sassyandclassy94 · 9 months ago
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The Greatest Generation would be so heart broken to see that the American youth is now promoting the very thought and propaganda that they fought and gave their lives to keep OUT of America.
Back when I was studying World War II in high school I never would’ve dreamed that my beloved United States would be embracing and pushing the same exact propaganda as the Third Reich.
Had we lived in Nazi Germany many of you would’ve sold out the Jews and the Christians who stood up to Hitler and it shows.
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theatrical-penguin · 2 years ago
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My only response to the latest Kanye and Trump shit
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mariacallous · 13 days ago
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Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”
Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”
This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”
In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.
Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.
In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”
His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.
These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.
These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.
But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.
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robertreich · 10 months ago
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Five Biggest Border Lies Debunked 
Republicans are lying about immigrants and the border. Here are five of their biggest doozies.
1. They claim Biden doesn’t want to secure the border
Well, that’s rubbish. Biden has consistently asked for additional funding for border security.
Republicans have just as consistently refused. They’re voting to cut Customs and Border Protection funding in spending bills and blocking passage of Biden’s $106 billion national security supplemental that includes border funding.
2. They blame the drug crisis on immigration
That’s more rubbish. While large amounts of fentanyl and other deadly drugs have been flowing into the U.S. from Mexico, 90% arrives through official ports of entry, not via immigrants illegally crossing the border. In fact, research by the Cato Institute found that more than 86% of the people convicted of trafficking fentanyl in 2021 were U.S. citizens.
3. They claim that undocumented immigrants are terrorists.
Baloney. For almost a half century, no American has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States that involved someone who crossed the border illegally.
4. They say immigrants are stealing American jobs.
Nonsense. Evidence shows immigrants are not taking jobs that American workers want. And the surge across the border is not increasing unemployment. Far from it: unemployment has been below 4% for roughly two years.
5. They blame crime on immigrants
More baloney. This has been debunked by numerous studies over the years. In fact, a 2020 study found that undocumented immigrants have "substantially" lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants.
Notwithstanding the recent migrant surge, America’s homicide rate has fallen nearly 13% since 2022 — the largest decrease on record. Local law enforcement agencies are also reporting drops in violent crime.
Who’s really behind these lies?
Since he entered politics, Donald Trump has fanned nativist fears and bigotry.
Now leaning into full neo-fascism and using the actual language of Hitler to attack immigrants.
Trump wants us to forget that almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to America under duress, or simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.
Know the truth and spread it.
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simply-ivanka · 1 month ago
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Are the Democrats trying to assassinate President Trump, or are they just rooting for it?
Shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated after the 2016 election, a so-called comedienne posted a picture of herself holding Trump’s severed, bloodied head. That apparently passes for comedy among Democrats.
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In a presentation of Julius Caesar in the venerable Shakespeare in the Park production in New York City a few months later, a likeness of Trump was cast in the role of Caesar. I don’t need to remind you what happens to Caesar in the end.
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The violent rhetoric from Democrats just keeps on coming, through Trump’s first term, into this year’s re-election campaign, and right up to weeks before the election. And now, it’s predictably escalating from violent rhetoric and into violent acts.
A month ago, a would-be assassin missed Trump’s cranium by a quarter-inch with a bullet from an AR-15, only because Trump luckily turned at the last possible second. It came out that the Trump campaign had requested beefed-up security prior to the incident, and the White House had denied his request.
The Secret Service at the time was headed by a DEI hire, and the agents at the event were test-failing amateurs. They allowed the shooter within 130 yards of Trump on an unsecured rooftop. Even after they saw him there, with a gun, they failed to take him out and failed to alert Trump or his staff until he’d fired eight shots, killing one man, seriously wounding another, and grazing Trump’s ear.  
In an apparent admission of near-lethal negligence by the Service, five agents were later suspended.
Their replacements seem not much better. In yesterday’s attempt, a Democrat donor got within easy range of Trump on a golf course with a rifle equipped with a high-powered scope. The shooter was wearing a Go-Pro, apparently to post his assassination on YouTube where Democrats everywhere could cheer it. He was thwarted only because he was foolish enough to poke his rifle out of the bushes, where an agent happened to see it.
The shooter had been on the golf course for at least 12 hours. One must wonder, how did he know Trump’s golfing schedule at least 12 hours in advance?
Even now, after two assassination attempts that missed due only to incredible luck or Providence, President Trump is not afforded the level of protection that President Biden or even Vice President Harris receives.
Most recently, President Doofus again falsely accused Trump of saying that neo-Nazis are “fine people” even though that accusation has been thoroughly debunked even by leftist fact-checkers.
Kamala Harris repeated the lie in her debate with Trump – and was not corrected by the moderators even though the moderators purported to correct at least seven Trump statements (some of which were not factual claims, but mere opinions).
You might think the mainstream media would condemn these assassination attempts in the strongest words possible. But if you do think that, then you haven’t been paying attention to the mainstream media for the last ten years.
The mainstream media is implying – no, they’re outright stating – that Trump has all this coming because he’s a Republican who says nasty things. The Washington Post has already dismissed the assassination attempt and has framed it instead as Trump unfairly capitalizing on the incident politically.
The media take their cue from Biden and Harris. They routinely equate Trump with Adolf Hitler, the mass murderer of millions.
