They’re testing the fences. This is how fascism creeps in mostly under the radar.

They say something egregious and gauge the response. If it gets too much backlash, they dial it back a bit, but each outrageous move normalises fascism a bit more until people are unknowingly accepting things that would have been unthinkable a few years before.

By the time people notice, discourse is so broken it’s nearly impossible to go back without seismic (and often deadly) social change.