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The affirmation ‘fake it ’till you make it’ has long been one employed to fight the dreaded ‘impostor syndrome.’ To be a writer with confidence, act like you have that confidence, play the part until it because a reality for you. This applies to nearly all areas of human activity; act the way you want to be, and it will help you become exactly that.

I think there’s a dark mirror-universe version of this effect as well. I think if you want to be that thing you are act is fairly irrelevant. You will tend to become what you pretend to be, even if that was not your original intention.

There’s an activity, principally online, known as ‘owning the libs,’ where people, mostly men, perform in a manner to provoke anger and outrage from liberals and then rejoicing in the fact that you managed to make the outraged. The fact that there’s an entire community of people acting this way is of concern because in my opinion many of them are ‘faking it’, being homophobic racist until they ‘make it’ actually becoming homophobic racists.

Compounding this effect is the presence of actual homophobic racist all too eager to welcome anyone to their ranks. The pressure of conformity within any social group is powerful, humans are social creatures, and those drives are very hard to overcome. Pressure to conform to the hateful community eventually molds those ‘pretending’ into actual adherents.

So, maybe that ‘okay’ hand gesture wasn’t really and truly meant as a white power symbol, and maybe that ‘roman salute’ was just someone throwing their heart to the crowd, but such things a welcomed with great joy by the fascists and racists and positive reinforcement changes people. Sometimes they fake it until it makes them Nazis.