The Democrats let their rank and file connect the dots: Everyone has been taught, correctly, that killing Hitler would have been a heroic act that would have saved millions. So, the Democrats don’t exactly say “kill Trump” but they do suggest you’d be a hero if you did.
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hotvintagepoll · 1 month ago
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Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Man Who Laughs)— oh my god look at him in Caligari. I specifically said that he's from this because him as Cesare is just. MMMMM. he's so wet and sad and scrungly. and little. he's like a kitten left alone in a dark alley except he's also killed people (not his fault). something wrong with him (Cesare). as for Conrad himself. oh my god look at him... them big ole eyes and the walk of some fucking thing creature
Phil Silvers (Summer Stock)—this man has the single most expressive face in all of golden age hollywood (okay maybe second only to Donald O'Connor) and he is such a Perfect counterpart to Gene Kelly in Summer Stock. like, little baby queer lady me had such a soft spot for the funky little comic relief guys and he's the king of them all! his verse in "Dig For Your Dinner" [link] makes me laugh uncontrollably and every time i watch it, my brain plays "YOU GOTTA SEE YOUR DENTIST TWICE A YEAR" on loop for a solid week afterwards
This is round 1 of the contest. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. If you're confused on what a scrungle is, or any of the rules of the contest, click here.
[additional submitted propaganda + scrungly videos under the cut]
Conrad Veidt:
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I mean just look at him. The wet cat energy. The ghostly eyes. He did the monster mash before anybody. Where would we be today without him, he even has one (1) song on spotify. I regularly forget he's dead and wonder what his next movie will be. He slays in any role. The Ultimate Skrunkle.
He's the ultimate scrungly to me, the basis for many of our scrungly guys today. he's so skinny and pale and he wears so much eye makeup
He was THE bisexual goth tumblr sexyman of early film. Seriously the old timey Tumblrinas would send him fanmail about wanting him to choke them. He inspired the designs for the Joker and Jafar,and was nicknamed the “Demon of the Silver Screen” for his horror roles. His first wife divorced him for crossdressing. Hitler sent him hate mail for speaking out about antisemitism. He really loved his wife and told the Germans to go fuck themselves when they threatened his job if he didn’t divorce her for being Jewish. Just look at me and tell me this guy isn’t scrungly he’s like a personification of the emo kid from Horton hears a who
[cw the below clip depicts assault/abduction and could be scary for some viewers]
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Phil Silvers:
"it's hard to hold the screen against don knotts, but phil manages."
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justinspoliticalcorner · 2 months ago
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Eric Hananoki at MMFA:
Former President Donald Trump used his Truth Social account to “retruth” a supporter’s meme calling for the imprisonment of Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, and other prominent figures. A review of that supporter's account also found numerous calls for Trump’s political opponents to be killed.
This isn’t an aberration. Media Matters recently documented that Trump promoted an account which spews the N-word, praises Hitler as a hero, and denies the Holocaust. Trump has also frequently interacted with the account Patriot4Life, including this month. That account has repeatedly promoted calls for political killings, including recently retruthing an image calling for Harris and Gov. Tim Walz to be killed.  Trump has promoted another Truth Social account that calls for Democrats to be executed. [...] The Trump-promoted “Proud American” account (“Proud_American1776”) has repeatedly posted calls to kill Trump’s opponents. 
Donald Trump continues to give promotion to Truth Social accounts that contain posts with calls to kill Trump’s opponents.
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billcipherisntreal · 3 months ago
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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 4 months ago
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By Jan-Werner Müller
The horrific attempt to assassinate Donald Trump – and reactions to it – created a kind of X-ray of our body politic. It demonstrates how, contrary to the conventional wisdom about “polarization” – which suggests some kind of symmetry between the parties moving towards extreme poles – US politics is fundamentally asymmetrical. Democrats, from Biden to AOC, have been statesmanlike and stateswomanlike, condemning political violence in unison. Republicans, by contrast, have immediately blamed the attack on Biden. Worse, they have used the attack for a novel form of blackmail: stop warning about Trump’s authoritarianism or be accused of inciting violence. Of course, Trump must be protected on the campaign trail and beyond; at the same time, US democracy must be protected from Trump.
Democrats were right to repeat the civics textbook wisdom that democracy is about processing conflicts – including deep moral disagreements – in a peaceful manner. Meanwhile, commentators, out of naivety or noble idealism, did not always choose to remain faithful to the historical record: political violence might, in theory, be “un-American”; in practice it is, alas, as American as apple pie. If anything, the recent period – both in the US and European democracies – has been somewhat exceptional in not featuring many high-profile attempts on politician’s lives (which is not to deny the continuity of racist domestic terrorism in the US).
Democrats also resisted the temptation to point out that Trump’s rhetoric since 2015 has encouraged violence – not a subjective impression, but a question of social scientific findings. There are specific incidents when perpetrators invoked his name; what’s more, large numbers of citizens who identify as Republicans profess their willingness to countenance violence in defense of “their way of life”. Like other rightwing populists around the globe, Trump has been instilling fear that somehow the country is being taken away from what he regularly calls “the real people”. As in so many instances of terror, it is those willing to commit violence who see themselves as victims, convinced that others, not they, engaged in evil first.
