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I recently came across this video from the NYT. It is titled: "We're experts in Fascism. We're Leaving the U.S."
Not to boo my outgroup too much here (and that's not the point of this), but holy shit this video is bonkers. The logical jumps these people are making, their inability to understand or recognize that they are explicitly not living in a fascist dictatorship when they work for the largest newspaper in the country publishing content about how the leader of the country is a giant fascist. This video is frightening to me for the following reason:
What does the deprogramming effort for all of this eventually look like? Or does it happen?
These people (not necessarily the ones in the video, but the ones who might watch this type of video earnestly) seem convinced that we are living in a society which is comparable in some way to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
I guess I have to stop myself here to check my biases: are we? Just to look at the most obvious thing here, the press, the answer is unequivocally: no, or perhaps even "fuck no, lol".
Or the military? It seems like we have the most powerful military on earth, and are essentially not using it at all.
As far as ICE: ice killed two people in situations which were arguably (though not definitely) self defense, and the response was that the Federal Government largely pulled out of the area (Minnesota) where they were deployed. This is while local residents are doing things like stalking federal law enforcement, setting up various checkpoints, and delaying "rapid response forces" to track their movements.
Would Hitler have tolerated this? Was there an equivalent in Nazi Germany of non-Nazis setting up checkpoints for the Nazis and driving them out of town?
Okay I'm talking to myself here: no we are not even remotely close to anything even remotely like a fascist dictatorship. By almost every definition we are likely the farthest we have ever been from living in a fascist dictatorship.
So deprogramming: has there been any serious discussion about what this will look like? It's been on my mind for a little over a year now. Here was the positive realization I had about it: it's not necessary. The people being dispatched by this sort of propaganda don't hold coherent beliefs. This is not part of a larger system of beliefs that all build on top of one another. These ideas are mostly just sitting on their own. They are a collection, not a system.
So this means that deprogramming isn't so much a process of unwinding everything, it's just a matter of installing a new set of ideas. Deprogramming could happen in a few days, for some people it could probably happen in a single episode of John Oliver or Rachel Maddow.
Realistically this was a happy realization to me. Am I wrong to think this?
The video makes it rather ambiguous as to whether the people in the video think we're already in a dictatorship, or if we're just sliding towards one. I'd say it mostly endorses the latter narrative while you're mostly attacking the former. I'm not saying you're attacking a strawman per se, but you're not addressing their stronger argument much either.
Yes, we could very well be on the slide towards a dictatorship. The biggest protection against a dictatorship would be the people broadly penalizing authoritarian behavior. The US had that 2 decades ago, but it doesn't have that much on the Republican side in the age of the Trump Cult. There's some people on the Right like Yarvin that explicitly want a dictatorship in some form. I don't think they have much pull, and that a dictatorship would not come from their actions. Rather, it would come from the Republican rank-and-file being more-or-less fine with a right wing takeover.
A Republican leader could say "the Dems are blocking immigration enforcement -- the only way to really fix immigration is with extraordinary power", and I highly doubt most Republicans would stand in the way. If they're not really complaining about the unprecedented corruption of Trump 47 which brings them no tangible rewards, why would they complain about this? The only 2 things standing in the way are 1) if law enforcement and the military would comply, and 2) if Republican leaders themselves actually want that sort of thing. The police and military could probably be slow-boiled into accepting something like this. On #2, I don't think Trump wants to become a dictator (and he's pretty old anyways), though someone like Vance might. Although Vance will probably have a very hard time keeping the Trump coalition together to the same extent that Trump did, so that will lessen the cultism aspect.
I don't think the US will transition to a dictatorship over the next 10 years, but it's like only a 70% chance that won't happen instead of a 99% chance 2 decades ago. The protections against it happening are becoming worryingly thin.
Or the democrat side. Biden sat pretty far outside the post-watergate norm for domestic policy pressures, and the unwillingness to acknowledge that is a major reason that stasis is unfixable. Cultural republicans have rights, and if we have to choose us or you to be oppressed, guess what we pick.
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Nobody needs to be deprogrammed. Behind every inflammatory internet video there is a man trying to make a living by producing internet videos. Politics drives engagement, engagement drives ad revenue. Nothing to explain.
And by the way, you're encouraging it by linking the video.
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Regarding deprogramming, I think it happens across generations as opposed to one group of people actually getting deprogrammed.
My Dad, mostly due to dating my Mom, dabbled in Hippy-ism in the early 70s. Long hair, Grateful dead concerts. That sort of thing.
By the time they had their first child, Dad had a typical corporate haircut, wore suits to work everyday, and smashed that like button for Reagan in the next election. He didn't deprogram so much as reverted to what he was. The dabbling was just that, dabbling.
But they still send christmas cards to at least two hardcore hippies. One still does the "ride your bike naked" around either Portland or Seattle (I forget which one) each spring. I don't know if his "employment" history is either of a) existant or b) not mostly illegal. That dude is never going to deprogram. Trump isn't on his radar because he still hasn't gotten over Nixon.
And his son is an aerospace engineer. With a crew cut. I've never met him, but Dad says that he and his father are estranged (my Dad and the hippy still catch up over zoom a few times per year).
It doesn't take much of a logical leap to think that the son grew up in a kind of fucked household because his Dad was so down with the cause. His, the son's, reaction was to, I'd bet, follow that straight and narrow path, work hard, and find a way to make some money. I'd wager he's probably half MAGA and half techno-futurist.
You see this more broadly with Gen-Z. While some of them are indeed "dinergoths" (See other top level post from this week's thread), you also have Gen-Z gym bro's who openly say "retard" and "faggot" to one another and don't care if they get tut-tutted by their post-woke classmates.
That's how deprogramming happens. I think the hard problem across generations, however, still has to do with male-female social and political relationships. That's a true capital-C Culture War which is upstream of politics and political LARPing.
