“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.
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.
A lot of people are more interested in hating people that are different from them than making informed decisions.
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.
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?
The correct question others should have posited when the idea of race was created by white supremacists.