Plenty of Republicans have shown no restraint in their reactions to the events in Pennsylvania. It’s the reverse of what happens after mass shootings: Democrats ask why civilians should have the right to carry assault weapons; conservatives, offering thoughts and prayers, warns against “politicizing” mass killings. Now, in the absence of real information on the shooter, leading Republicans have not hesitated a second to “politicize” the assassination attempt, which is to say: turn it to partisan advantage. Trump’s running mate JD Vance blamed those who dare to call Trump authoritarian (after having, before his MAGA conversion, warned of Trump as “America’s Hitler”); Greg Abbott pointed to a “they” who first tried to put Trump in jail and how attempted to kill him; Mike Lee demanded that all federal charges against the former president be dropped (by that logic, the possible guilt of any defendant dissolves if they are attacked by some random person).
Whether such bad-faith claims succeed depends on professional observers: pundits and journalists. Will they adopt a framing according to which “all sides” have to “lower the political temperature”, and somehow “come together”, as the kitschy communitarian rhetoric of many commentators has it? Or can they accept two things as true at the same time: that political violence is wrong, and that the Republican party, transformed into a Trumpist personality cult (with new narrative elements and iconography after Saturday) poses an existential danger to American democracy.
Under relentless assault from the right for supposedly being “biased”, plenty of media professionals seek refuge rather than truth, as the journalism professor Jay Rosen has memorably put it. Refuge-seeking can take different forms: one is to deploy euphemisms; instead of calling a second Trump term potentially authoritarian, call it “disruptive”. Another is use of passive voice (a blogger opined on Sunday that norms of peaceful transfer of power have been “strained” – as if some impersonal force, or force majeure, was to blame); and, most of all, there is the seemingly unassailable descriptive claim that the two parties live in “two realities”.
Most damaging, perhaps, is false equivalence. This past weekend, observers could point to deeply irresponsible, if not outright crazy, claims on the left and the right. But the crucial difference remains that such claims were made by highly influential office holders only on the right. It’s one thing to have conspiracy theories advanced by some leftie internet personality; it’s another to have an ominous “they” invoked by the governor of Texas.
If all else fails, horse race analysis of elections can provide refuge, since it requires only speculation, not political judgment: is the assassination attempt good or bad for Trump’s campaign? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with asking the question – especially in light of the fact that the attempt to kill far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 appears to have helped the Brazilian aspiring autocrat at the time. But it’s hardly the most important one.
No one should give in to blackmail based on the notion that criticizing politicians’ authoritarian aspirations is equal to incitement to violence. Aspiring authoritarians do want to control speech; before they have reached power, they cannot do so – unless the fearful or the ignorant become their accomplices.
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misfitwashere · 4 months ago
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Political Violence
Reflections from the 1920s and 1930s
Timothy Snyder
Jul 14, 2024
What to make of the assassination attempt?
I am sharing a few thoughts about where we are, based on assassinations during the interwar period, the 1920s and 1930s.  It is distant enough that perhaps we can attend to the examples without too much emotion, and yet close enough to be useful.
We learn that violence that starts on one corner of the far right often ricochets.  We find that the important threshold is the enabling of the violence.  And we realize is what we do afterwards that counts the most.
None of this makes the outcome of a horrid act completely predictable.  But it does help us to see how some things that will predictably be said might be unhelpful and untrue. 
Some of Donald Trump’s supporters, including one right-radical senator and one right-radical congressman, were quick to blame the Democrats.  (This is also, of course, Moscow’s line).
Their reasoning might seem intuitive, and clearly did seem intuitive to many people. If a radical-right politician such as Donald Trump is the victim of an assassination attempt, should we not presume that the perpetrator is on the radical left?
No, we should not.
That sort of presumption, based on us-and-them thinking, is dangerous.  It begins a chain of thinking that can lead to more violence.  We are the victims, and they are the aggressors.  We have been hurt, so it must have been them.  No one thinking this way ever asks about the violence on one’s own side. 
And this way of thinking is also very often erroneous.  The history of the far right tells a different story, one in which violence often refracts within and around a political movement that endorses it.
This afternoon I passed by the Austrian parliament, where the chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was assassinated ninety years ago.  Dollfuss had introduced political violence into the political system, and was very much ruling from the far right.  And he died by political violence nonetheless, by the hand of people who found him not radical enough.
In March 1933, Dollfuss dissolved the Austrian parliament, bringing electoral democracy to an end.  He transformed his political party (and a few other groups, and a right-wing paramilitary) into a new Fatherland Front.  The Fatherland Front government crushed the Left with armed force.  Dollfuss began to build a regime on the model of Italian fascism, defined in Christian nationalist terms.  That was not enough for the most extreme elements of the Austrian right. In July 1934 a group of Nazis dressed as policemen made their way into the parliament, shot Dollfuss, and let him bleed to death.
Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany a few weeks earlier than Dollfuss in Austria.  He too crushed the Left, grouping socialists and communists as “Marxists” and placing them in concentration camps.  He represented the extreme right in German politics.  On the streets, Hitler’s cause was pushed forward by the violent SA (Sturmabteilung), led by Ernst Röhm. Hitler’s rise to the office of chancellor was enabled by conservatives and militarists.  They believed, wrongly, that Hitler’s violent rhetoric would serve their interests.  In the “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler had Röhm and many of his men assassinated, along with others who had helped bring him to power.
A drastic case of right-wing murderousness in the interwar period was among the various elements of the Romanian far right.  The twists and turns here would take too long to describe. In brief: the fascists who themselves glorified violence were attacked by others on the far right.
