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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?
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.
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.
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.
He's literally just trolling. One time he was meeting with Dem congressional leadership and offered them the hats.
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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