Fascism is Secretly a Trauma Response

Fear shrinks our world until only the threat remains in view. That biological truth doesn’t stop at the edge of the skin; it scales up to cities and nations. We explore how chronic stress—pandemic fallout, economic pressure, and a nonstop fear feed—can push entire communities toward authoritarian comfort: conformity, punishment, and a single story that feels safe because it’s simple.

I lay out the biology first: how tunnel vision and fight–flight–freeze–fawn tilt our choices when we feel cornered. Then we connect the science to politics with research you can use. Karen Stenner’s work on normative threat explains rising demands for sameness. Terror management theory shows why mortality talk fuels loyalty to strongmen. Michael Hogg’s uncertainty-identity theory clarifies why shaky times tighten in-groups and elevate leaders who promise firm rules. We also examine the media ecosystem, lawsuits that exposed manufactured narratives, and why single-source news becomes addictive when certainty feels like oxygen.

Religion’s role is nuanced and real. The habit of surrender—let go and let God—can slide into civic life as let go and let the Strong Leader. Priming, prophecy, and confirmation bias form a powerful feedback loop that paints outsiders as dangerous and makes crackdowns look like care. I share personal stories from an evangelical upbringing to show how these patterns get baked in early and reactivated under stress.

Here’s the hopeful pivot: the same biology that drifts us toward control can lead us back through connection. Safety downshifts the nervous system. Mutual aid, volunteering, honest conversation, and multiple information streams widen the aperture so complexity feels manageable again. If we regulate our bodies and strengthen our communities, we reduce the appeal of punitive certainty and make democratic solutions visible.

If this resonates, share it with one person who feels alone or overwhelmed. Then do something together—big or small—that builds connection. Subscribe for more grounded, plainspoken dives into how our bodies, beliefs, and politics shape each other, and leave a review to help others find the show.

Chapters

• 0:35 Framing Fascism As Trauma
• 4:20 Biology Of Stress And Tunnel Vision
• 12:10 From Threat To Craving Control
• 21:09 Stress To Authoritarianism: Theories
• 32:46 Media Fear, Certainty, And Echoes

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:35

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I'm your host, Owl Medicine, and today's podcast is all about how fascism and this tendency that we have currently is really just trauma response. And I really want to make this very clear because this is the heart of my understanding of everything that's happening right now. This and being raised in an evangelical authoritarian style household. Um so buckle up because this one's gonna be a doozy. Um I really want to make this clear. So what I'm gonna be laying out in this podcast is we're gonna have a couple of like three different main acts. And the first one is just to paint the big picture, I'm gonna compare like a nation under threat to a human nervous system under stress or threat. And we're gonna look at the biology of what happens in a human, and we're gonna compare that to what happens civically in a nation state. And we're gonna look at like the parallels, and I hope that you see the incredible parallels that are going on right now. That there is a reason there are 15 different countries, many of which are predominantly monotheistic, which is interesting. Um, not enough evidence to like obviously it's just coincidental as far as evidence goes, but to me, it's more than coincidental, and you'll understand why when we finish this podcast. But there are a lot of countries and upheaval right now, because frankly, I think that a lot of what's happening is a response to COVID. I think that a lot of people are still stressed and still afraid, and then we have the condition of long COVID, which is just extra like inflammation and swelling in the body and in the brain. That is our definition for long COVID, which is the dumbest thing in the world. But whatever. Because I mean, the reality is that COVID did change our baseline biology. I don't know or necessarily believe that the virus changed our baseline biology, but certainly our collective response as a culture, as a nation, and as a world changed our biological responses. So, in the first bit, I'm gonna be laying out that a nation-state versus a human body under external threats. Then we're gonna look how that stress leads us to authoritarianism, how it's its baseline um responses is to it makes perfect sense to lean toward authoritarianism. And then the last piece is gonna tie in religion and certainty uh in uh a threat, because right now the fascist, like the fascist movement that is really taking a hold strongly in the United States right now, is I think a response to COVID and is predominantly being pushed by evangelical Christians. So I believe that there is a very important connection there. And if we look at the biology, it actually explains all of this. So that's the overview of today's um episode. So buckle up. Act one, we have to start by talking about the biology of stress. Like what happens when we have a stress response. There's that classic story of your brain and the bear. And it's the like stress 101 introduction, the psych 101 introduction to stress. And basically the story goes like you say that you are in the woods and you see a bear. Then what happens is your body primes itself to be prepared to deal with this threat. Now we've all heard of fight, flight, freeze, and now people have probably heard of fright and flight, and now you've heard of fight, flight, freeze, and maybe even fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These are four different ways. They're really two different primary ways, but there are sub, like subdivided ways within those two that um are