I read Mein Kampf and didn't turn into Nick Fuentes.

The original photo in the header can be found here; I added the upper-left text for emphasis in the design.

When I was a teenaged little shit, I had a bit of an edgy streak despite my unfashionable glasses and the fact that I was a band nerd who played trombone (fuck you, Riker played it, and he was a goddamned sex symbol in TNG.. Which I now realize still doesn't change the optics here).

I thought I was hardcore punk-rock, you see, and sought to prove it in my own little ways that made little-to-no sense in reality.

One of those ways manifested itself when I was in the library at the high school I attended. I can't recall why I was in the library; I think maybe it was part of some class where we had a sub teacher, or our classroom was being fumigated for whatever brain-rotting disease had infected myself and my fellow youth turning us into extra-shitty little shits, but I digress.

I had already learned to love reading at this age; a library is not a strange place to me.. However, I was feeling a bit performative.

So, I utilized my local libraries card catalog - that's right, a physical fucking card catalog - and tracked down Mein Kampf.

Yup! My high school library had fucking Mein Kampf (and Farenheit 451, too, I believe; amusingly enough I still haven't read that).

I sat down with my best friend at the time (a fellow ne'er-do-well) at a table and proceeded to read the first part of the piece-of-shit's book, with a shit-eating (well, shit-consuming in this context) grin on my face.

It didn't take long for me to realize:

Holy shit, Hitler was one whiny little bitch.

This is how I learned things like Hitler made fun of overweight kids (of course he did, because inferiority complex came a callin' for Hitler early on) and had greatly over-estimated his worth as an artist.

More importantly, I was able to read what would most assuredly be called propaganda and see it for what it was: Bullshit.

Despite my desire to be an edgy little bastard, I learned - thanks to my mother and a handful of teachers - how to consume something critically and not take everything at face-value.

Nick Fuentes, Kanye West, and a not-insignificant chunk of the current US Government administration (fuck you Kash "What Epstein Files" Patel and Pete Kegsbreath) failed this lesson.. And, by extension, a much too fucking large percentage of the population here in the US.

Media literacy fucking matters, and if you can't see through the propaganda, you just become another distribution method for it.

Shit like Mein Kampf are only dangerous when presented to people who are incapable of thinking critically.. So what we need to do is make sure people can fucking think critically.

We're not going to do that, however, if we keep banning books, cutting education, and shoving a propaganda firehose into every person's favorite content feed troughs.

This isn't limited to just the Right side of the political spectrum: Fucking casual Liberal media has been pulling this same shit, too (I'm looking at you, Occupy Democracy) with dumbed-down, overwrought headlines and clickbait consumerism that continously kills my hope that there will be a meaningful, long-term shift of the Overton Window to the Left.. Because you sure as shit aren't successfully convincing folks who bought into the Right's propaganda already.

Put the goddamned money into real fucking facts and stop using the same bait tactics (poorly) that the Right uses, goddammit.

Foxtrot Delta Tango.