To be sure, not all would-be assassins of the period were on the right.  A German carpenter tried to kill Hitler.  A marble worker threw a bomb at Mussolini’s car. 
And the general point about how violence, once authorized, can turn in an unexpected direction, also applies to the far left of the 1920s and 1930s.  A number of Josef Stalin’s fellow Bolsheviks, who endorsed and applied political violence to come to power between 1917 and 1922, were then killed in the name of that revolution in the 1930s. 
That, if anything, just confirms the general point.  We might be tempted to think that violence against one side must come from the other side.  But the bloody genie, once unleashed, often stays close to home.  Those who have made violence normal are especially vulnerable, because they will always have colleagues or followers who think they have not gone far enough.
Of course, not all right-wing assassins killed their fellow right-wingers.  Eligiusz Niewiadomski murdered the centrist Polish president in December 1922.  Niewiadomski seems to have been an unstable personality, whose dreadful beliefs were brought towards action by the media around him. 
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As far as we can tell right now, the man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump was a registered Republican gun enthusiast.  As more details emerge, the image will clarify.  Assassins are individuals, and their motivations can sometimes be surprising or turn out to be obscure and debatable.
At this point, it is just worth noting that it would not be surprising if the man who tried to assassinate Trump was, like Trump, a right-wing radical.  That would be typical of the United States, where most terrorist acts come from the far right.  It would also be historically normal.  Trump, like extreme-right-wing politicians in the past, has legitimated violence. 
Nothing in recent American political life resembles Trump’s call for “Second-Amendment people” to kill Hillary Clinton, his mockery of Paul Pelosi after an attempted murder, his belittling of Gretchen Whitmer after a kidnapping attempt, the stochastic violence he directs against critics to intimidate them and against his fellow Republicans to keep them in line, the brutal language of his rallies since 2016, his vocal admiration for leaders known to be mass killers, and his violent attempt to overthrow constitutional rule in January 2021.
What matters more than the action, though, is the reaction.  We should all condemn political violence.  We should all proclaim that this next election will be settled by the number of votes, rather than by threats, coups, beatings, or murders.  The media should not spread messages of hatred and baseless conspiratorial thinking.
And we should all be aware of the temptations of martyrdom.
Whatever actually happens in an act of political violence, there will be someone, somewhere, who claims that victimhood means innocence, and that innocence justifies more violence by hands that remain ever blameless.  This sort of logic is already all over the internet.  That move was made in all the fascist cases.  When the German Nazis took over Austria in 1938, they raised a monument to their martyrs.  The Romanian fascists killed to avenge theirs. 
Trump is of similar mind: he refers to the convicted criminals who stormed the White House as “martyrs” and makes them part of his rallies.  He constantly refers to himself as a victim.
One can only hope that he does not escalate such rhetoric, or direct blame where it does not belong.  Doing so won’t help him win an election, but it will make further violence more likely.
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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 days ago
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David Rowe
* * * *
Good morning. This is what fascism looks like.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Oct 26, 2024
It crept in overnight, while we were sleeping.  Fascism showed its face not with jackboots and concentration camps…not yet, anyway…but rather as just another day in Capitalist America.  Two major media companies, the Washington Post and the LA Times, made decisions to capitulate to the man they fear will be elected president before a single vote has been counted.  They decided not to run editorials endorsing their preferred candidate for president, Kamala Harris, because the owners of the companies, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, are afraid if they anger Donald Trump, he will hit them where it hurts:  In their pocketbooks.
Bezos sees himself as particularly vulnerable to the wrath of Donald Trump.  Before he left office in 2021, Trump appointed a puppet to run the United States Postal Service (USPS):  Louis DeJoy, a long-time Republican fund-raiser and major Trump contributor who was appointed as one of three deputy finance chairmen of the Republican National Committee shortly after Trump took office in 2017.  The USPS prioritizes package delivery for Amazon and sets the price it pays for the service.  Trump has threatened Bezos with jacking up his Amazon delivery prices before, in 2018.  The Postmaster General was then Megan Brennan, appointed during the Obama administration, who resisted Trump’s demand to raise delivery prices, but such resistance is unlikely to happen if Trump is elected and DeJoy is there to carry out his wishes.
This is the way it happens.  An autocrat like Donald Trump, with his history of impulsive decisions and threats against perceived enemies, has two billionaires cowering in fear, and he didn’t even have to pick up the phone.
Fascism is not an all-at-once transformation.  We’ve already had our Brownshirt day, on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump’s MAGA army stormed the Capitol waving Confederate and Nazi flags and assaulting police officers and attempting to hunt down and kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, all of it, we now know, with Trump cheering them on from the White House.  Fascism uses symbols – MAGA this time, Swastika last time – to rally followers, and then it feeds them fear and lies and the demonization of minorities and others perceived as not like us.
I don’t even know that you can name the period of fascism we’re in right now.  Giving it a name doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it is happening right in front of our eyes, and little if nothing is being done about it, other than fascism finally being called out by political leaders such as Kamala Harris and other Democrats, and some news organizations have at last crossed the Rubicon of using the “F” word of fascism and the “H” word of Hitler in the same sentences with Donald Trump.
What can we do?  We can all vote for Kamala Harris and whatever Democrat is running for whatever office in your district and state. 
