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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?
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.
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".
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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