the natural responses to stress. We can fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And with a bear, like fawning actually can kind of work if it's like a black bear, or not a black bear, a brown bear. Um I don't remember. But one of them, they tell you to play dead. That's fawning. And you could fight, but you're gonna lose because it's a bear. And so then fleeing is maybe your best option, unless it might be freezing. Um, and if maybe the bear hasn't seen you, you can freeze, and like that's cool, and maybe they won't see you and they'll continue along their way, and you alright. But no matter what, no matter which of the strategies your body uses for this fight, flight, freeze, fawn response to seeing a st a bear, which is a pretty big stressor, your body is going to respond by changing the way that you see things, literally. Your your vision will actually, like your pupils will dilate. We start to literally get tunnel vision, we focus exclusively on the threat and we don't see what's happening around us. Our uh blood vessels, they constrict because now is time to pump as much blood to as many parts of the body as possible to either fight the bear or run away. That means our digestion gets shut down because digestion is not nearly as important as survival. So our body through the vagus nerve tells our stomach to like chill out and peristalsis, which is the digestion, it's the movement of food through the intestines, tells peristalsis to chill out, says we're not doing that right now, we got bigger fish to fry. This is really interesting and it's important to notice because these are the responses of the human body under stress. Now we've done a little bit of psychological evaluation, we've done some studies on what happens to people under stress, not just biologically, but psychologically. And we know through uh we know through science that is published in highly acclaimed journals that a person who is under stress is much more likely to view neutral faces as threatening or negative faces. They're more likely to view neutral phrasing and words as more threatening or aggressive or negative. It, like I said, creates this tunnel vision and not just your actual sensory vision, but it creates a psychological tunnel vision as well, where you're only really able to focus on the like the stress or the threat itself. And that gets really hard because COVID shaped all of our worlds, it changed everything, and there isn't one person or thing that we can point at that was the problem, which means we have this existential crisis happening in the world. That's why 15 countries have been like burning down their burning down their congresses and their their version of their white houses. They've people have have evacuated their burning buildings in the street. There's major upheaval in a lot of places because a lot of places seem to be going down this authoritarian road, which makes sense because under threat, we have a need for safety. We have a biological need for safety as human beings. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to get safety for ourselves. And this is the difference. The way the way one person attains safety is different from the way another person attains safety. This is why some of our biggest stressors and people who piss us off the most can be siblings. Because our siblings had to learn to cope with the same stresses that we did, but they have a different way of coping with those stresses. And their version of coping or their the way that they cope usually is a complete paradigm shift from the way that the other siblings cope, and the there that creates some conflict on what's important and what matters and how to move through life. This same thing is happening with people who are conservative. More conservative people, and especially Christian people, any monotheistic religion, has a tendency, since your religion, which is like your baseline for how you see the entire world, depending on how religious you are, the more true that that statement is. But when your entire world is like just leave it to God, and God will take care of it, you have this one this one being outside of you who you can lean on to solve all of your problems. You don't even need to know what the problems are, you can just leave it to God. And this is what we're seeing, because there is no one to blame for COVID. There is no one specific person. So everyone is under this str under this stress, they're under this fear because there is nobody to blame. That's more scary, and they're looking for a way to find safety, and blame is usually a part of that because we point the finger at whoever's fault it was, and we say, You, you're not allowed to do that again, and then we all feel a little bit safer. But since we can't do that, because the the fault, there it there isn't any single one thing that you can point at, except for maybe like technological advancement of the human race, which that's a big bucket. It's very hard to pin the blame on any one place or any one tangible thing. So we wind up creating this existential enemy to help us deal with the existential crisis, and this is what's happening. This is why they're terrified, and they like the the right right now, hate all immigrants, they're terrified of them. But before I get too ahead of myself, let me I'm I'm starting to touch on um act two and three here. Let me slow down a bit. The there is a bit of trauma science that's important to understand here. If safety downshifts our bodies toward connection, then threat up shifts our bodies toward control. I think that's really important to understand. And if you listen to the likes of people like uh Stephen Porgis and Bessel Bessel van der Koch, who were like the two most amazing trauma researchers uh out there, um, then like Stephen Porgis invented polyvagal theory or found, I guess, uh polyvagal theory, they understand or they say a lot that safety is a biological need for the human animal. And if there is a threat, we get