they insisted that they were owed the broad brush, and that was the scary part. [...] That's the shape of war though, two wrongs making a right, two sides merely "defending" themselves, over and over again.

This is the heart of it, I think.

There's a right-wing Substack I subscribe to because I hate the fucker, hate him, I hate-read his newsletter, and yet in the course of reading it I am instructed by the framing, I see how he has assembled pieces {D,E,F} and combined them with pieces {P,Q,R} to make a certain kind of story. And the story holds together! It is, when one adopts the frame, and the evidence he has assembled, and follows his narrative flow, attending to this and not that, perfectly rational. (I don't read any left-wing Substackers because I'm already familiar with their version of the same.)

It's easy to see how if you have a burning need for X to be the story, that you can walk away confirmed that X is, in fact, the story, for pretty much any X. Pick a fucking position and if you're not a total imbecile you can chart a defensible argument for it, and go on TV or on Twitter, or start your own newsletter, and find your legions, getting more and more right the whole time, more right and more convinced of your rightness.

This isn't to say that everyone is as bad as everyone, or that all arguments are equally true and thus equally worthless. I don't believe that. But man, it's instructive. I have a much better sense of how a person could make an ideological journey, filled with reasonable-seeming logic and plausible facts along the way, and emerge a Nazi at the end of it.

Nobody sees himself turning into the villain.