"), police brutality (i.e. "ACAB"), as well as a drive to recognize the struggles faced by women, LGBTQ people, and disabled people. For a moment it seemed as though left-wing and socially progressive populism would defeat MAGA for good, and Gen Z would herald a future environmentally and socially conscious "woke" society. Much like how certain sections of the German working class were hopeful amidst their newfound rights and freedoms guaranteed by the republic, many Americans had high hopes for what Biden would do to address the economic inequality in America, exacerbated by COVID and the great recession.

Much like how the Kapp Putsch (1920) and murder of foreign minister Walter Rathenau (1922) initially turned many Germans against reactionary nationalism, it seemed that after Jan 6th, Trump would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

But as we all know very well, the "woke" optimism of 2020 began to fray. As the 2022-2023 inflation surge eroded the faith many former left-leaning voters had in Biden, and in the centre-left parties across Europe, the 1923 hyperinflation and reichstag chaos disillusioned millions of Germans who had once celebrated the abdication of the Kaiser. Much like the right-wing populist parties (MAGA, Afd, National Rally, Reform) that began taking off in 2023, one can argue that 1923 was the moment many Germans truly recognized the instability and weakness of the republic. The rapid societal changes brought on by the environmentalist movements (think school climate strikes, fridays for future, transition to green energy) and the ”woke” BLM/Feminist/LGBTQ movements of 2020 unnerved a lot of conservatives, libertarians, and especially my demographic, younger Gen Z men - and became the seeds of a reactionary backlash that has grown into the right-wing populism sweeping the west. I can’t help but notice the similarity in the backlash these aforementioned revolutionary socialist uprisings of 1919 generated - the Junkers, religious conservatives, middle classes, and the Prussian military-industrial establishment were horrified about these radical changes in the social fabric, and as a result began relying on political organizations farther and farther to the right to suppress communist “disturbances”.

In my opinion, Trump's second term is more comparable to the Hindenburg presidency (1925-) rather than Hitler's ascension to power. As can be argued about Trump, Hindenburg distrusted liberal democracy, had authoritarian conservative leanings (privately despising the Weimar Republic) and set about attempting to place more reactionary national-conservative figures in positions of power. Later in his term, Hindenburg would be a de facto strongman by ruling through presidential decree rather than parliament. Trump - much like Hindenburg - is a figure who eroded democratic institutions, and broke democratic norms regarding how executive power should be used - potentially leading to someone even more extreme down the line. The main difference here is that Trump raped children and directly destroyed public faith in government institutions.

Another contributing factor to this comparison to the Weimar Republic is the rising antisemitism in the United States (not the "antisemitism" that that Israel lobby uses to frame anyone criticizing their war crimes). When looking at the comments of any remotely political Instagram Reel, or when listening to a far-right influencer's (think Fuentes, Dan Bilzerian, Alex Jones, Candace Owens) podcast, you can see that belief in antisemitic conspiracy theories of all Jewish people being inherently subversive to the nation, greedy, and manipulating both capitalism and progressive ideologies to gain power has grown drastically in the past year. The greater problem with these types of influencers is that their views often come as a "package deal" - and include the side of holocaust denial, biological essentialism, "we fought the wrong enemy in WWII" opinions, and over-generalization of all non WASP ethnic or religious minority groups into a dehumanizing caricature of a stereotype. These aren't fringe, esoteric, Charlottesville-esque figures anymore. Millions of people are watching these podcasts, reels, and YouTube shorts as their only source of information and nodding along, algorithmically digging themselves further and further into the echo chamber without questioning who is feeding them the information.

This rhetoric is without exaggeration, identical to the discourse the fascist movements of Mosley and Hitler and Pavelic employed to gain popular support among those who were gullible, unemployed and disillusioned by mainstream political discourse in the face of economic turmoil. Neo Nazis on Twitter today complain about how the Jews have somehow manufactured and are controlling feminism, the LGBTQ movement, environmental movements, and all left-wing ideologies because "the Jews think the goyim are cattle", while SA men once stood on crates and expounded how both Bolshevism and High Finance were inventions of the Jews, meant to strangle the Aryan race into servitude. The tendency of certain human minds to move towards black and white, simplistic, tribalistic thinking in the face of economic anxiety has not changed one bit.

If the AI bubble bursts in the late 2020s, automation increasingly displaces white collar jobs, and costs of living and housing continue to increase at current rates, there is no doubt that certain demagogic figures will rise, employing nativist and christian nationalist rhetoric to channel the frustrations of the unemployed and disaffected. I personally also fear that climate change refugees, decreasing numbers of people in higher education, and decreasing birth rates will futher fuel societal instability in the early 2030s and lead to even greater far-right backlashes against immigration, and women having a free will. The cognitive infrastructure necessary for fascism has been hammered into the minds of millions of Americans in the past 10 years - from the alt right pipeline to short form content to AI slop, this is the new "media" that is replacing cable television.

Much like the Centre party under Heinrich Bruening (1930-1932) contributed to the Nazi appeal due to the implementation of austerity measures, I fear that a centrist, pro-corporate, Zionist democrat elected in 2028 would horribly fail to address the need for radical economic change amidst skyrocketing costs of living/housing and automation and instead further inflame rising antisemitism by sending more money to Israel.

If America will go through a genuinely reactionary, fascistic dictatorship phase in the near future, it will be spurred by what will supersede MAGA - the Groyper/America First movement.

There's my very long rant. If you've reached this far thanks for reading my thoughts. What do you think?