Journalists everywhere, but particularly at the Washington Post and LA Times, have a crucial role to play right now.  It is journalism about Donald Trump’s crimes and political extremism that has revealed him as not just a totalitarian politician, but as a man consumed with a fascist lust for absolute power.  It has been people like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson who have put Trump’s rise in historical perspective and compared what is happening right now in this country to what happened nearly a century ago in Germany with the rise of Hitler, when German corporate titans of the day bowed down to him in fear. 
Now the reporters and editors at the Post and the LA Times can help show the world what contemporary fascism looks like by refusing to countenance the craven subservience of their owners.  There are leaders at the Washington Post, in particular Bob Woodward and Eugene Robinson and David Ignatius and Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty, who can show the way for their colleagues by leading a newspaper-wide walk out.  With what we are seeing every day from Donald Trump, they can call it a “Strike Against Fascism,” or “A Call to Arms.”
You might accuse me as a freelancer of not taking seriously the possibility that people at both papers might lose their jobs for leading or participating in a walk-out.  But people have already resigned in protest at both papers.  This isn’t a time to show fear.  It’s a time to stand up to power. The writers and editors have a lot to lose, but they have already been treated as expendable, and they’ve been told they are in danger of losing their jobs anyway.
The guy Bezos put in as publisher of the Post, former Murdoch hitman Will Lewis, bluntly told Post staffers when he was appointed, “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”   He could have been talking as well to the staffs of the New York Times and the three major television networks and cable news like CNN and MSNBC.  All of them are in an existential crisis at this crucial moment in our history.  Newspapers are closing across the country.  Television networks and cable news shows are hemorrhaging viewers. 
The arrival of Bezos and Soon-Shiong to “rescue” two major American newspapers has shown us how hollow were any hopes that billionaires will or even can make a difference in today’s economic and political climate. 
But workers can make a difference.  With ten days to go until the election, let’s see if a day with no newspaper in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles can make a difference.  Maybe a strike will teach reporters and editors and the rest of us that we are beyond the point of being able to affect our lives and the lives of others.  Or maybe rallying against the fascism that has been stealing our national politics will help to send more people to the polls to vote for Kamala Harris on November 5.
I do know this:  When you are bullied, you STAND UP or you lose your self-respect and your dignity and your right to life. The fascism of Donald Trump would take away all three.
Lucian Truscott Newsletter
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hillaryisaboss · 11 months ago
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The 80+ million who voted for Joe Biden need to be on BLUE ALERT: the media is giving millions in free airtime to Donald because 1) he is purposefully talking like Hitler to poison our minds 2) his legal battles are intensifying & 3) he is an entertainer & Americans love entertainers — even evil ones with documented cases of both mental & physical abuse. Ignore the media circus: Joe Biden & Kamala Harris will protect abortion & protect women. Joe Biden & Kamala Harris will protect our planet from burning & certain death due to rapidly increasing climate change. Joe Biden & Kamala Harris will protect us from guns & those who terrorize our schools & kill our schoolchildren. Joe Biden & Kamala Harris will protect our access to healthcare, saving countless human lives every single year. The media loves ratings. Don’t let them prop up Demagogue Donald to victory like they did in 2016. Question the media: are the poll numbers really that close among actual *REAL* voters? Democrats have won upset after upset due to the abortion issue alone. Currently, Donald & his cult are playing it up for ratings. Will *REAL* Americans fall for it like we did in 2016? VOTE BLUE. Save America from Donald & his white terrorist thugs who seek to divide us & poison our minds with hate, discrimination, & the natural human inclination towards hating those who are different from us. There’s a reason many dictators are dully elected at the very start. Blame immigrants. Blame the media. Remove rights for women & other marginalized groups. Spread fear. Intimidate. Claim to be the arbitrator of truth. We can’t let this happen to our democracy. Ignore the media & VOTE BLUE in 2024 💙🩵💙🩵💙
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daughters-of-liberty · 2 months ago
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I feel for Trump's family. People forget that they're people, too. The media get so caught up in calling Trump literal Hitler that they don't realize what effect that has on people that aren't playing with a full deck of cards. It's disgusting.
And let's be clear, here: if he only had one child he had to explain the situation to, that's still one time too many to have to tell your kid "hey, so, someone tried to kill grandpa today". And that's a conversation they still would've had twice. In one summer.
But no mention of the first assassination attempt during Trump's debate with Kamala. Once the Dems published their "there's no room for violence in politics" tweets, the dust settled, and nooobody cared in mainstream media. It's gonna be exactly the same this time round, and next time, and the time after that. I pray there aren't anymore attempts on Trump's life, but I'm also realist. Two assassination attempts in the span of two months? After YEARS, the better part of a decade, of no actual* threats to Donald Trump? It's a little suspicious to me.
More than a little suspicious.
*I say actual threats because, in this instance, I'm not counting all the celebrities that have made jokes—extremely fucked up, unfunny jokes, but jokes nonetheless—about attempting some act of violence upon Donald Trump; like Johnny Depp, Kathy Griffin, or Madonna.
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mariacallous · 1 month ago
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The New York Times once dubbed the Princeton professor Robert George, who has guided Republican elites for decades, “the reigning brain of the Christian right.” Last year, he issued a stark warning to his ideological allies. “Each time we think the horrific virus of anti-Semitism has been extirpated, it reappears,” he wrote in May 2023. “A plea to my fellow Catholics—especially Catholic young people: Stay a million miles from this evil. Do not let it infect your thinking.” When I spoke with George that summer, he likened his sense of foreboding to that of Heinrich Heine, the 19th-century German poet who prophesied the rise of Nazism in 1834.