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The irony calling Trump and his supporters "Fascist" is that MAGA does not buy into the idea of the state as ultimate sovereign/final arbiter of authority. MAGA does not want a rational materialist technocracy society run by "Elite Human Capital" (or a racial spoils system for that matter) nor does MAGA see itself as socialist (though they are certainly nationalist).
To the extent that mid 20th century fascism is an active and vital force in US politics today, it is embodied by the sort of affluent white liberal who writes for the New York Times and voted for Zohran Mamdani on the high-end, and would-be brownshirts like Alex Pretti on the low end.
I would argue that MAGA is (amongst many things) a popular reaction against the fascistic and anti-western tendencies that have been allowed to fester amongst our so-called "best and brightest" for far too long. But acknowledging that would force the NYT to grapple with their own checkered history regarding Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the German Bund, Et Al, whereas doubling down on calling anyone to the right of Karl Marx a secret Nazi costs them nothing but readership.
Much of MAGA buys into the idea that Trump ought to be the ultimate sovereign/final arbiter of authority. There's a short distance from the type of cultism the rank-and-file MAGA voter shows, and the idea that Trump should be some sort of dictator, if only to stop those evil leftists!
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It was a decade and a half before Nazi Germany, but the Ruhr Uprising set up a left-wing paramilitary that drove the right-wing paramilitaries of 1920 Germany out of town.
The fact that the answer was "no", whereas the Weimar Republic's answer was "well, maybe for a few weeks, tops", was part of the background that let Hitler seize power. Psychologically, fascism is basically what you get when the human sense of disgust goes out of control, and if you want people's disgust reactions to go overboard then the most powerful scenario is a combination of enemies that disgust them and "friends" who normalize going overboard in reaction.
Minnesota is no Ruhr Uprising - the death count is still around "two", not "a thousand" - but it's also not a situation that would have seemed incongruous in Wiemar Germany. It's vastly less significant in scope, but it's not in a different category.
Perhaps what is most different is the bulk of public reaction? The Ruhr Uprising spooked the median German more than its suppression did, and opposition vs support for that suppression was divisive even among leftist factions there. Opposition to current ICE practices, on the other hand, has expanded well past the median American and is still climbing. Some opposition to ICE is still an expression of unthinking disgust, and in particular the sort of anti-border-control protestors who are "reinventing borders from first principles" with Minnesota checkpoints are about as anti-fascist as the "Anti-fascist Protection Rampart" was, but groups becoming fascist while decrying fascism may come out ... weirder ... than historical groups who went fascist deliberately.
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I will grant you that for Good, that argument can be made.
For Pretti, I just don't see it. Shooting someone who was at that time unarmed in the back because you thought they were armed looks bad. Likely there are thousands of gang members doing time for murder or manslaughter for cases which had a better claim to self defense than the Pretti shooters. They certainly had more reasonable doubt because their actions were unlikely to be filmed from multiple angles.
Are you advocating to pardon all of them, or do you advocate that cops should be held to much lower standards ("if the cop plausibly thought he was in danger, that's self defense")?
Anyone who is claiming that as of this moment, the US is a fascist dictatorship is obviously full of shit. I have no idea if the people in the video are making such claims, or if that is a straw man, and refuse to watch video arguments out of principle -- literate people should use text.
The ICE deployment to MN is not in itself a milestone on the path to fascism. Nor is them killing two people in error. The fact that both of them were slandered as domestic terrorists by Trump officials is much more concerning.
If you want to steelman the rise of fascism thesis, you could instead focus on Trump undermining elections, as he did in 2020 when he flat out denied the outcome. If his J6 crowd had been more successful and forced Pence to certify his election based on his alternative electors, do you think Trump would have refused if he had thought he could get away with it?
Likewise, Trump's recent call to nationalize the election seems dangerous. I have never seen Trump being willing to admit defeat in his life. I am certain that an election under his control would find the votes he wants, this time. This is different from Biden or Obama or W, none of whom I could imagine to end the American democracy experiment to stay in power for a few more years. All that is standing between Trump and kinghood is the SCOTUS, and to be fair, that is a substantial check on him. But that is the guardrail of democracy -- if everything was running well, you should not depend on the guardrail.
Careful, that consensus is breaking, too. DNI director seizing Georgia ballots just weeks after the takeover of Venezuela isn't a good look for the most fair election ever.
But you've had video of Ruby Freeman running the same ballots through over and over for years at this point, so updating now might not be possible.
The Atlantic tells me that while a corrupt Fulton County prosecutor investigating Trump was fine, and the FBI faking up a damning photo of Trump's Mar-a-Lago documents was fine, the Trump administration investigating Fulton County is yet another unprecedented threat to democracy. It's all who/whom and not even subtle. And in a case with no stakes; no matter what the investigation finds, Biden's term is in the past, and anyway no one who matters will believe even the smokingest of smoking guns -- but of course that isn't going to exist, because if it ever did it would have been destroyed. And if nothing is found... well, no one who thought the election was crooked is going to change their mind either.
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He did have a gun. The likeliest explanation seems like it went off as it was being confiscated from him.
Well, they are part of antifa signal groups explicitly creating checkpoints in and out of the city, harassing journalists and private citizens, obstructing the police, and organizing to seize the state's monopoly on violence. They are all knowingly several steps past peaceful protest.
Talking past the sale? I've still yet to receive a good explanation for why several swing states stopped counting votes simultaneously at 3am and then, when counting resumed, it turned out there were hundreds of thousands of ballots more to count than there had been before, that all magically went for Biden in the needed ratios.
Noted fascist countries Japan, France, Pakistan, Iraq. Taking elections out of the hands of Cook County, Illinois is a dangerous step on the path to fascism. (?)
