Propaganda doesn't exist in a vacuum. People must make it, and people must spread it. Like spam, if there's nobody dumb enough to click on the links, the spammers will soon stop sending spam for want of profitability. The receptivity to propaganda is a necessary component for the propagation of it.

Yeah, man. It's fucking messy, is what it is. We are sloshy bags of water and hormones feeding a mass of electrified gelatin. There's no ideal solution because there's no ideal human. We're all fucked up in so many different ways.

I understand intimately the sense of loss that violence brings, but I also understand that violence has historically been one of the most successful strategies for resolving conflict. I'm consequently a huge fan of the John Browns and Malcolm X's of the world, and not so much the MLK Jrs and Gandhis. Gandhi thought he could dissuade Hitler from genociding a people and plunging the entire world into a war by having a polite discussion. Churchill thought it needed to be bombs, tanks, infantry, and warships. Churchill was right.

On the other hand, I am also a huge fan of the Frederick Douglasses of the world. Courage doesn't only manifest itself on the battlefield. It also looks like petitioning the president for policy changes and reading a speech reminding everybody of why "Independence Day" isn't a universally beloved tradition.

I don't claim to have any of the answers. I believe that people are complicated, but also that good and evil are also things that exist. For example, I think that the majority of the people who voted for the Nazi party were doing so out of economic concerns, or anger at the wave of migrants taking German & Austrian jobs, or fear that they were the butt of the rest of the world's jokes. If you'd asked any of them before they voted whether they would be cool with industrialized murder of German citizens, they'd almost certainly say no. But that's what it turned out that they voted for. Hitler didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes; he was pretty open about his intentions, even at the outset.

The people who voted for the Nazis had a myriad of different reasons for voting the way they did, but in the end, none of that matters. They contributed to one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. Many of them even took a more active role in perpetrating that evil. Artists, comedians, writers, mechanics, doctors, scientists, grocers, homemakers, attorneys; people from every walk of life. Just your ordinary, average populace. All of them fucking evil.

The truth of the matter is, evil isn't some bald guy sitting in his volcanic lair stroking his persian cat while plotting the destruction of the world. Evil is very often banal. And that's the most insidious thing about it, in my opinion.