Some 15 months later, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson welcomed a man named Darryl Cooper onto his web-based show and introduced him to millions of followers as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” The two proceeded to discuss how Adolf Hitler might have gotten a bad rap and why British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War.”
Hitler tried “to broadcast a call for peace directly to the British people” and wanted to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem,” Cooper elaborated in a social-media post. “He was ignored.” Why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place—and what a satisfactory “solution” to their inconvenient existence might be—was not addressed.
Some Republican politicians spoke out against Carlson’s conversation with Cooper, and many historians, including conservative ones, debunked its Holocaust revisionism. But Carlson is no fringe figure. His show ranks as one of the top podcasts in the United States; videos of its episodes rack up millions of views. He has the ear of Donald Trump and spoke during prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention. His anti-Jewish provocations are not a personal idiosyncrasy but the latest expression of an insurgent force on the American right—one that began to swell when Trump first declared his candidacy for president and that has come to challenge the identity of the conservative movement itself.
Anti-Semitism has always existed on the political extremes, but it began to migrate into the mainstream of the Republican coalition during the Trump administration. At first, the prejudice took the guise of protest.
In 2019, hecklers pursued the Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw—a popular former Navy SEAL from Texas—across a tour of college campuses, posing leading questions to him about Jews and Israel, and insinuating that the Jewish state was behind the 9/11 attacks. The activists called themselves “Groypers” and were led by a young white supremacist named Nick Fuentes, an internet personality who had defended racial segregation, denied the Holocaust, and participated in the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”
The slogan referred to a far-right fantasy known as the “Great Replacement,” according to which Jews are plotting to flood the country with Black and brown migrants in order to displace the white race. That belief animated Robert Bowers, who perpetrated the largest massacre of Jews on American soil at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 after sharing rants about the Great Replacement on social media. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the gunman wrote in his final post, “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
Less than three years later, Carlson sanitized that same conspiracy theory on his top-rated cable-news show. “They’re trying to change the population of the United States,” the Fox host declared, “and they hate it when you say that because it’s true, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.” Like many before him, Carlson maintained plausible deniability by affirming an anti-Semitic accusation without explicitly naming Jews as culprits. He could rely on members of his audience to fill in the blanks.
Carlson and Fuentes weren’t the only ones who recognized the rising appeal of anti-Semitism on the right. On January 6, 2021, an influencer named Elijah Schaffer joined thousands of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol, posting live from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Eighteen months later, Schaffer publicly polled his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers: “Do you believe Jews disproportionately control the world institutions, banks, & are waging war on white, western society?” Social-media polls are not scientific, so the fact that more than 70 percent of respondents said some version of “yes” matters less than the fact that 94,000 people participated in the survey. Schaffer correctly gauged that this subject was something that his audience wanted to discuss, and certainly not something that would hurt his career.
With little fanfare, the tide had turned in favor of those advancing anti-Semitic arguments. In 2019, Fuentes and his faction were disrupting Republican politicians like Crenshaw. By 2022, Fuentes was shaking hands onstage with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In 2019, the Groyper activists were picketing events held by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization founded by the activist Charlie Kirk. By 2024, Turning Point was employing—and periodically firing and denouncing—anti-Semitic influencers who appeared at conventions run by Fuentes. “The Zionist Jews controlling our planet are all pedophiles who have no regard for the sanctity of human life and purity,” one of the organization’s ambassadors posted before she was dismissed.
In 2020, Carlson’s lead writer, Blake Neff, was compelled to resign after he was exposed as a regular contributor to a racist internet forum. Today, he produces Kirk’s podcast and recently reported alongside him at the Republican National Convention. “Why does Turning Point USA keep pushing anti-Semitism?” asked Erick Erickson, the longtime conservative radio host and activist, last October. The answer: Because that’s what a growing portion of the audience wants.
“When I began my career in 2017,” Fuentes wrote in May 2023, “I was considered radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views … In 2023, on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on the door of the political mainstream.” Fuentes is a congenital liar, but a year after this triumphalist pronouncement, his basic point is hard to dispute. Little by little, the extreme has become mainstream—especially since October 7.
Last December, Tucker Carlson joined the popular anti-establishment podcast Breaking Points to discuss the Gaza conflict and accused a prominent Jewish political personality of disloyalty to the nation. “They don’t care about the country at all,” he told the host, “but I do … because I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I’m shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned. And I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America, because he doesn’t, obviously.”
The twist: “He” was not some far-left activist who had called America an irredeemably racist regime. Carlson was referring to Ben Shapiro, arguably the most visible Jewish conservative in America, and insinuating that despite his decades of paeans to American exceptionalism, Shapiro was a foreign implant secretly serving Israeli interests. The podcast host did not object to Carlson’s remarks.
The war in Gaza has placed Jews and their role in American politics under a microscope. Much has been written about how the conflict has divided the left and led to a spike in anti-Semitism in progressive spaces, but less attention has been paid to the similar shake-up on the right, where events in the Middle East have forced previously subterranean tensions to the surface. Today, the Republican Party’s establishment says that it stands with Israel and against anti-Semitism, but that stance is under attack by a new wave of insurgents with a very different agenda.
