A short thread on the fascist digital media playbook. Today, this story appeared. It's important to recognize the method behind the veneer of "fringe extremism" 
1. Regularly get leaders to say outrageously controversial things that get widely reported by every media outlet and amplified for free by folks sharing it on social media (both for sarcasm and genuine outrage)
2. When the media reaches out to the party for a response, disown it right away (“We worship the Mahatma”) but take zero disciplinary action. I mean, when “Goli maaro” is OK, dissing Gandhi is just par for the course.
3. Sometimes, Arnab & co will run a panel debate on it & invite extremists who, at zero cost, amplify the poisonous historical revision on live TV for an hour. The anchor will *never* interrupt & call out factual errors and instead say “We need to hear both sides”
4. The politically engaged among the population (a tiny percentage) is not the target audience for this at all. It’s the apolitical person who doesn’t do politics on social media (the vast majority) and just occasionally gets his/her news from TV or a WhatsApp forward
5. To this person, the fact that a senior leader is saying something like this adds credibility, and some of them will begin to think “perhaps there is some truth to this idea that Godse was a hero” if they keep hearing it repeatedly.
6. And then we are all shocked that this happens (and a fake mark sheet is produced to muddle the issue further)
7. I wish the solution to the problem was to convince people to get their history knowledge from actual history books than from the mouths of politicians, but it isn't. But what's for sure is that the media amplifying it for free is part of the problem.
