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Honestly, if they weren’t doing that, I don’t think you’d see the blowback. It’s easy to hate things that look and sound like stuff that happens in the movies. If you slam-tackle people in public, throw flashbangs into diners during dinner rush, and so on, you get blowback.
I’m not sure what the end goal actually is here. Is he going to go full president Joker? Very Smart People on the left say so. But then again, if that’s true, those same people are behaving very strangely. They’re attending rallies they pre-register for by giving their full name (50501 does this), filming the entire thing, posting symbols on social media, etc. they also show up in full cosplay — Gilead Girls, Leia, various anime characters. I just, if they’re thinking that Trump is going to mass arrest opposition, they’re not only doing everything possible to make sure they’re on the list, but fighting back in ways that simply don’t make any sense. You think Trump wants to arrest the opposition, so you register in advance, apply with the local police (which likely means giving contact information). When you get there, you stand on sidewalks with signs, dressed as children’s TV and movie characters? I can’t imagine anyone would have thought any of it in other states with the threat of authoritarian takeover. I’m sure the people who protested the Nazis did so for a couple of hours on weekends while dressed as characters from Wizard of Oz or Popeye. So either it’s true that Trump is going Joker and we just happen to have an opposition composed entirely of people who stopped maturing at like 8 years old (in which case, we’re going that way), or the whole thing is a combination of Oppression Fetishized, and being used to drum up support and donations.
As I said I don’t have any special insight into this sort of thing. If the end is to take over and disappear Americans, I don’t know what would look different. On the other hand if that’s not the end goal, it would look the same. I would say it’s maybe 30-40% it escalates.
The goal is to make it impossible to enact the disappear-protesters step of the plan by having too many protesters on the list, most of whom are manifestly not worth the bother of disappearing. The harmlessness of the protests is the point, both in and of itself (in that it'll make a regime that tries to make them out to be dangerous rioters look ridiculous) and because it makes them an attractive position for more and more people to join.
I mean im not sure that works. I’m sure that you’re not going to literally disappear everyone who went to a protest where 50501 is present, however the data gleaned from such events would be extremely useful to bad actors if they wanted to make things interesting.
First, running the list and public profiles of attendees is a treasure trove of information that can be weaponized against them. For example, I can look for common elements in those profiles. Perhaps an interest in art, a type of music, favorite TV shows, etc. I can then use that data to find other people with that profile who are not yet protesting but might. I can perhaps check these names against other databases. Any unpaid parking tickets? Anyone looking for a job I can flag in a background check? I don’t need to go after all of them or even most of them. I can probably get better bang for the buck by targeting random people who are perhaps really well connected on social media. If I arrest 50, but they post about the experience online, and those posts, because of the number of followers goes fairly viral, I can probably discourage people from protesting without having to really waste time and energy trying to brute force the thing.
The beauty of AI in this case is that I can use big data to control people in ways that are pretty invisible until they punish rule breakers. If I can make it hard to get an apartment, or a job, or for you or you kids to get into a good college, I don’t need to body slam you and throw you in jail, I can just reward the good ones with prestige and easier life while punishing the bad by withholding privileges. If protesting means that the only jobs you can get are at Wendy’s, I don’t even need to make it illegal. People won’t do it because they don’t want to get stuck working at Wendy’s and living with cockroaches in a squatter apartment with 6 roommates.
This is true if we're talking about a smart, tech-aware dictator. But your original post wasn't talking about people who expect a smart tech-driven dictatorship. It was talking about people who expect Trump to go President Joker and round up all his enemies in unmarked vans. I think the recent protestors' behavior follows a rational strategy within that framework - whose likelihood relative to "Trump continues to be more bark than bite" or "Trump becomes a smart dictator" is, of course, questionable, but that, again, wasn't the question.
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'Follow the money' has been sound advice for generations for deciphering contexts for a reason.
Media controls, which really means internet controls, which really means social media control.
When states turn to disappearance campaigns, one of the key points is that people, well, disappear. Lose track of them. No one can find them for long, long periods of time. And part of this is that you prevent media from being to follow up- and that the media that try, also disappear. No official, reputable media reports on them, and the absence is what is conspicuous. You can't hide that people disappear, and to a degree you don't want to, but the tactice works by the ambiguity. The ambiguity is provided by the media not providing answers.
The current administration has been more notable for reducing the levers of influence over media reporting than in building the influence apparatus. When Trump feuded with Reuters (or was it AP) over the Gulf of America renaming, his retaliation was to... kick the reporting organization out of the press pool. Access is what is typically used as the influence vector of a government over a reporter / organization, since access in controlled circumstances is what gives the ability to build ties / leverage over others. Separation is distance is a decrease in influence.
Similarly, the Trump administration very quickly took direct steps to dismantle the sort of media-influence apparatus that the Biden administration supported. Trump and Rubio very, very quickly distanced the US- and by distanced I mean shut down the parts of the State Department participating in it- government-supported-by-proxy media-rating and fact-checker-black-lists that were used to support, and penalize, media groups based on their reliability.
If the end was to take over and disappear Americans, this is the sort of institutional capacity you would want to coopt, not dismantle.
You would use the government hand to apply aggressive fact checking to purge the political hyperbolics as misinformation, purge the old regime's supporters from the institution, and then use the misinformation pretext to aggressively go after anyone claiming the government was disappearing Americans. Part of this would be by staging a few false positives- for example, conduct to prompt a social media storm that could be proven false- and then use the false-coverage to start administering sanctions/punishments on misinformation grounds.
Dismantling a tool that could be used for a nefarious purpose isn't proof that a nefarious purpose won't occur, but it's about as good as one can get from inference. Especially given the rather elaborate preparation kabuki sets the Trump administration has demonstrated to date, such as the whole DOGE saga and how it started with the USAID takedown. There was a heck of a lot of choreographing in that, which is about as good an indication of prepatory planning, and the sort of policy-cognizant planning that would recognize tools for a crackdown campaign.
Except because of the makeup of the whole apparatus, it couldn't be used by Trump or the right. It was a left-only set up from the beginning.
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