I don't like Yarvin's ideas that I've heard, but GP has a point. There's almost no point to posting something that will just get downvoted quickly (which any defense of Yarvin certainly would), regardless of whether it makes any interesting points. Once it's dead it won't get much if any interaction. It's not about being afraid of people criticizing, it's about expending the effort to write a quality comment that won't be viewed or engaged by anyone.

I do think we on HN have gotten way too reflexively downvoting of opinions we disagree with. IMHO downvoting should be used like a moderation tool to downrank low effort/spammy or factually/objectively incorrect posts that don't contribute anything interesting to the discussion, not as a lazy way of expressing our disagreement.

> This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.

You could dismiss almost any political ideology with this. Certainly there's a lot of people who experienced this in the USSR, North Korea, China, and more, and those are/were hardly fascist governments.

When it comes to rising fascism, the political mainstream that you so passionately defend and is currently having having apoplectic fits doesn't have the best record, does it?

If you remember the 2000s, there was a great deal of consternation with respect of George Bush, his anti-terrorism laws, etc. He was clearly marked as fascist who was going to establish a dictatorship. That clearly didn't happen.

Meanwhile, after the fascist Bush was overthrown, the Obama administration found it wise to reset relations with the government of Vladimir Putin, which had already invaded neighboring Georgia.

In fact, virtually all the steps in the annihilation of Russian democracy were clearly supported by the political and administrative class that currently seeks to insinuate the present American government is fascist (and in the pay of Putin), going as far back as Yeltsin sending his tanks against parliament in 93.

And that's just a recent example. There are worse ones. If you listen to mainstream political scholarship the Committee for Union and Progress should be the furthest thing from nazi ideology.

Which is why you should be silent in this discussion. Curtis Yarvin may be a fascist, or he may not. In any case, your opinion is just noise. You do not know what fascism is, and neither do the people that form your opinion (the writers in the New Yorker for example).

If you were to support a resistance movement, the government that you would fight to bring about is more likely to engage in ethnic extermination than the "fascist" regime that was overthrown.