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In one of the last episodes of Breaking Points I could stomach, the hosts were arguing over whether Trump was an authoritarian fascist. And no matter what the right cohost pointed out that Biden had done too, the left cohost just said "But authoritarian fascism is by definition right wing, therefore nothing Biden did was authoritarian fascism because he's on the left". That was it. And it was more or less the moment I realized the show I'd been a patron of since it began wasn't worth watching anymore.
But that does seem to be how those people think. Whether something is authoritarian is not a matter of specific actions, but actions coupled with intent. If you assume your guys have good intent, they are never authoritarian. If you assume the other guys always have bad intent, everything they do is authoritarian.
There seems to be a strain of people who absolutely cannot look past labels in any way. I recently read a highly upvoted comment on Imgur (which is extremely left wing) which went something like:
"Remember when they tried to call Antifa a terrorist organization? It's proof they're fascists that they're so afraid of an antifacist idea!"
The people in question seem absolutely unable to see that you can make up your own names for things, and people are absolutely not bound to follow them.
To tie it into the point above - I'd argue that a salient comparison with Antifa would be the National Socialists Party of Germany's Brown shirts - but the sort of people who claim that all of their opponents are Nazis can't even see the comparison, because their opponents are the Nazis, not them, and Nazis used the brown shirts.
If you wanted to stir the pot, you could ask those folks how they feel about the demolition of the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall).
Based on my experience on Tumblr, they tend to be very unhappy about it, since it very much did what it's name said, and was about keeping fascists out, not East Germans in, because who would ever want to leave the socialist paradise of East Germany? Fascists resisting de-Nazification, that's who! Which is why, while some people did sneak out of East Berlin across the wall, we can thus know, with absolute logical certainty, that every single one of them was a Nazi.
Again, I've seen people literally argue this, and then proceed to call people's relatives Nazis (in that distinctly condescending "sorry to break it to you, sweetie" manner) when presented with counter-examples.
I've seen similar discussions about Cubans. Someone flees Cuba? That's an enemy of all good leftists.
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