This author is naive. It's already 'normal' for half the country. Even the GOPers who don't go in for hardcore Trumpism are perfectly used to seeing this stuff in their circles. My dad is a "never-Trump", former-and-maybe-future Republican, and basically all of the other people at his catholic church are these kind of people. He's used to it, and just thinks they're misguided or that they espouse it for the sake of building community with the other nutters.

While authoritarianism gestates it is vulnerable. Upsetting. Revolting. In its early stages it hides in the dark as adherents gather and the mythologies and narratives that will eventually propel it are accumulated and turn inward and then outward. Nazism and Fascism would’ve never gained power had this not been this case, had they not practiced outside the eyes of the public and created their own worlds to inhabit. And then, as they begin stepping into the light, there is still a moment to reject them. To see exactly how twisted the ideologies are.

This is where your reaction comes in.

Even when the Nazis were in power, there were people in Germany who were disgusted by their rhetoric. By then, it's too late to ask, "how do we stop this from becoming normal". We're there. The question now is, "how the fuck do we de-program 70+ million ethnonationalist theocrats"? We're no longer in the "hides in the dark" phase, we're in the final "turns outward" phase, with even politicians at CPAC calling for the end of democracy, and judges issuing overtly and willfully religious legal rulings.

This author is talking to their 40%, anti-ethnonationalist-theocracy bubble, and thinking they have an advantage over the 40% nutjobs.

It's underestimating just how fucked we are.