This is really the point to hammer home. Back in my lib days, I started hanging out with a dude who was much cooler than me, and his anarchist friends. We once got to talking about how our town used to have a pretty substantial neo-nazi presence, in the 80s-90s. I said something to the effect of “good thing people are smarter today!” and he and his friends got really animated and saying how “they didn’t just go away one day, we fucking chased them out of here!”

While at first I just didn’t like getting yelled at, it eventually dawned upon me that that he was right. I, and everyone I had ever talked to about it (other libs), just assumed that that whole unpleasant nazi thing just went away, through the magic of progress, presumably. It was just a thing that was there once, now wasn’t. People like him and his friends (and I’ve since met many more) were the actual people who went out and risked life and limb to oppose the nazis everywhere the went, to vandalize their posters and stickers the moment they went up, to show up in numbers every time there was a demonstration. To do everything to make life as shitty as possible for these pieces of shit until it just wasn’t really viable to be a nazi in our town anymore.

That whole realization did a lot to cure me of my “we can’t sink to their level”/freezepeach brainworms.