I cannot believe I’m still seeing this Kirk-shooter-was-actually-MAGA tier theory in the wild
This is a pretty weak attempt at dismissing the possibility. I'll contest that it was the likeliest explanation, as Shakes asserts, but you're making a pretty bold claim in dismissing it.
We know ICE isn't particularly well trained. Are you going to tell me that it's outside the realm of possibility that the agent didn't get his finger stuck inside the trigger guard? It was cold enough that he might not even have felt it.
We also know that Pretti didn't exactly make the best life choices. Are you going to tell me that it's outside the realm of possibility that the holster he was using might not have been a high quality holster with good retention and absolutely no gaps around the trigger guard molding? Are you going to suggest that it's a "conspiracy" to suggest that something like an elastic cord or drawstring might have slipped in there?
That's not even getting into "P320s go off by themselves" memery.
Look at the video -- he's not even holding it in a normal firing position, he's got his hand wrapped around the lower grip. (as one would when handling an unknown firearm -- not sure the training on this, but it seems like something that would happen pretty often in a legal CCW jurisdiction, and Grey Jacket looks pretty well trained)
Note that this also means that if the gun did go off for SIG reasons (that nobody has really been able to replicate in controlled circumstances), the recoil would cause a lot more muzzle flip than usual, potentially even causing him to lose control of the gun -- like I said last week the would be extremely obvious, not a matter of trying to see the slide moving in grainy compressed footage.
I can't say that it's out of the question, but it's extremely implausible -- the only real evidence ever presented is "SIG lol, amirite" which seems awfully weak if you're going to present it as "the most likely explanation".
I have watched the video. It's fast enough and grainy enough that my (terrible) eyes can't make out enough detail to see one way or the other.
It does, however, sound like one report is slightly different than the others. That could be an artifact of how cell phone mics work, but it does make me hesitate to discount the "first shot was an ND with Pretti's gun" theory out of hand.
It's actually a lot easier to see what's going on by watching the video (maybe slowed down a tick) with sound -- it's clear to me that he has his trigger finger not only outside the guard, but wrapped around the grip -- as you would hold a hammer or something and a finger's width lower than you normally would.
That seems like the safest way to handle a gun that you aren't sure of the loaded/safety status of -- but would be fairly uncontrollable if that gun were to somehow go off.
I'll take your word for this and assume that's what's going on. My vision is so bad that I can't tell either way.
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This is why I regard it as pretty comparable to the “Kirk Shooter was MAGA theory.” “SIG lol” as the entire basis for the theory is pretty comparable to “his parents were MAGA” as both are just probabilistic arguments while all the direct evidence we have is contrary. The grey jacket guy didn’t react as if the gun in his hand went off, and he looked behind him over the opposite shoulder. As far as I know ICE/DHS has not even claimed this misfire theory in their own defense, it is 100% cope. As you said, is it strictly possible a misfire happened despite all the evidence? Sure. In the same sense that it’s strictly possible Kirk’s shooter is a groyper chud despite the evidence.
It's even worse, really -- I'm sure you could establish a reasonably strong correlation between Trump-voting parents and MAGA-chud children over the entire population; on the other hand there are millions of SIG 320s out there, with very few NDs at all and zero strongly confirmed ADs. The probabalistic argument isn't even particularly strong.
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Look, if you want to insult me, just tell me to go fuck myself, that's honestly more polite than this smug indirection. What exactly are you expecting here? We elevated extremely grainy and vague footage into national importance, don't insult my intelligence by pretending that it's oh-so-clear and I'm the dumb one. He had a gun, something happened as it was being confiscated from him, and then ICE shot him. From some angles it appears very plausible that the gun went off and spooked everyone, which is a thing that happens. The benefit of my suggestion is that it requires neither that Alex Pretti was actually secretly trying to shoot ICE agents, nor that ICE is actually a fascist rogue police state. Accidents happen!
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The argument is: they saw he had a gun, heard “gun gun gun”, saw him reaching for it, had interacted with him previously, and knew he was violent - because of all of this they interpreted what was going on was that he was reaching for a gun to shoot them with.
It’s not a particularly good argument, but it’s a very far cry from the SS making a bunch of people stand in a pit full of dead bodies and opening fire on them with machine guns.
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I think you're directionally correct about how close we are to disctatorship relative to what the average redditir thinks, but do you really think we're doing better than we've been in recent years? I'd allege that we're closer to fascist dictatorship than we've been since... WWII maybe?
I know the executive branch has been growing in power my whole life, but Trump II really has a YOLO attitude about it and is really just willing to do whatever shit he wants. E.g. blatantly unconstitutional tariffs that the Supreme Court won't even rule on. The weaponization of the justice department without even a pretense that things aren't political. Politicization for previously apolitical administrative roles, including firing people for not stroking Trump's ego enough. The expansion of ICE-- it's not like the public didn't vote for more deportations, but similarly it's a force being used for Trump's political/personal vendettas. You really think Minnesota is more of a hotspot of illegal immigrants than, say, Texas? (Actually, I'd be curious to see data on this.)
A lot of this is about the fuzziness of how our laws are applied. Of course the executive can fire people, but when you brook no disagreement and surround yourself with yes-men, you are certainly taking things a step closer to authoritarianism.
Augustus never disbanded the Senate; he didn't just disband everything Star Wars style and declare himself emperor. But nonetheless he ran over previous norms and altered the constitution of Rome forever, becoming the quintessential (pre-modern) authoritarian.
Texas has deported more people than Minnesota, it just sends in the state troopers to beat up annoying lefty protestors instead of letting ICE handle it themselves.
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Is the issue here that Trump doesn't make pretenses when the media criticizes him for it, whereas previously the media just never criticized Biden and Obama for doing it?
