America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the internet for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: internet commenters.

The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an internet comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed.

The weapons of fascism—the masked secret police, the corruption, the crackdowns on civil society, the mocking disregard for law—are but the emboldened physical manifestations of Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. You may object that this takes things too lightly. Isn’t it absurd, even grotesque, to draw a line from idiots typing out enraged and error-riddled arguments to the profound real-world oppression we are now experiencing? Yes! Oh, yes it is! This absurdity, in fact, is at the very heart of fascist violence. It is the final twist of the knife, the head-shaking feeling of disbelief right before you are tossed in the prison van. It’s not just that we are being destroyed, it’s that we are being destroyed for incredibly stupid reasons. There lies the ultimate triumph of the dumbasses!