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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?
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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