Militias are out in the streets with semi-automatic weapons and busting into legislatures.
White-identity Christian fascists are praising the criminal president as a messiah.
Monied interests see the violence as a means for power.
It's bad.
People like myself have been warning you for years. It wasn't alarmism and it wasn't a grift.
This situation, this moment in American history, is rife for bloodletting and bad faith actions.
It's time to recognize the situation for what it is. We're in a burgeoning crisis.
Until people see just how bad of a place we are, that all the elements for a fascistic takeover and widespread antidemocratic violence and oppression are in place, it's just going to get worse.
Large scale action and a societal reckoning has to happen.
Hide behind the status quo and misplaced faith in our institutions all you want, but until people actually wrestle with this situation, it's doomed to get so very much worse.
We're on the precipice of something very, very large and very, very bad.
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Trumpism is about using existing prejudices and distrust to enable the final stage of a decades' long project to dismantle government as a means of helping people.
Congress isn't going to help anyone besides the wealthy and powerful. It's there as an illusion.
We've seen this throughout our history. Representative government was meant as a means of channeling public sentiment into a body intended to either redirect anger or just disperse it.
That changed for awhile, but it's worse now than nearly any other time.
The pandemic has made it disturbingly clear that our government is not there to help anyone. It's there to oversee the redistribution of our wealth and to manage artificial austerity.
These stimulus packages are a joke, a distraction from the incompetence of government.
I’ve been trying to tell people that QAnon is madness but that Trump and his followers will embrace them as a necessary alternate reality. The threat is growing.
It’s time to grit our teeth, recognize the reality, and do the hard necessary work of dismantling fascism.
We have to stop looking away from our very real problems of white supremacy, weaponized disinformation, and rhetoric that turns us from addressable issues to symbolic battles. We have to understand these bizarre alternate realities and fight against them.
Trump and QAnon and this fascist movement isn’t something you can just turn off like a bad TV show. They’re symptoms of a much larger and pervasive disease that festered for years and years and are only going to grow.
The Cult of Trump is everywhere calling on the President of the United States to declare martial law, invalidate the election, and either hold a new one or declare himself the winner.
No, this probably won’t happen, but it’s important to recognize this fascist mindset exists
1/
The myth of America, this story of our exceptionalism and dedication to liberty, hides a really disturbing past and reality: we have strong fascistic underpinnings. They’ve been there since the beginning, Trump has only emboldened them and encouraged them.
2/
America inspired the fascist movements of the 20th century. We were linked directly to the Third Reich in ideology and laws. Burying and denying this has only allowed anti democratic sentiments to fester and grow, leading us to this point of crisis.
3/
All right. We have to talk about how Trump's openly calling for elections to be canceled and stolen and this incredibly dangerous misconception that everything is fine and fixed now that he's slated to leave office.
He's a symptom of a much larger disease.
1/
This is a much, MUCH bigger conversation that needs to happen, and I'm trying to work through it on here, but I'm really concerned about how short our memories are, how eager we are to be rid of Trump and Trumpism, and how that's going to make things so much worse.
2/
I've gone on the record now for awhile, that I thought the coup was both a real attempt to steal the election and also a grift, and that I think we're probably to the point where we might ALMOST be out of the woods in regards to this election.
For the next four years Trump is going to behave like an antipresident in exile, holding a shadow presidency that not only critiques the Biden Administration but undermines it and fosters radical violence.
We need to recognize this and plan accordingly.
It's not enough that Trump was defeated, we now have the hard and necessary work of dismantling the addiction our media's addiction in order to derail the message but also in terms of deradicalizing the country while forwarding an actual agenda.
This is going to be a lot of work
As I've said before, we have to disentangle the spectacle/tabloid Trump garbage from the actual communication and radicalization of dangerous groups and individuals.
It's going to be exhausting and hard, especially with the economic environment, but we can do it.
People like Chuck Todd aren’t presenting news. They’re covering politics as a game and critiquing strategies, legal, factual, or wholly made up.
It doesn’t matter if it’s dangerous, fascistic, or otherwise, what matters is whether it will work. We have to reject this mindset.
For years now we’ve had “news shows” engaging in coverage of “news behind the news,” or breathless speculation about strategies and maneuvers that influence the news.
Chuck Todd is literally discussing whether Republican lies will influence him and his friends.
Again, I’ve compared politics to wrestling, and the modern news media, like wrestling, isn’t focused on the product, whether it’s matches or coverage, but is obsessed with how power makes its decisions and how power alters reality for consumption.