“I resisted calling it fascism until it was too late and people were dying at the hands of monsters.”
Get fucked. It was fascism when it was George Floyd and it’s fascism now. It’s been a fascism white people were willing to ignore because it didn’t impact them directly for fucking decades, if not a hundred years or more.
Great job joining us in reality.
[Fascism] has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, especially by left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action.
Yeah, this guy can fuck right off.
Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.
Maybe he’s been in opposition of using the term because he’s fucking fascist-lite himself. Fascist with half the calories.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of Rauch before but this is Bari Weiss level of bullshit. Fuck opinion writers.
This is infuriating.
We’ve been calling it fascism for at least 10 years because that’s what it’s been.
We were trying to get you fucks to wake up and stop it before it was too late, and now that you’re finally willing to acknowledge it, it’s too fucking late.
Thanks for ignoring us and enabling it. You can fuck all the way off.
How long until we stop complaining about fascism and actively talk about doing something about it—publicly?
When was the US not fascism? Serious question.
Serious answer:
From wiki: “Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”
I’m not a historian or anything, but I would say that until trump we haven’t really had anyone you could call a dictator. And saying we had a strong regimentation of society and the economy seems like a stretch with the exception of wartime. You could make a good argument for ww2 era USA under FDR though that also came on the back of the new deal and a relatively progressive thrust in US politics (of course many groups of people were still oppressed and marginalized though), and possibly some parts of US involvement in Vietnam. But I think realistically there are better descriptions of the US government during those times.
This comment is intended not to discount the historic atrocities and abject failings of the US government, but rather to maintain the power of the word fascism and to assert that things are in fact different at this moment, even if they’ve been bad for a lot if people for a long time.
It was fascism this time 12 months ago when Trump had women and people of colors plaques and images covered at national museums and at nasa.
When they banned words from research. Like: women. Female. Bias, transgender, equality. Privilege.
When they prosecuted women as murderers for having a safe first trimester termination of pregnancy.
When they started demanding a woman must die before any medical procedures would be performed that could harm a fetus, even if that fetus was dead or non viable.
When they removed black veterans stories from the VA websites and other government websites.
When they changed the dod to the department of war.
My gawd. This all started a year ago. It was fascism then.
It was clearly fascism when Project 2025 was leaked.
It wasn’t leaked. The people who made it made a website and publicly posted it. They announced their fascist agenda and still people ignored it
Shocked. I am shocked. Shocked I tell you.
It was fascism in 2016 when he promised to ban people from entering the US based on religion.
Sure, all of that is true.
Why would you (not you, daannii, the general ‘you’) want to alienate an ally by rubbing that in their face?
You get a little emotional boost by feeling self-righteous in exchange for helping splinter the enemies of Fascism.
Welcome converts, don’t spit on them.
I’d like to take this opportunity to express the profoundly tragic failure of Democrats to mount any kind of meaningful opposition to this fascist project, that has been underway since at least the Reagan administration.
Also the fact that Donny got off for January 6th still blows my fucking mind.
That’s because they’re fine with fascism too. This isn’t a fight between parties. It’s a fight between the rich owner class and everyone else.
They just voted to fund ICE. Again.
They’re not failing at anything. A significant amount of them are just quietly complicit.
The red and blue party work as one and have been ruling in usa for a century
I’m glad you got there eventually. Keep listening closely to the people who told you this years ago, they are clearly more perceptive than you.
It was literally fucking YEARS of me dealing with variations of “he’s not a fascist! He’s just an impotent wannabe dictator, we’ll be fine. You’re overreacting!” from acquaintances and family. Not friends, I don’t have friends that stupid.
I will stand arm in arm with every person who mocked me for “being a worrier”, not just because it’s the only way out of this, but because it’s the best way, maybe the only way, to build a better future.
With that having been said, I hope each and every one of them gets a terrible case of genital lice at some point in their lives.
An impotent wannabe dictator is a fascist lmaoooo. That is some wild level of cope. “ he is not a fascist. He is just a fascist light. It will be fine.”
Once we give the impotent wanna be dictator, a little more power it will be fine! If I didn’t know people, I wouldn’t think this was real
I know! It’s like “She’s not an abuser. She hits me when she’s frustrated, but it’s not too hard and doesn’t usually leave a bruise. It’s just rough housing.” This actually was said to me last week. Mind fucking blown.
This is the best response.
I wonder which of the 3000 things over the past decade changed their minds.
3000 things? Using the short list? 😆
Yeah, printer ran out of ink, so we could only get the top 3k; HP promised new ink is in the mail.
So the United States, once the world’s exemplary liberal democracy, is now a hybrid state combining a fascist leader and a liberal Constitution; but no, it has not fallen to fascism. And it will not.
Well that’s alright then. I almost thought the Atlantic was becoming less useless for a second there
“I declare it”
Fucking ridiculous. “Hitler is a Nazi, but Germany isnt Nazi!”
If they keep plugging their ears it can’t be true!
the United States, once the world’s exemplary liberal democracy
When?
Yes, we know.
See, everyone knows that fascism is a bad thing. That has been taught in every school since the end of WW2.
It’s just a shame that most people never bothered to look up what fascism actually is, and it can be something your guys do as well.
Our general discourse has been so deeply and deliberately poisoned that people don’t pay attention to words broadly anymore. So many different foreign and domestic forces have worked so tirelessly to amplify the chaos and boost the worst takes on both sides of every social issue, that the general population of the US stopped paying attention. (The horrific 2024 exit-polling confirms this too.)
This is why people are latching onto character over policy, it’s why Trump retains power despite not having any clue what he’s doing and is just obviously being led around by his cabinet. It’s why we all seem to care a lot more about what our favorite internet streamer has to say about a candidate than AP our Routers or the evening news, because the words have been said so much that people stopped paying attention.