cranked up rather than like cranked down. So we're more worried about safety and control than we are connection when we get into this. So act two, stress to authoritarianism. This is all about connecting the dots between the heightened stress that we talk about from act one, all of those biological stress responses, our tunnel vision, our heart racing, our blood vessels constricting, getting us ready to fight, fly, or run away from whatever the threat is. And now let's look at this on a global or at least a national scale. Right now, like so here's a good time to introduce uh Karen Stenner's idea about the normative threat. People with an underlying authoritarian disposition start demanding more conformity and harsher treatment of anyone who is different. In other words, the more uncertain the world feels, the more people crave order and control, especially those that have an underlying authoritarian predisposition. Now, what do we know? Who do we know with an underlying authoritarian predisposition? Anybody who really like voted and supported Trump. Now, not every single one of them have an authoritarian predisposition. I'm sure some of them were just like super duper contrarian, but even contrarians, we really like to have our favorite contrarian and like we glom on to that. And both sides are doing this, but this is about fascism. This episode is about fascism. So with Karen Sinner's work on the normative threat, it makes it obvious that okay, peep that there are people that some of us have an authoritarian predisposition. And those people are demanding harsher treatment and demanding complete conformity from everybody who is not just like them. And then we have the terror management theory. This is an interesting one because uh terror management theory explains that when people are reminded of their mortality, they are more likely to support a charismatic authoritarian leader. And this is obviously can be tied to the constant stream of pandemic news, of the immigrant news, of the threat to the threat to the 2016 election with the Mueller report. And this uh I'm getting a little ahead of myself again, but this points me to Fox News has been sued hands down, way, way, way, way more. I actually just recently looked up every single lawsuit against Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC to look up any defamation stuff, any false like news claims kind kind of things. And Fox News has been sued over and over and over again, and they always lose, basically. Um, and including they were sued by the people who created the ticket booths for voting, for saying that they were tampered with, and they were sued, and they lost because it turned out that they knowingly did this. They knew that they were telling a lie, but it fit with the paradigm and it fit with the narrative that their people want to hear. So they ran the story for multiple weeks, regardless of the fact that they as a unit knew that this news story was a lie. And they may they maintained that it was true and kept running it, creating an existential threat, saying that the uh that even our voting is is under attack, which it was. The end of the Mueller report, which I had forgotten about until like a year ago, and I decided to do some research on it, was like, what happened with all of that anyway? And looked it up and come to find out that the Mueller report eventually just said that Trump lost the election and it wasn't it wouldn't have been possible for him to come out on top the way he did if it weren't for massive, massive, massive Russian interference. So this we'll get to when we get to getting all of your information from one trusted source, which is a thing that conservatives do, that liberals tend to not do. And anyone under stress, whether conservative or liberal, starts to do less of. We start to get our information from less places because the perspectives that we're having to manage, if we get five different perspectives, we have to balance those and choose where we're going to believe, or say somewhere in this thing is is approximately close enough to what I believe, but approximately close enough is not close enough under threat. So most of us want something that we believe immediately because that certainty brings us a felt sense of safety. And that's what we're all after. Because again, this is a response to COVID and the other incredible stresses that we have in the world. It's COVID, it's housing crisis, it's the well affordability crisis, it's the billionaire crisis, it's it's the stock market crisis, is what it is. If we didn't have the stock market, none of this shit would be happening because you wouldn't have venture capital companies, you wouldn't have BlackRock, you wouldn't have Vanderbilt, um, the I almost said Vanderbilt. Um, you wouldn't have these massive um money management companies that just move billions of well, trillions of dollars around for multiple billionaires. You wouldn't have any of those things. But all of these things add up to a major existential crisis. Everyone, whether Republican or Democrat or libertarian or anarchist, everyone is having to work even harder to make ends meet, except for maybe some of us like real anarchists who were like, fuck the whole system, and I only need to make enough to like have food, and I'm not trying to have a have uh a new car or a house or anything. That's pretty much what you have to do in order to afford living in America right now, is just be okay with being completely impoverished. But these are all existential threats, right? And we're looking for safety in the existential threat. And so when we bring in this concept of terror management theory, that's why our news is constantly reminding people of their mortality. We're constantly showing stuff of death because it creates a demand for more certainty. And so people keep going back to the news to find out what's happening so they can feel more safe and feel more secure, even though the news is purposefully and knowingly