“This is out of the autocratic playbook. As autocrats consolidate their power once they’re in office, anything that threatens their power … becomes illegal,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said.
Donald Trump is ramping up his rhetoric depicting his political rivals and critics as criminals, while dropping a long trail of suggestions that he favors outlawing political speech that he deems misleading or challenges his claims to power.
In a speech Friday in Aurora, Colorado, the Republican presidential nominee blasted the immigration system and lobbed a rhetorical grenade at his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“She’s a criminal. She’s a criminal,” said Trump, who was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York hush money trial. “She really is, if you think about it.”
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How the f*ck is this race tied!?
Do you remember growing up and asking “how was it even possible that someone as monstrous as Hitler was put in power? He wasn’t shy about his intents!”?
I think this go around it’s worse than Hitler.
We didn’t have mass communication in the same way during the rise of Hitler.
We didn’t have access to a wealth of information that ran counter to the programming during the rise of Hitler.
We didn’t have the amount of available access to other parts of the country and the world during the rise of Hitler.
We didn’t have the example of Hitler during the rise of Hitler.
The thing that’s so fucking surreal this time is that people should largely know better, but don’t.
So now, we’ll watch in 4k ultra hd the rise of a wanton fascist who spouts provable lies daily: an anti-science, anti-tech, anti-globalist ignoramus who likely could’ve never rose to prominence without an international micro-blogging website enabling him.
You say ‘mass communication’, ‘information’, and so on.
I say a ‘purposefully underfunded and failing education system’ and ‘online communication being used to spread anti-factual conspiracy theories’.
Human choices, human systems, and human preferences for the untrue are, for many, stronger forces than reality. You can’t just invoke critical thinking, rationality, and logic to dispel those factors.
In short: people are asking for what they want. It’s probably too late to ask why they want it while they’re in the process of forcing it down the necks of others. All we can do is stop them moving their hands.
That’s precisely the point. In the early 20th century, access to reputable sources of information was much more difficult. It was far easier to go about your day without seeing a single piece of information that contradicted “dear leader”. Fascism was also a relatively new, relatively untested ideology said to combine the “best parts of the right and the left”.
Nowadays, fascists choose to plug their ears with their fingers and hum in order to support the ideology, or they support it because they actually support its eventual ends of genocide and authoritarianism. In the first go around, not everyone knew where these roads led, but this time we should know better but either do not, or do not care.
Yes, because they’re motivated to live in that fantasy world where they are ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’ are being punished.
Why ‘should’ people prefer reality to a fantasy? Humans had the choice to make a reality which provided human decency for as many as possible, but it was consciously and repeatedly decided to exploit the many in order to enrich the few.
Maybe because other people that you punish unjustly as part of your fantasy world fucking exist and feel pain?
I get why someone with zero empathy, values, and morals would argue that acting out a fantasy in the real world is superior to hum drum reality, but that’s what you have to be to act that way.
It is perfectly possible for some people to not care about this, as is discussed in psychological literature. It is also perfectly possible for some people to only extend care towards their ingroup, as they discuss as part of discussions of their own political preferences.
You were asking why someone should prefer reality over fantasy land and I answered that.
I also covered that I understood that asshole nihilists and hedonists exist, so I’m not sure why that had to be retreaded.
Some people seem to know better
The Internet has provided us a wealth of information. In fact… maybe too much information, with questionable veracity. Social media has provided viral ways of spreading this information to people finding a truth that fits their existing beliefs, not necessarily finding the truth from an objective set of facts.
This isn’t just about Trump, the GOP, or even just fascism. It’s a complete breakdown of our trust in shared reality. It’s an indication that humans are not as smart as we think about applying technology we’ve invented, or maybe not as capable as we think about connecting with as many people as the internet allows us to.
I largely agree. However, it’s not 100% of humanity that cannot handle the advent of social media.
A large portion of the population does actually know what’s happening.
Some of the people pushing the lies (e.g. the FEMA crap), even know that they’re creating or redistributing AI generated garbage, but they are actively participating in the perpetuation of the falsehoods and purposefully becoming detached from reality.
All of this is what makes it so surreal to me (and arguably worse than before). A large portion of the public knows that what is being pushed is a complete fabrication and it continues anyway.
It was easier to argue ignorance in the past (after the war a lot of people argued that they didn’t even know that the holocaust was happening). I don’t know that we could make the same argument this go around.
I was always a really good lier as a kid so I never wondered that. I just figured people these days are to educated to fall for it.
A lot of people are more interested in hating people that are different from them than making informed decisions.
Sadly I truly believe this is the case. There’s no reason to support Trump positions unless you’re a billionaire. Any non-billionaire that supports his obvious lies and grifts must be a racist, because he doesn’t have anything else going on.
Decades of unfiltered right wing radio declaring Democrats as literally evil and propogating the idea of Republicans being the party of God. When your rival is the embodiment of evil you cannot ever work with them or compromise with them lest you be destroyed.
If Hitler got to power with plenty of supporters, there’s plenty of room for propaganda to work in other cases too
So many reasons.
Just one of these is the people who seem to think making the insignificant gesture of voting third-party as a “fuck you” to the Dems is a good idea, when all it does is increase the chance of Republicans winning.
This goes for the presidential race and for most tight senate/house races, too. The ballot box isn’t where a coalition starts. A coalition starts by providing candidates who are actually likely to win.
I don’t think it’s as close as the news says it is. They want eyeballs. I think it will not be as close as these polls say.
That’s what I said before the last time he was elected.
So did I but it must be said that none of these elections in recent memory have been fair elections. The Democrats win the vote totals. Voter laws in “red” states are so thoroughly fucked that they exclude and oppress voting rights so that the Republican voters outnumber the voters who may vote against them. Then you have gerrymandering on top of that. Despite the prosecutions of Republican voter interference, nothing systemic has changed to make voting a fair competition. Any discourse on changes to these problems seem to get silenced.
The current system is broken, seemingly intractable, and favors Republicans. Wash, rinse, repeat every four years.
And so did everyone else.
A lot of people don’t want to look into the mirror, but it really says a lot about the Democratic party that 3/3 of their picks have struggled so hard against someone like Trump. Trump is vile dog shit but what does it say about you (the royal ‘you’) when you can’t even come off as something more appealing than that?
A huge swath of Republican voters are not voting for Trump. They are voting against “Democrats”. Propaganda in the US has turned politics into a team sport, and you always root for your team, even if your team is having a rough season.
The problem is the media, the lack of education, and the hatred of enough people to choose Trump despite his blatant lies.
Blaming the other candidates is brainless and completely ignores the actual fucking issues
I guess not enough youths Pokémon go to the polls.
Your thinking here is incomplete. Appealing to who? Some people want exactly the qualities that we think makes Trump dogshit.
Concentrated ownership of media and excessive lobbying.
The correct question others should have posited when the idea of race was created by white supremacists.
Was it? That seems oversimplified but I’m not familiar with the history there.