This is not a new, modern ploy either. The KGB and CIA both have written how to destabilize nations using these tactics as far back as the 50’s or earlier.
Who’s that kgb guy that runs Russia loves trump and had been accused of interfering with international elections. Has a bigger army of Internet bots than the army he fields?
I would wager that the army Elon employs is bigger. He deliberately monetized blue-check twitter accounts for high views and shares. Not much, just a few dollars a month, maybe a couple hundred dollars if you break some thousands of shares and views.
For the average American this is not worth the time and effort to stay on Twitter all day and night farming engagement, but for the average citizen of a place like India, this is a living. So now in addition to the Russian bot-farms, Chinese espionage orgs, domestic groups of angry incels employing bot armies, we also now have millions of people in countries like India, Philippines, Pakistan and other countries who have been holistically outsourced to push rage-bait and propaganda through US culture and conversation.
This has had a devastating effect on our domestic conversations. These people are probably fine, normal, decent people, but they have no stake in the USA’s future and are wrecking our present day so they get a meal tomorrow.
We have to start treating the information feeds in new ways. Namely, by turning them all off and spending more time in local communities and socializing to form protective groups and power blocs in our neighborhoods and cities. The most sensational bullshit someone reads online will not withstand peer-pressure to think critically and not act stupid.
Well said, couldn’t agree more!
Fascism is bad, communism is bad, socialism is bad. Leftists have successfully been labeled socialists and communists, why would the other side care about being labeled fascists anymore? They’re just words, meaningless abstractions now.
Right, but if you say to a Leftist “You are a socialist!” they’ll say “Yes, that’s correct”.
The MAGA hats aren’t owning the word fascism. They don’t know what it is. They know it’s bad. It’s something that happened in WW2. It’s something others do.
I’d link Michael Rosen’s “I Sometimes Fear” poem, but this administration did walk in saying exactly that, and half the people still didn’t connect the dots.
The sad and dangerous thing is that many are actually starting to come around to the idea that fascism is good. They have spent years denying that Trump is a fascist and are now fully embracing it.
Fascism is a big word with a lot of weight to it.
The more you get into politics and the more you debate with people across the aisle, the more you realize you have to be careful what words you use, so as not to lose credibility.
That being said…this is fascism. Period.
It’s happening. It’s happening now. It’s happening here. It’s not debatable anymore.
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their silence today with the atlantic coming forward is extremely embarrassing, along with the nytimes
Only thing I will give NYT credit for is the way they recently put together a bunch of the Renee Good videos, determined they showed (what the rest of us already knew) that the murderer was not in front of the car along with a visual explainer, and put it on the front page. That got the unvarnished visual evidence in front of a lot of people that would otherwise have not seen it.
But that’s just one thing, and they’ve been sanewashing for years. Beyond that, both the WSJ and the NYT is a big part of the reason we’re here. Maybe if they hadn’t worked so hard at bothsidesing insanity and lies they would not have lent such a helping hand to the speedrun into fascism that was 47ths first year.
You guys are so screwed, I left Reddit cause of all the censorship and siding with the government.
I’ve had comment removed from this community for being incendiary, for saying Trump and ICE agents need to feel the force of the second amendment.
You guys are not even allowed to discuss anything further than a useless peaceful protest, or you get banned or shut down and silenced.
Even regular folk who mod on Lemmy are tripping over themselves to stop us from actually doing anything
.world communities are particularly squeamish about not toeing the corpo line.
No sub, on Lemmy or Reddit, is safe from power tripping mods. I’m currently dealing with a Lemmy mod on a few other Lemmy subs that’s abusing his mod powers.
The bottom line is the other mods either need to step in and reign the bad mods in or remove them, or their sub dies. Seen it on Reddit plenty of times. But I’ve also seen Reddit mods that successfully removed their bad actors and then everything was fine. So it could go either way.
Some things are best discussed privately.
You guys are not even allowed to discuss anything further than a useless peaceful protest, or you get banned or shut down and silenced.
Everyone who isn’t actively complicit is terrified of standing up and therefore standing out. It’s a rational response and one we’ve been struggling with since the era of modern policing.
Even regular folk who mod on Lemmy are tripping over themselves to stop us from actually doing anything
I see a lot of empty gestures towards “someone should do something”. I see books like “How to Blow Up A Pipeline” and movies like “One Battle After Another” exemplify and valorize domestic insurrection. It isn’t as though there’s some total censorship. And we have plenty of nominal organs of resistance - from charity groups to gun clubs to local political caucuses - that could “do something” if they knew what exactly it was they were trying to do.
But relatively few people want to risk their lives and livelihoods to take a turn at being Revolutionaries. We don’t have a revolutionary movement. We have a random collection of martyrs piling up in the street - people who did not wake up that morning and declare they were going to die for their cause, but were just swept up in the violence for the most token forms of resistance.
Lemmy mods don’t have to try particularly hard to squelch something that isn’t emergent.
Well, welcome to the party, I guess.
Even if, as I put it in my other reply to a similarly limp dicked Atlantic article, you’re so late to the party that the caterers that were hired for it were deported by ICE months ago.
Stuff like this is why I unsubscribed. Just respectability politics.
Thinking it a term best avoided for reasons of decorum is part of what got us here.
And too late to matter. Thanks.
So you literally ignored hitlers plot playing out until it was to late, and now it’s okay to call them hurtful name. Another banger from the Atlantic.
The Atlantic is trash. Lib bullshit late to the party and faking it. These are the same people who enable fascism. Not to mention the zios…