perpetuating more fear and more of like it's it's it's feeding itself, right? Not just Fox News, although they're the worst because they have repeatedly knowingly shared false information. And the president that they love so much is the one who invented the term fake news and alternative facts to just quell any of the naysayers about him. Next, we'll go into Michael Hogg's idea that when people feel uncertain about themselves or the world, they cling more tightly to their in-group and they prefer leaders who enforce clear norms. Basically, uncertainty makes people want a firm hand at the helm. They want somebody in charge who's going to take charge. That makes them feel more safe, more secure. But the problem is America is supposed to be a melting pot. We're supposed to be a very diverse country. And so there is no norm. And people's in-group has become are you a Nazi or are you not a Nazi? And I'm absolutely guilty of this, and I don't fucking feel bad because I have waited and waited and waited and tried and tried and tried and been patient and been patient and been patient, and there are still people who refuse to understand that they support fascism because they support the definition of fascism, which I did a whole post on on Facebook. Maybe I'll pull that up in a little bit. But I don't want to get too far off of topic here. The this problem with Michael, like that Michael Hogg has put out, like put out, saying that like when people feel uncertain, they want a firm hand. This is fascism, right? So this is this biological reality that we're all existing with in our nervous systems, because it's just it's not just things that happen to us personally that affect our nervous system. It's things that happen to us globally, nationally, existentially, sociologically. These things affect us and they affect us ding ding ding via our nervous system. And then we seek to regulate our nervous system through personal and through social or political actions. This is why everybody is not everybody. This is why Christians, Christians in my town just Saturday, at the No Kings protest, there were half a dozen of the Turning Point USA new chapter that just started in my town that uh kicked my partner speaker off of the ledge and threw it onto a roof because you know they're super caring Christians. They they came to the No Kings protest to counter protest, and I, no kidding. I heard them sing, it's like chanting, let's go ice, let's go ice, let's go ice. It didn't last that long, but I was like, wow, this is how the Christians are. Yup. So for those of you who don't know, I grew up in a very, very evangelical Christian household. My father specifically. My father has a associate's degree in Bible doctrine and theology from the community college of the Air Force. We used to stamp and mail postal patron, um, which I won't get into, uh, we used to mail chick tracks to every single house in the entire state. We covered all of Indiana one time. And what I say by we is I mean, my father would buy these chick tracks, which are like pamphlets that scare people into believing in heaven and hell. Mostly scare people into believing in hell, so then by default you'll believe in heaven. Because it's easier to get somebody to believe something through fear. Hmm, sound familiar? So, like we would take these chick tracks that were really, really, really ridiculous and quite traumatizing, and we'd stuff them into envelopes. One of like my three, my two siblings, us three kids, my sister, myself, and my brother. One of us would stuff the chick track into the envelope, the next would seal the envelope, and the third would stamp a stamp that said postal patron, which is a uh a stamp that my father bought from the post office that allowed him to legally and without paying for postage because he paid for the stamp, allows you to legally uh put anything into an envelope, stamp it with postal patron, and however many of those things that they have, they will distribute them out to every single mailbox that the that the mail goes to that day. So it's that's why it's postal patron, any patron of the post office. If a person does this, you can get that information out to anybody without paying individual stamp prices. So, like, that's the level of like brainwashed activism I was raised into. That this is basic. This is your this is this is like you just doing your your your religious duty. This was um this obviously also led me to doing things like when I was in high school, uh, setting up street preachings in the gravel parking lot on Lincoln Street, which was like the cool strip to drive up and down in my tiny, tiny little town, Greensburg, Indiana. And I set up a big old, like a big old tent to do like a tent revival in the parking lot of the Christian bookstore that opened up, and I pulled in I pulled in people from different denominations, a Nazarene pastor and a Baptist pastor and uh Methodist preacher, pulled in singers from school and from church, and asked them to come and sing and do this little thing because that's how brainwashed I was. That's how aggressive the conditioning of some evangelicals can be. That's why I say I was basically raised in Charlie Kirk's house in many ways. Um, except I think my prop my father was at least as bad and maybe worse. So, which is a whole thing. But the reason I bring all of this up is if you know about the psychological term priming, you can get people to say just about anything. Mentalists, it's that's a whole that's a whole subsection or a subgenre of magic, and it's my favorite in the world because you can see a really good mentalist. Like I've seen mentalists on like late night shows pop up and just do their little bit of like, all right, I want everybody to grab this piece of paper that's under your thing and the marker that's under your chair and draw a shape on it. But before you do, let me give you some examples. And they like they like, okay, you can do letters, you can do numbers, and like here's a letter, here's