Texas is working with ICE so there's no need for it. For example, after an illegal alien rapist serves his time in jail in TX, the prison system calls up ICE and hands him over. MN does not do this - for some reason MN wants illegal alien rapists out on the streets and collecting welfare. So you need ICE agents on the streets doing police work instead.
I agree that we're closer than we have been in a long while. But we're certainly further from fascism than we were under Obama and Biden.
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Manafort, Bannon, Roger Stone, George Papadapolous, Pete Navarro, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Trump himself, etc. etc. etc. The idea that the last DOJ had a "pretense that things aren't political" is doing a lot of work here, come on now.
Is authoritarianism just whenever the executive isn't constrained from doing things?
/shrug, that's not so bad a definition. If all the power is concentrated in a single authority and is unconstrained, yeah, that's authoritarianism. Our constitution (both the written document and the actually makeup of our government) work(s/ed) so well because political actors had lots of constraints on them. Most formally this is the other branches of government but is also affected by governance norms and public outrage.
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In 2021 I was hours from losing my job because I wouldn't submit to a medical procedure.
Trump hasn't done that to me yet.
Is this a thing that is associated with fascist dictatorships more strongly than with other forms of government? Usually "if the government forces me to do things I don't want, that's basically fascism" is a leap of nomenclature more associates with young lefties.
"Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" is arguably more of a generic totalitarian sentiment, but I think it's safe to say it's pretty strongly associated with fascism?
Well, but it's a stretch to go from a medical procedure being mandated under threat of losing your job to that motto. There are many procedures that match the motto better than mandatory vaccination, while being very common - like, for example, state railways, public schooling with civics classes, and mandatory ID.
Those don't seem all that salient at the moment (nor Trumpy)?
It started well before the mandates; how else can you frame widespread and clearly unconstitutional restrictions on freedom of movement etc. "for the good of the state"? I literally had reddit normies upvoting and commenting in agreement with (less famous) Mussolini quotes at the time -- it was very bad.
My point is just that "mandatory medical procedure" does not code "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" to a greater degree than other things which are very common, so unless all these other things are also signs of fascist dictatorship, to whatever extent "mandatory medical procedure" signals fascist dictatorship at least does not factor through any similarity between it and "Everything in the State(...)".
The connection to Trump is downstream from the discussion that preceded it: @birb_cromble was trying to argue that Trump is not closer to fascism than his American predecessors on the basis that Biden before him imposed mandatory medical procedures, which he presumably sees as a very fascist thing to do (more fascist than any of @guy's examples). I argue contra this in the direction that mandatory medical procedures are not actually all that fascist, and hence @guy's examples about Trump can't be flatly dismissed with something to the effect of "Biden was very fascist so none of this should even rise to the point of consideration".
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Even if you were to define "fascism" solely based around your personal feelings toward and experience with the government (rather than some greater, big-picture perspective), vaccine mandates were in no way a novel or unique feature of COVID. There's a long history of them in the United States, at various times and for various reasons.
They were actually quite novel - the supreme court decided that.
The closest comparison that might make it not be novel, if you squint and ignore details, would be Jacobson, but that covered the states and not the feds, and predates a lot of other important jurisprudence.
Above and beyond that, using OSHA to try and justify it was literally a thing that had never been done before.
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Who cares if they were novel? What difference does that make? The government tried to have millions of us fired because we didn't want to take a vaccine that didn't even work. Imagine for a second that the vaccine cured homosexuality or made everyone white. Imagine that the government wanted to make everyone get their bodyfat percentage calculated. ?
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I think many of your points can be rebutted. They are in essence treating the progressive option as neutral.
Take for example the politicization of certain administrative roles. Did you miss the first Trump term where those ‘apolitical’ roles were used to #resist. Was that not political? The departments were not apolitical to start with; Trump II is merely saying if they are going to be political might as well be our guys.
Or take ICE. It is deporting more people in Texas and Florida. The big difference is those states are working with the feds so you don’t need a lot of federal people there to enforce deportation. Not so in Minnesota. Is that fascist? Was Little Rock and the 101st fascist?
Re the weaponization of the justice department did we not just live through the Dems trying the leading opposition candidate on novel bogus charges? That is but one example. You also had under Obama the targeting of conservative NGOs.
Maybe you say this is just the “you too” fallacy. But I think the reality is that Trump recognizes he (and Republicans more broadly) being knifes to shootouts. Trump decided to finally bring a gun. Maybe that increases the odds of something spiraling out of control and leading to right fascism. But if he didn’t it would clearly lead to left fascism.
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99% of Reddit, and virtually the entire Straight Dope Message Board (which was once a fun place to hang out, 20-25 years ago) has been infected with this mind virus. Both places are now hard-left, Weatherman style. Most of the threads in the SDMB's BBQ Pit (the forum for rants and flamewars) are now anti-Trump and anti-ICE tirades. Don't they ever get tired of this??
The only refuge I have is explicitly New Right/dissident-right Substacks.
That and KiwiFarms.
I really, really do not want to live in a country where this is the political mainstream. I wish Governor Spanberger would start building Canadian-style suicide booths so I can have a way out.
I feel like even the somewhat-edgy places have really been pulled back in the pack in the last year or two. Stupidpol was solid for a few years especially during COVID since there weren't that many COVID-critical places that weren't full nutjob festivals, but browsing Stupidpol these days there's way too much Israel-Palestine lunacy for my tastes.
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There won't be any deprogramming, they'll just stop talking about it when they win their next election. Remember how fast Code Pink cratered once Obama was the one droning weddings in the middle east? They just disappeared off the news where their spokespeople had been parked for six years on every single broadcast from the weather to sports. Went from a quarter million members to low double digits in a month.
