"The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other."

This is the money shot in today's Triad for me because epistemic certainty is the starting point on the path toward autocracy--though it doesn't always progress past the starting point. It's why simple people looking for simple explanations about complex issues are often the people who fall into these movements. They easily fall into epistemic certainty because they can only deal with binary choices around complex topics and need a scapegoat or oppressor to blame. And once they have the scapegoat/oppressor in mind ("elites," immigrants, liberals, Jews, etc.), they fall right in line with the side who opposes the scapegoat/oppressor. Know who really likes to commit to epistemic certainty? The White Christian Nationalism (WCN) movement within MAGA.

There's kind of a psychological order of operations in moving a group of peoples toward autocracy--whether from the left (communism) or the right (fascism)--and it starts with epistemic certainty about your side being the good guys and the other side being the bad guys, often accompanied by layering religious virtue from an unquestionable authority onto their side ("god is for us"). It then moves to dehumanizing the other side, becoming uncooperative with them, segregating the other side from the rest of the populace, taking over institutions--particularly the security services that enforce laws, committing stochastic violence against the other side once they're segregated from the rest and the security services are controlled, and eventually either forcing the other side to mass-migrate or slaughtering them wholesale if they refuse.

When viewing where MAGA is on this scale of progression, they're already dehumanizing liberals, they've already invoked their side as the side that "god" (an unquestionable authority) is on, they're already being uncooperative with liberals within state/federal institutions, they're already planning to take over security-based institutions ("constitutional sheriffs," Schedule F/Project 2025 purges, etc.), and they're occasionally committing stochastic violence against liberals/minorities (Charlottesville, Buffalo, Charleston AME, El Paso Walmart, Tree of Life, J6th, etc.). I guess the question is how far down the progression scale they end up, which is partly a factor of how strong our institutions end up being in the short run and partly a factor of how much society willfully tolerates MAGA's extremism in political elections via popular support at the ballot box.