“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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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.
Human choices, human systems, and human preferences for the untrue are, for many, stronger forces than reality.
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.
Nowadays, fascists choose to plug their ears with their fingers
Yes, because they’re motivated to live in that fantasy world where they are ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’ are being punished.
but this time we should know better
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.
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.
