I've watched several documentaries on people falling down fascist pipelines (one on Qanon and another 2 or 3 on 4chan) and in every single one of them it's mentioned that "at first it was just jokes, we were being ironic, then it got serious"
This is one of the core reasons liberals inevitably lose to fascism—they think they can win with a clever gotcha, when they’ve actually already lost by presuming that the argument the fascists pose was in good faith to begin with.
My favorite thing whenever Tony gets brought up is that people genuinely believe that he’s blackballed for being a conservative in the NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE. Like say those words out loud to yourself and see if you don’t sound like a bozo
Short fiction has its own particular set of pleasures of course, but long novels offer something so special: to lose yourself in some gigantic sprawling masterpiece, escaping, breaking free, patiently disconnecting from the world and entering into another for days and weeks.