a number, here's a shape, here's just a squiggly line, blah, blah, blah. But at the end, when he had everybody hold up their thing, the entire audience, studio audience, shows their cards that they wrote on, like 95% of them all drew a star. How the f does that happen? Well, priming is how that happens. And the mentalist went on to explain. He's like, look, you can use you can use letters, you can use numbers. So the first letter was a backwards S. The another the the next one was like was a four that was sloppily drawn to look a little bit like an A. And then there was like a squiggly line, and then another one stabbed through there, and it was like an upside down R. Um, and then the then there was like, and you can just do like little shapes or whatever, and did like a a little T thing that was like upside down. But no one noticed that because it was all very purposefully programmed into the bit. And that was his point. And he brought it up, he was like, How did this happen? And he was like, This is how. If you'd stack all of these examples that I just gave to you, and you put you re-y can turn them upside down and reshuffle the order, it literally spelled out star. But no one noticed that. It was a subconscious prime. That's why everyone in the audience chose a star. This is the power of our subconscious. This is the power of psychological priming. So when this applying this to religion, when your entire philosophy is when life gets too hard and you can't handle it because you're too weak, because you're just a regular old person, you're just a human being, and that means that you are that you means that you are flawed and and in need of saving and in need of help. You can just give it all to God. You can just let go and let God. And this is exactly what the right has done with Trump. They have let go and let Trump. They don't care about politics. They they're not politically aware people. Conservatives are the least educated, they're mo they're the most homogenous within their belief systems. They all believe the same thing. What is what that means by homogenous within their belief systems, the the right is as a whole much more homogeneous. And over 60% of them said that they get all of their news from one place in a 2023 survey. They get all of their news uh from one place, and that place was denoted to be Fox News. Whereas when they polled liberals with the exact same thing, it was broken up between five different news stations. And this falls back into that we want certainty. When we are under threat, our body craves certainty. And this is why we shoot ourselves in the foot as chronic stress-adapted people. When we're super stress or overwhelmed, we want certainty. Even if that certainty is bad, I can go ahead and shoot myself in the foot. And if things are rough, I can be a complete asshole and make sure that people behave exactly the way that I think they're going to behave because prick predictability is closer to than or close to certainty. Predictability is a little step along the way. That kind of certainty is that something is predictable. So We'll shoot ourselves in the foot when we're stressed. And that's exactly what's happening on a nation level right now. People are afraid. They're stressed. They're already psychologically primed. Any Christian in the in the country. So like, and this isn't dogging on Christianity. I've had my own problems with them in the past. And I still think that raising your child under like extreme evangelical views is absolutely abusive because if you tell your child that they are dirty and from birth and that they need to be saved in order to be like a good person, then you're fucked. Like fuck you. But that doesn't mean that I have a problem with all of Christianity. I don't. Uh, but I do recognize that it has problems. And this is one of the problems. When times get stressed, when people get stressed, we look to our religion to solve problems. And even if we somehow magically don't, the Christians specifically somehow magically don't just go let go and let God, they're already primed to do so from their entire lives or however long they've been practicing their Christianity by just letting go and letting God and giving it up to God and being like, I don't need to worry about this, I don't need to solve this problem, I'll let God do it. Which is why most of us liberals hate this that whole thoughts and prayers bullshit, because it's just an excuse to not do anything that's actually gonna help anybody. And that's not to say that the the heart of that message isn't true, that sometimes things are so overwhelming and there's nothing you can really do. So you have to let go of trying to solve the problem and let God do it. And then there are times where you ought to keep your hand on the wheel and really try your best to figure it out. I really think that we should always have our hands on the wheel and try our best to figure it out. Um, it's only when we get to like crazy overwhelm levels and that metabolic price that we pay for staying engaged in the problem solving becomes too high. That's when I think that we should back off. But because of the psychological priming of monotheistic religions, especially Christianity, that's the one I'm most familiar with. I don't know that this is true and like as as true in Islam or Judaism. But this whole concept of like let go, let God really does. It's that it is deeply, deeply seated in the religion. And having one authority figure with all of the power who works in mysterious ways, and we don't know how it's going to work out, but we trust that it's going to. That is the same blind psychotic devotion that we're seeing to Trump. We saw it in the Christian religions, and this is why the only people left who really support him are crazy right-wing Christians. This is why it fits perfectly with their paradigm. Now, I'm not gonna get into all of the details about the whole like religious thing go like feeding into prophecies and the end times