Nothing will be walked back. No one will apologize (unless they're a grifter switching sides). And it will all be re-used on the next Republican of any note. None of us saw the last Republican not to be called Hitler (Hoover), now we've seen the last Republican not to get a tranche of rape allegations, we've seen the last Republican to not have felony charges. This is how politics is done, and if you don't like it, politics is not for you.
I also suspect that they'll retcon the history of the Great Awokening and deny that it ever happened, claiming that it was the invention of neo-Nazi propaganda and never anything real and substantial. Basically the same way they've trivialized and misrepresented political correctness, critical race theory, radical feminism and DEI. There have been extensive discussions of this memory-holing process over the Intellectual Dark Web subreddit.
Code Pink, however, is I think a rather different story. I'd argue that the Bush Jr. administration utilized the parallel wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a huge source of distraction in domestic politics, which largely explains why the Culture War was more or less dormant during his presidency save for manufactured and long forgotten scandals like the stem cell research issue. (This also explains most of the existing nostalgia for the 2000s.) For the left-wing opposition it seems like a good idea to push an anti-war message, which then compelled many Republican normies to troll them in turn with militarist antics. In reality, very few average people are dedicated militarists or anti-militarists. Code Pink was a case of manufactured pacifism / anti-interventionism. Kayfabe, basically. The hatred of immigration restrictionism, on the other hand, is genuine.
Do you have any links? Sounds interesting
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Nope, and to see it in real time, remember all the people who thought Obama was a secret-muslim-communist and was going to use operation Jade Helm to seize power. Well even if you do they don't. Or anything during Covid if you didn't notice the sides switched who was pro and anti-vaccine. To deprogram them Donald Trump simply needs to leave office and this will all have been a fever dream. Hardcore partisans of any stripe have an issue with talking themselves into these kind of positions but fortunately they are lightly held and easily forgotten. And even if a Republican wins he won't be as threatening to liberals as Trump and they'll simmer down.
Remind me of this comment when we get the "theocratic misogynistic racist Hitler the 14th" treatment of whoever that will be (remember Mitt Romney?)
No the real funny part will be when when Trump gets his heel-face turn like Bush and you'll have people asking why the current evilman can't be more like that generous new york democrat that was a republican president years ago, before the parties switched you see.
The public rehabilitation of Bush Jr. is one of the oddest things I've witnessed in my lifetime. It would be easy to assume there's some kind of statute of limitations element to it, but that doesn't seem to be the case: Reagan is just as despised as ever.
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I got into an argument with a person on Facebook who was defending his decision to compare ICE to the SS and the Gestapo. When arguing that such a comparison was not in the least bit hyperbolic and distasteful, he pointed out that ICE have killed 40 people since the beginning of January 2025.
Assuming that figure is accurate, I find it profoundly disquieting that this person apparently thinks that killing 40 North or South Americans is morally equivalent to killing 6 million Jews. What the hell kind of exchange rate is that?
On a quick Google, this is probably a died in custody figure, not a "killed by ICE" figure. For reference, are (on a quick Google...) upwards of 70,000 people in ICE custody.
So I would say that you should assume the figure is not accurate if someone frames it to you as a homicide figure.
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The old tension between the "the salient thing about the Nazis is that they killed Jews" and "the salient thing about the Nazis is that they seized power and brutally eliminated all dissent, the Jew-killing just came later as a natural consequence" views? Americans are often programmed to favour the former, but I don't think the latter is so rare or unreasonable. This is especially so because I am European, but perhaps some American lefties are in the same memespace now. In our eyes, the Nazis would still have had the Nazi essence even if they hypothetically had left the Jews alone. Comparing to such hypothetical versions of the SS and Gestapo is still hyperbolic, but not in the way or to the extent you say.
I agree with @The_Nybbler that this is an ahistorical reading. The Nazis did not kill Jews because they were "dissenting" (indeed, the Nazis killed cooperative Jews: see part V here) – they killed them because they were Jews.
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This isn't true. The Jew-killing was a goal separate from seizing power and eliminating all dissent, not a consequence of it.
I mean, I'm aware (and I think most others who have what I would consider this reading are) how centrally it featured in the agenda of Hitler and other core Nazis from the beginning. The "natural consequence" argument is not "they seized power first and then serendipitously decided to kill the Jews", but "someone seizing this much power and agency is bound to produce a pile of corpses one way or another".
This amounts to an almost fully general cynicism against action and ambition - the assumption is that the world frustrates and obstructs you if you want to achieve anything significant, and if you are the sort of person whose reaction to being obstructed is "we should find a way to root out the obstructionists" rather than to give up, then you will likely eventually mass-murder someone while trying to immanentize your ideals, simply because even Little Timmy probably believes in something that, if taken seriously, would require murdering millions and all that is stopping him is that he is quick to give up. This is of course pretty antithetical to the Yankee ethos, so it would not catch on in "Optimate/Vaishya" (or what those Moldbug terms were) America.
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I would predict that the new set of ideas will be even crazier.
It seems to me that the issue here is that new technologies (social media, smartphones, etc.) have intensified the processes which lead to subgroups of people going crazy. I can pretty much assure you that the "experts" in this video are constantly bathed in a stream of propaganda which reinforces and further radicalizes their beliefs.
So I would guess that we're in for a wild ride.
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I can only wish the right-wing was ever as based as these people claim it is.
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I haven't seen deprogramming as I think you are suggesting for my entire adult life. The closest I've seen is a pause button that slows down the machine as it negotiates with the crisis producing organs. I don't think they're quite as pliable as you suggest, but I agree the people aren't the main issue.
The problem is we're left with a ruling class made up solely of people who are practiced in little else but our familiar little routines. The last vestiges of the adults in the room generation -- the ones who consciously decided to turn up the heat for worthwhile ends -- are dying off. Because of that, deprogramming is unlikely to come in return to normalcy form. If it does come, I expect it will be in a refreshing, possibly progressive or radical package. A breath of fresh air! I'll believe it when I see it.