Since October 7, in addition to slurring Shapiro, Carlson has hosted a parade of anti-Jewish guests on his show. One was Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster known for her defenses of another anti-Jewish agitator, Kanye “Ye” West. Owens had already clashed with her employer—the conservative outlet The Daily Wire, co-founded by Shapiro—over her seeming indifference to anti-Semitism. But after the Hamas assault, she began making explicit what had previously been implicit—including liking a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood,” a reference to the medieval blood libel. The Daily Wire severed ties with her soon after. But this did not remotely curb her appeal.
Today, Owens can be found fulminating on her YouTube channel (2.4 million subscribers) or X feed (5.6 million followers) about how a devil-worshipping Jewish cult controls the world, and how Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and killed President John F. Kennedy. Owens has also jumped aboard the Reich-Rehabilitation Express. “What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” she asked in July. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’”
“Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote after Carlson’s Holocaust conversation came under fire. The post received 15,000 likes.
Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics intensified several forces that have contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism on the American right. One was populism, which pits the common people against a corrupt elite. Populists play on discontents that reflect genuine failures of the establishment, but their approach also readily maps onto the ancient anti-Semitic canard that clandestine string-pulling Jews are the source of society’s problems. Once people become convinced that the world is oppressed by an invisible hand, they often conclude that the hand belongs to an invisible Jew.
Another such force is isolationism, or the desire to extricate the United States from foreign entanglements, following decades of debacles in the Middle East. But like the original America First Committee, which sought to keep the country out of World War II, today’s isolationists often conceive of Jews as either rootless cosmopolitans undermining national cohesion or dual loyalists subverting the national interest in service of their own. In this regard, the Tucker Carlsons of 2024 resemble the reactionary activists of the 1930s, such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who infamously accused Jewish leaders of acting “for reasons which are not American,” and warned of “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
Populism and isolationism have legitimate expressions, but preventing them from descending into anti-Semitism requires leaders willing to restrain their movement’s worst instincts. Today’s right has fewer by the day. Trump fundamentally refuses to repudiate anyone who supports him, and by devolving power from traditional Republican elites and institutions to a diffuse array of online influencers, the former president has ensured that no one is in a position to corral the right’s excesses, even if someone wanted to.
As one conservative columnist put it to me in August 2023, “What you’re actually worried about is not Trump being Hitler. What you’re worried about is Trump incentivizing anti-Semites,” to the point where “a generation from now, you’ve got Karl Lueger,” the anti-Jewish mayor of Vienna who inspired Hitler, “and two generations from now, you do have something like that.” The accelerant that is social-media discourse, together with a war that brings Jews to the center of political attention, could shorten that timeline.
For now, the biggest obstacle to anti-Semitism’s ascent on the right is the Republican rank and file’s general commitment to Israel, which causes them to recoil when people like Owens rant about how the Jewish state is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles. Even conservatives like Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, a neo-isolationist who opposes foreign aid to Ukraine, are careful to affirm their continued support for Israel, in deference to the party base.
But this residual Zionism shields only Israeli Jews from abuse, not American ones—and it certainly does not protect the large majority of American Jews who vote for Democrats. This is why Trump suffers no consequences in his own coalition when he rails against “liberal Jews” who “voted to destroy America.” But such vilification won’t end there. As hard-core anti-Israel activists who have engaged in anti-Semitism against American Jews have demonstrated, most people who hate one swath of the world’s Jews eventually turn on the rest. “If I don’t win this election,” Trump said last week, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”
More than populism and isolationism, the force that unites the right’s anti-Semites and explains why they have been slowly winning the war for the future of conservatism is conspiracism. To see its power in practice, one need only examine the social-media posts of Elon Musk, which serve as a window into the mindset of the insurgent right and its receptivity to anti-Semitism.
Over the past year, the world’s richest man has repeatedly shared anti-Jewish propaganda on X, only to walk it back following criticism from more traditional conservative quarters. In November, Musk affirmed the Great Replacement theory, replying to a white nationalist who expressed it with these words: “You have said the actual truth.” After a furious backlash, the magnate recanted, saying, “It might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” Musk subsequently met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accompanied Ben Shapiro on a trip to Auschwitz, but the lesson didn’t quite take. Earlier this month, he shared Carlson’s discussion of Holocaust revisionism with the approbation: “Very interesting. Worth watching.” Once again under fire, he deleted the tweet and apologized, saying he’d listened to only part of the interview.
But this lesson is also unlikely to stick, because like many on the new right, Musk is in thrall to a worldview that makes him particularly susceptible to anti-Jewish ideas. Last September, not long before Musk declared the “actual truth” of the Great Replacement, he participated in a public exchange with a group of rabbis, activists, and Jewish conservatives. The discussion was intended as an intervention to inoculate Musk against anti-Semitism, but early on, he said something that showed why the cause was likely lost before the conversation even began. “I think,” Musk cracked, “we’re running out of conspiracy theories that didn’t turn out to be true.”
The popularity of such sentiments among contemporary conservatives explains why the likes of Carlson and Owens have been gaining ground and old-guard conservatives such as Shapiro and Erickson have been losing it. Simply put, as Trump and his allies have coopted the conservative movement, it has become defined by a fundamental distrust of authority and institutions, and a concurrent embrace of conspiracy theories about elite cabals. And the more conspiratorial thinking becomes commonplace on the right, the more inevitable that its partisans will land on one of the oldest conspiracies of them all.