and like the seven stages that are going, the seven eras that are the seven epochs that are going to happen leading up to the rule, the rule of the church age. Um, because the last step before the church age is the law age. And we were ruled, um, and before that it's the m age of man, and we're in the age of man, and we're that's why they're so happy. That's why the right and the Christians are so happy to create the evil, create evil in their own minds inside every every leftist and every immigrant, because they want an excuse to crack down on anything that's different from them because their religion says that everyone is going to everyone that's not in their religion is going to get left behind for this like reign of terror of a thousand years from uh from Satan. But before we that happens, we go through the age of the age of man, and then the age of law, and then the age of the church. This age of law is what they think that we're entering right now, and that age of law is functionally, it's exactly the same. It's an age of extreme authoritarian control. And that's why they're happy to blame the leftists and call us violent, even though every bit of st every bit of statistic that we've ever seen shows that the right is profoundly, profoundly more violent, like 90 something percent more violent, like 90% of all of the domestic terrorist attacks that have happened in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. But this is why they want to paint everybody else as evil and are okay with this with more punitive um recourse to anybody that they see different because they're entering this age of the law. And to them that's exciting because even though it's oh, it's really sad and it's hard, but they shouldn't be here illegally, it's all leading up to the rapture. It's all leading up to the the thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ. It's all leading up to that, and because of that, because this is all prophecy, then well, that's just the way that it is. And because it's all prophecy, that gives them confirmation bias. It feeds them exactly what they expect and it fits into their worldview perfectly. So here's what I want to do. Here's what I want from you. If you know anybody who is feeling alone right now, if you know anybody who is stressed right now, please share this with them. Share this with one person. Just one person. Because the solution for all of this is increasing our connection, because connection with each other is what's going to like lower our stress levels. That whole thing about connection, um, about when we lower the stress, we increase connection, and when we ramp up the stress, we increase control. Right now, those of us on the ground, those of us like living life under this fascist rule, this like fascism light TM rule, uh there isn't a lot we have control over. There is some things that we have some input, some sway in, which is why I've been loud about not wanting turning point USA in my town. Uh, but for the most part, we don't have that much control over what's happening on a global scale. We have some, that's why we're out protesting, but since we don't have that, and that's the and that's the automatic desire is control from stress, then let's do the other and ramp ourselves down. Which means send this podcast to somebody that you know or you think might benefit from it, and then go do something with someone. Do some kind of mutual aid. Go to a soup kitchen, go volunteer somewhere, like go give a homeless person a dollar or five. Do something to strengthen your connection and your community. That's my call to action in this. I hope this gave you some new information. I hope you have a new lens or a new layer to add to your lenses of how this world is currently functioning. I fully believe that what's happening right now is a trauma response. And I see it as that. And as a trauma author and trauma person, I absolutely have empathy for that. I have sympathy for that. The thing about being a trauma author and a person who is actively trying to integrate all of these truths into my life, that means that I cannot allow another traumatized person to further traumatize other people just because of their trauma. So I understand the deep, deep, deep trauma of being raised an evangelical Christian in our country. And I understand exactly how difficult it is to claw your way out of that, to learn to trust more than one source, to learn to see other people's differences as something other than a threat. But consistently, neurologically, that's not what conservatives do. And the thing is, is if you're actively hurting someone else, uh it's my job to stop you. And these fascists, in a fascist response, in a very understandable stress response, a totally understandable trauma response to these very real existential threats right now, is understandable. It is predictable. It's predictable because fascism is a biological response on a nationwide level to existential threats. That's why we have so many crazy conservative fascist governments popping up at the end of COVID. But we don't have to let that be the way that we handle it. I believe it is partly my job to call that crap out. It's also my job to regulate my nervous system and not put more effort into calling it out than I have the energy for, and that is something I am working on. But this I thought was important enough. I needed to put the podcast out. I've been wanting to do it for literally months, and I finally was just like, I I'm I have to, I have to, today. Today's the day. I already have two other podcasts recorded that need edited and uploaded. And I haven't even been uploading every week, but I've been busy and yeah, it's been a lot. But I really thought this was important enough to share. So please share it with somebody. And thank you for listening to the end. I really appreciate you. Thank you for being a part of these really difficult conversations. Take care of yourself, and remember, stay curious and stay uncomfortable.