The forever crisis has become too useful to too many. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs now benefit from if not rely on the arrangement. More importantly, so do many individual political careers. The end of democracy can't endure forever, yet I see no reason to believe why it can't endure the foreseeable future if we stay on an uncomfortable, but not-killing-each-other trajectory. At least Motte adjacent people somewhere will have a good hearty chuckle at the necessary rehabilitation of Trump, as to better contrast him against the next threat.
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Naziphobia is a very serious problem. Everywhere is 1930s Germany, everyone is Hitler, and everything is genocide, but they've just learned to hide it. But the smart and educated have been warned, and they know just how to root out the hidden Nazis. Anyone who does anything that might be what a Nazi would do if they were pretending not to be a Nazi must be exposed as a Nazi, and fortunately we have "experts on fascism" (presumably much like our "experts on misogyny" and "experts on whiteness") who can hear the secret dog whistles that Nazis use to communicate. They must be rooted out an expelled from society, because even the smallest Nazi presence will irresistibly grow and take over if left unchecked.
And in the next breath, they'll assert that slippery slopes are a "fallacy".
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I would strongly disagree with the claim that "The people being dispatched by this sort of propaganda don't hold coherent beliefs." Many people (including Scott) have noticed how woke wraps itself up in concepts which make it easy to fall into and hard to reason yourself out of ("intellecutal superweapons"). A classic example is the statement that "We live in a patriarchy."
For a rationally-minded person like me, I naturally ask "How would I go disproving that statement?" A statement that can't possibly be experimentally disproven has no possible truth value.
My observation has been that the existence of the patriarchy is not disprovable. Men suffering under the system? "The patriarchy hurts men, too." Women succeeding more than men, on average? (postsecondary degrees, for example) "It's our turn now." Women controlling most purchasing decisions by value? "They are just being forced to spend money by the patriarchy - women's products are too expensive, and this is extra bad because women don't earn as much." Society prioritizing womens' lives over those of men? "They are being treated as property."
The point is not about patriarchy per se (I find a plutocracy more likely). The point is that you see this broadly in woke discourse. Trans people are told that their liberal family members deadnaming them or misgendering them are being hateful and bigoted, and that they should seek supportive communities. Racial minorities are told that every negative interaction they had with white people was because of white racism. Obese people are told that their doctor being concerned about their weight is fat-shaming and fat-phobia.
These are totalizing worldviews. They don't stand up to detailed scrutiny and don't capture the nuance of the world. But they are self-consistent.
To go back to your main point, I think a useful analogy would be to look at cult deprogramming. People stay in cults because they get something out of them, whether that's a sense of purpose, social belonging, or power. Sometimes we (non-culties) get lucky, the marginal benefits of being in the cult wane, a trusted figure points out some inaccuracies, or some residual doubt becomes significant enough to warrant seeking external counsel. Other times they ride their cult to the grave.
My parents had an odd philosophy about this: benevolent patience. The culties will come around eventually, so be friendly and be there for them when they come around. I'm not sure I have that much grace to give. It works in the long term against weak cults, but hasn't worked to prevent family members from going deeply woke. I'm not sure it would be a winning move against the other things that estrange people from family: abusive romantic partners, fentanyl, or gang membership.
These are what the Humanities folks call "interpretive frameworks". (also "critical perspective", or "theoretical framework", though "theory" means something different to them than to scientists) You can examine whatever you want (a diner menu, say) "through the lens" of one of such frameworks (feminist theory of Judith Butler, say), to arrive at hidden patterns (like, notice that eggs are cheaper than sausages, hmmm...).
The practitioners say that the point is insight, not proof. I suspect that the point is to test rhetorical innovation.
In Humanities, success isn't about correctly predicting the physical world. Success is in coming up with ideas that people will discuss, or better yet passionately argue. So the more your idea is like a Shiri statement, the better it is for you.
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You could see it alllllllmost, almost happening with the killing of Charlie Kirk. Almost. The vibes ebbed, but the most annoying people never really relinquished their position that Charlie Kirk was a much worse person than George Floyd (for example) and totally had it coming.
And then, like, the next headline we were all supposed to be talking about was decided by NYT, or NPR. We had a moment of reflection on the temperature in the US, and it passed.
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It seems to be almost a Reddit left wing consensus that the year is 1933 and you should do whatever you would have done then if you consider yourself a good person. It's totally beyond me how this much panic has set in. I've never seen it in my whole life in any political domain.
The next election. That's all it's going to take. A liberal candidate will win and everybody will think they saved the world by showing up to vote (but won't ever think they were overreacting by calling the US a fascist state).
Dismantling the idea won't happen before the election, it can't happen before Trump is gone. Because Trump is literally Hitler, or at least trying to be. There can't be catharsis until he is gone and the threat is over. Don't let your guard down!
I'm just so dismayed at how the left is handling the current situation I just can't read anything online anymore. I actually logged back in here for the first time in years to get away from every subreddit I love becoming a home to normies wigging out. Even fucking movie review channels that have never said a political word in their lives had emergency panic threads stickied in their subreddits.
The Technology Connections guy, who was never in the least political before, devoted the last part of his latest video to an anti-Trump rant.
Ah, that's sad to hear.
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You are being deliberately obtuse here. A man who tried to stay in office after losing the 2020 election including (definitely) by sending goons to the Capitol to intimidate Mike Pence into refusing to certify the results and (probably) by meeting with generals to discuss the possibility of a military autogolpe was re-elected in 2024, as the candidate of a party which has sought to eject the people who allowed Biden to assume office. The goons sent to the Capitol got out of hand and the resulting riot meant that 2020 was only the 2nd election since the Founding when the votes of the electors could not be counted on the appointed day*. He has just ordered federal law enforcement to seize Georgia's voting records based on (if you take his public statements literally) an obviously false theory that Italian satellites were used to alter the results or (if you take his public statements seriously but not literally) a gish gallop of fraud allegations that were adjudicated false at the time. His supporters online are currently boasting about how he is going to get a kidnapped foreign head of state to falsely confess to rigging the 2020 election.
