Text from article: Disinformation researchers and experts on propaganda have followed the sludge and bile emanating from these governmental accounts with alarm. “What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism,” says Jason Stanley; he’s a philosopher, author, and professor at University of Toronto who’s in the process of leaving the United States because of, as he baldly puts it, “concerns over fascism.” The memes about brutal detention and deportation, specifically, invite audiences to delight in what Stanley calls “torture,” to see themselves in what the government is doing, to say, as he puts it, “This is something we’re doing together, we’re having a blast, we’re laughing and those wimpy liberals are saying it’s scandalous. We’re going to show our power over them by having as much fun as possible.” “They’re offering them delight in the torture of others.” Stanley says that it’s part of the overall structure of what his colleague Timothy Snyder calls “sadopopulism“: putting policies into place that inflict real pain and harm on the US populace, while also encouraging scapegoating and xenophobia against stigmatized groups. (“If you hurt people you create a resource of pain, of anxiety and fear which you then direct against others,” Snyder says in a video explaining the concept.) “What they’re offering people is not health insurance or economic security,” Stanley says. “They’re offering them delight in the torture of others.”