Conspiratorial thinking is neither new to American politics nor confined to one end of the ideological spectrum. But Trump has made foundational what was once marginal. Beginning with birtherism and culminating in election denialism, he turned anti-establishment conspiracism into a litmus test for attaining political power, compelling Republicans to either sign on to his claims of 2020 fraud or be exiled to irrelevance.
The fundamental fault line in the conservative coalition became whether someone was willing to buy into ever more elaborate fantasies. The result was to elevate those with flexible approaches to facts, such as Carlson and Owens, who were predisposed to say and do anything—no matter how hypocritical or absurd—to obtain influence. Once opened, this conspiratorial box could not be closed. After all, a movement that legitimizes crackpot schemes about rigged voting machines and microchipped vaccines cannot simply turn around and draw the line at the Jews.
For mercenary opportunists like Carlson, this moment holds incredible promise. But for Republicans with principles—those who know who won the 2020 election, or who was the bad guy in World War II, and can’t bring themselves to say otherwise—it’s a time of profound peril. And for Jews, the targets of one of the world’s deadliest conspiracy theories, such developments are even more forboding.
“It is now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure,” Jonathan Tobin, the pro-Trump conservative editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, wrote after Carlson’s World War II episode. “He must be put in his place, and condemned by Trump and Vance.”
Anti-Semitism’s ultimate victory in GOP politics is not assured. Musk did delete his tweets, Owens was fired, and some Republicans did condemn Carlson’s Holocaust segment. But beseeching Trump and his camp to intervene here mistakes the cause for the cure.
Three days after Carlson posted his Hitler apologetics, Vance shrugged off the controversy and recorded an interview with him, and this past Saturday, the two men yukked it up onstage at a political event in Pennsylvania before an audience of thousands. Such coziness should not surprise, given that Carlson was reportedly instrumental in securing the VP slot for the Ohio senator. Asked earlier if he took issue with Carlson’s decision to air the Holocaust revisionism, Vance retorted, “The fundamental idea here is Republicans believe not in censorship; we believe in free speech and debate.” He conveniently declined to use his own speech to debate Carlson’s.
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corporationsarepeople · 1 year ago
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“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, they will do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”
—Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate, Nov 12, 2023
Since the fascists, authoritarians always want to do two things — they want to change the way that people see violence, making it into something necessary and patriotic and even morally righteous, and they want to change the way people see their targets.
And so they use dehumanizing language. And former President Trump is doing both. He's been using his rallies since 2015 to shift the idea of violence into something positive. And now he's starting to use dehumanizing rhetoric, all these groups who live like vermin. And this is what the original fascists did. Hitler started talking about Jews as parasites in 1920.
So by the time he got in, in 1933, Germans had been exposed to this dehumanizing rhetoric for 13 years. And Mussolini literally talked about rats. After he had become dictator in 1927, he said, we need to kill rats who are bringing infectious diseases and Bolshevism from the east.
This matches up with Trump talking about immigrants bringing disease and other such things. So this is very dangerous rhetoric with a very precise fascist history.
There's a two-part thing that authoritarians do.
First, they change the view of violence. And Mr. Trump, since 2015, he started saying at his rallies, using his rallies and campaign events for radicalizing people. And he started saying, oh, in the old days, you used to hurt people. The problem is, Americans don't hurt each other anymore.
Now he's going into a new phase of openly dehumanizing his targets so that will lessen the taboos in the future. And we see that, in 2025, he's got plans for mass deportations, mass imprisonments and giant camps. So you need people to be less sensitive about violence, either committing it themselves or tolerating it.
And I see that as the reason he's using this dehumanizing rhetoric now, to prepare people.
This (being a proud election denier) is part of being much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy, because the endgame of election denial is actually to convince Americans that elections shouldn't be the way they choose their leaders, they're too unreliable.
And we're beginning to see this with his allies. Michael Flynn said we shouldn't — elections, we might not even have one. Tommy Tuberville, the senator, said let's not even have elections, or the talk about America is never — pure democracy doesn't work. All of this is part of a campaign of, you could call it mass reeducation of Americans to want forms of authoritarian rule that Trump will give.
In all cases of history that I have studied in my book "Strongmen," people did not take the various Hitlers and Mussolinis seriously until it was too late.
—Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Nov 13, 2023
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azspot · 11 months ago
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The president is being impeached, even though there exists no case for impeachment. He is old, the president, and his cognition is impaired—so the story goes—while his opponent, former president Donald Trump, who is only 4 years younger and is as ignorant of all matters to do with the office he seeks as he is incurious of basic human decency, is—so the story goes—youthful and sharp as a tack, and possessed of the sort of musculature that would qualify him to appear in action movies. Trump has openly announced his intention to become a fascist dictator if he re-achieves the presidency, promising to use the military to crush dissent, vowing to use his standing army of fascist judges and police to seize power and disband large swaths of the government, and swearing to purge the courts and the government and the nation of undesirable elements. Last night he literally quoted Adolf Hitler, telling his pink-faced crowd that immigrants were poisoning the nation’s blood. The language he’s used to marshal his support among mostly white, mostly Christian Americans can only be described as dehumanizing and eliminationist, the sort of talk that usually precedes mass killings.
A.R. Moxon
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