People think Trump is uniquely dangerous to American democracy because Trump speaks and acts like a man who is uniquely dangerous to American democracy.
For the usual thermostatic reasons, I think a mainstream Democrat will be on the ballot in 2028 and will probably get more valid votes than the Republican in states representing a majority of the electoral college. But to shut down the "this is 1933" memeplex they would have to be allowed to assume office without a 2020-style attempt to prevent certification of the result. Given that Trump has, with the co-operation of the MAGA movement in the country, successfully turned "2020 was rigged and Democrats routinely rig elections" into a loyalty test for Republicans, the chance of this happening is minimal.
* The other case being Hayes-Tilden in 1876. The 1800 election didn't elect a President in a timely fashion, but the delay was in the House after the electoral college vote was tied.
There's going to be a more or less normal election between Vance and Newsom (or whoever) and the only real legacy of Jan 6 will be how the Democrats cried about it for four years straight and their only reward was to lose every single swing state and the popular vote in 2024.
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Most comments about Trump being literally Hitler aren't about Jan 6th. They're about things that he does that look or feel bad. Most/many/all of those things aren't anything even resembling a threat to democracy. Most/many/all of the things people don't like Trump are things that are absolutely legal, supported by about 50% of the population, but they just disagree with. Most are complete nothing burgers, and others are just Trump being a terrible person/politician/statesman/geopolitician. These things are being framed as things that are going to destroy democracy in America.
And I just don't see some losers in plastic Viking helmets running into the Capitol as being comparable to the Night of the Long Knives. And I don't think anybody really sees Hitler in Trump. Hitler was a big person, with grand plans. He was planning the invasion of Russia since 1925 when he published his book. And his book had some serious geopolitical insights. Trump's book is on how to make deals, and he seems to be pretty shit at that. Trump is a small man, with small plans. He's thinking about hotel deals, not Lebensraum.
I will grant that Jan 6th looks bad and makes people worry. I would not categorise almost any other facet of what Trump does as comparable to Hitler or America to Hitler's Germany. The panic that people are experiencing is not commensurate with the person they're worried about, or the reality on the ground. Trump is not going to be the president in a few years, America will continue, the NASDAQ will go up and to the right, and everybody will forget about the cringe tiktoks they were making in 2026.
The Night of the Long Knives happened after Hitler had already mostly consolidated the dictatorship - by that point the only limit to his power was that Hindenberg was still alive. The question is how Jan 6th compares to the stuff the SA were doing around 1930 - i.e. before Hitler seized power. My knowledge of Weimar history isn't detailed enough to give a straight answer. But "We aren't in 1934 Germany" isn't reassuring to someone who is worried about being in 1932 Germany.
More like 1923 Germany, if anything -- even there, at least there were some firefights.
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Has Trump shown any real inclination at all to push for a third term? Whilst I'm sure there'll be efforts on the back end of this electoral cycle in order to 'secure the integrity of the 2028 election' that will inevitably be heavily criticized by Democrats I'm pretty skeptical if anything in the realm of the 2020 election happens since it'd ostensibly be Vance running the show.
He's selling Trump 2028 merchandise in the official White House gift shop. Administration staffers don't feel able to say "Of course Trump won't run in 2028 - the constitution limits presidents to two terms" on the record, because Trump wouldn't like it.
Trump is deliberately maintaining strategic ambiguity about whether he will run for a third term. (Even if he wants to, he won't, because age is catching up with him). That is a good reason for people who care about the survival of American democracy to be worried.
In addition, Vance running the show doesn't fix the problem if Vance is also committed to using false allegations of voter fraud to undermine American democracy. And Vance was chosen because he is, indeed, committed to using false allegations of voter fraud to undermine American democracy.
Dammit, stop making me like him! I don't want to like him! I disapprove of him! He's a vulgarian and worse!
But he has a sense of humour in contrast to the wokescolds (imagine President Kamala's merch - a fake plastic cocoanut tree?) and makes me laugh even when I don't want to.
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He's literally just trolling. One time he was meeting with Dem congressional leadership and offered them the hats.
If true it makes a difference but not that much of one. It's a divisive strategy that is contemptuous of democracy and makes him an enemy of democracy.
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Which is also what you would do if you really were planning to run for a third term and trying to normalise the idea.
If anyone who wasn't Trump was selling official merch with "Candidate Year" on it, you would say they were running.
Nothing about Trump running again is credible. He has none of the institutional support required to take such a big step, he's already old as hell and would be considerably older by the time it is relevant.
Such a sweeping thing for the most widely criticized president of all time would require things like the military being on board and they simply are not and there is no credible path for them to become so.
It makes no sense.
Thinking it is likely (regardless of his interest or lack) is a sign that he's broken your brain and you need to take a step back and think about actual motivations, priors, and so on.
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You are the kind of person Trump is trolling.
It isn't bad to be annoyed by stupid shit. If someone who is your ideological foe says stupid shit for malign reasons you probably get irritated too, whether they're trolling or not, especially if they are very powerful. Be honest with yourself.
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Greenland was joking until it wasn't. Gaza was joking (really funny joking, actually) until it wasn't. Since the patterns were the same, Canada and Panama were likely not joking either.
It's the same thing I've noticed /pol/ or even certain communists on Discord do. Make "jokes" targeted in a certain direction. If you press on it at all, it's announced that it's just a joke. It's really boundary pushing, and if circumstances ever became more favorable, you'd find that the sentiments were real.
After Greenland, I am pretty tired of the "just trolling" defense. If he is trolling, it's fundamentally indistinguishable from when he is not trolling. He's lost all right to be trusted about whether he's "trolling" or not. I'm not even entirely opposed to getting Greenland, or other expansions, but in hindsight, it obviously was not just jokes, and I hate the lies being peddled about that.
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@aldomilyar is the person who brought up the third term, not me. I explicitly said I think Trump is too old to run for a third term.
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If you think there's the slightest chance he'll run, bet me about it.
I just said I think he won't, because he is too old.
But the thread isn't about betting odds - it is about why people who worry about MAGA authoritarianism are behaving rationally or not. A 10% chance that Trump is Hitler is a good reason for Americans who don't want to live under Nazi rule (or foreigners who might have to fight a future Nazi America - the main reason why Hitler is the worst is the aggressive war) to be worrying, but I still wouldn't want to bet on it.
"Trump probably won't do the bad things he says he is going to do" is not very reassuring to someone who saw Jan 6th, and is currently watching him do much more of the bad things he said he was going to do than he did in his first term. Even if true, "The President probably won't send troops to interfere with the certification process if his party loses the election" (which Trump has said he should have done in 2020) is a very, very low bar.
The OP claimed not to understand why people were worried. I think it is very obvious why people are worried, even if you disagree with their judgement about the odds. The idea that Trump is so clearly trolling that only a fool or a lunatic could take him seriously, even though his supporters say they take him seriously (but not literally), doesn't seem tenable to me after January 6th, and even less so after the Fulton County raid.
I think it's pretty much always rational to worry about government authoritarianism, it's just a question of proportionality.
What I think codes as irrational is that the people who claim to be worried about Trump Hitler don't seem interested in stopping him through normal democratic means.
Let's take the recent ICE stuff discussed in another post in this week's roundup. Democrats could sweeten the deal for Republicans by saying something like "we want to pass a bill to pare down ICE's authority. In exchange, we will delete the National Firearms Act and defund the ATF."
This would be a HUGE win for (some) righties, and might be able to pull off enough Tea Party types to pass in Congress (I haven't done a headcount). Obviously the NFA might be a good piece of legislation (it isn't, but for the sake of argument) - but if you think Trump is Hitler, removing a bunch of sworn, armed federal agents from his control is...actually a good thing? So it would be two birds with one stone for the left and something that righties could spin as a win - in other words, a good political play that would go beyond mere grandstanding. Furthermore, it could actually split the GOP coalition since there's a chance Trump would come out swinging against it and that would sour all of the pro-gun right on him.
You can repeat the thought experiment with whatever else you like - abortion, perhaps, or economic regulations.
But that's actually not what you see (or at least not what I've seen). Instead lefties seem extremely concerned about the very specific things Trump is doing that impact them right at the moment and not at all concerned about his ability to exercise federal power in ways that tribally code "left" even when those things are tools that could be used against them. If you're on the right, the left is showing basically zero interest in compromise. The message righties get from the left is whining about how Trump is mean and then how righties should lose and get nothing. That's not a palatable message.
I'm sure due to my media bubble and such there's some stuff that I am missing. Probably I am not being entirely fair. But if Trump is actually dangerously authoritarian, for crying aloud, work with Republicans to disarm as many federal law enforcement agents as you can! Be concerned about how the FBI treated him - go further and suggest they be punished by slashing their funding! Demand more investigation into how Tulsi was treated by DHS and go after their funding too! Pivot towards the IRS next. Map comprehensively every single thing the federal government does that could be turned against lefties but has been used against righties and work with them to defang that power.
By and large, I don't think that is what is happening. The left seems quite content to leave the massive (and often armed) federal bureaucracy in place, even though it would be turned against them if a right-wing authoritarian seized power. Which is why righties think that leftists (at least in power) aren't sincere in their concerns, or (alternatively) are incompetent.
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As gattsuru pointed out, I'm happy to offer 10:1 odds. I just flat out don't believe that anyone actually thinks "Trump is Hitler" is even remotely likely, and I don't think they are actually worried about that.
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If you thought there was a 10% chance for anything, you should be willing to take a bet, just one at steep odds. (Modulo ethical objections to gambling in general, lump value risks, yada.) Even with counterparty risk, I'd take a 10% chance at 50x returns and smile all the way to the bank.
But no one actually believes that number. I'm not sure many people buy 1% as a number.
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As far as I know, there is a well-founded overall consensus among historians that the political line pursued by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) after 1919 in the Weimar Republic ended up abetting the Nazi seizure of power instead of preventing or even disrupting it. There is also largely a consensus that the Anti-Fascist Action organization as it was founded in 1932 was little more than a front organization of the KPD. I sort of wonder how these people would react if you merely asked their opinion on this, but I guess asking this question in itself would instantly mark you as a Nazi in their eyes.
"Antifa is retarded" isn't exactly a rare position among the pro-establishment left. You can't say it in those words because it is ableist, but "Antifa are underemployed young men who are more interested in having an excuse to fight than actually preventing modern fascists taking over America" is something you could print in the NYT.
I won't disagree with your argument (although I doubt it's anti-ableism that is an important factor in this) but my point is that "Anti-Fascist Action" named itself as such because they, in accordance with the Stalinist line, considered Social Democrats to be fascists as well but at the same time wanted to dishonestly appear to non-Communists, which is a tactic their modern-day heirs are also continuing. I imagine this would be another divisive subject of discussion among Blue Tribers if they actually thought about it for a minute.
Also, that's a twenty Stalins criticism. Antifa is bad because they aren't left-wing enough. Nothing about being too extreme, and the way that's phrased they should be okay with using violence as long as it really stops "fascists".
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