This has long been the grift by which US electeds betray democracy and their constituents.
What's new is their openly fascistic unwillingness to even pretend to care, even as crises they have a hand in accelerate and compound, leaving vulnerable people to die.
3) the dying of the "weak" and the thriving of the "strong" are simply the proper natural order.
Fascists stack fix the game in favor of themselves and the privileged categories they occupy, extracting wealth from those that are marginalized.
By the time crisis hits (and it always does, usually with fascist complicity), the deck is already doubly stacked.
Cruz rarely bothers to pretend to camouflage his selfishness with feigned empathy, because he is at heart a fascist.
He believes he is naturally one of the strong, and that he deserves his success just as the "weak" deserve their suffering.
Trump really normalized that fascistically proud lack of empathy, and Cruz is a posterboy of that new normal for the post-Trump GOP.
He's not the vanguard, but he is absolutely a fascist.
The fact that this casual open fascistic behavior is the new normal should terrify us.
Not just because it signals that our electeds will jump ship the moment these crises hit home, but because officials feel comfortable publicly living that fascistic, casually eugenic doctrine.
This is the behavioral equivalent of saying the quiet part loud.
There are fewer and fewer quiet parts.
That's a very, very bad thing.
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Accountability makes people feel feels sometimes, and that's"s okay and good, actually.
Other examples: white tears, the tears of the complicit, and the tears of those who have experienced predictable consequences for their actions but never performed accountablity.
One of the most predictable responses to holding a white person, especially a white cis woman, accountable for racism is tears.
It is-- consciously or not-- a tactic to de-center the people who they caused pain and re-center whiteness and white feelings.
I've also seen sooooo much "but they already suffered consequences for their actions" in left community from folks and for folks who did harmful shit and faced legal/carceral consequences.
What we're seeing in Texas is shock doctrine capitalism.
It's a strategy where governments engage in austerity measures that make it impossible to respond adequately to emergencies, then use the aftermath to privatize & justify *more* austerity.
The rich profit, the poor die.
We've seen it with COVID on a national level.
All levels of governments have made extreme cuts to our social safety net in the past three decades, leaving us unable to weather this storm.
They'll be using the human cost & resulting tax shortfalls to justify austerity for years.
We saw it in Philly after the 2008 crash.
Then-Mayor Nutter used the shortfalls to engage in extreme austerity measures down to trying to close libraries and... selling off most of our snowplows.
Proud Goys-- the "Christian nationalist" Proud Boys offshoot mad about PB not more avertly avowings white supremacy-- is leaning hard into Edgar Cayce-based racist vaccine conspiracy.
Cayce was a supposed clairvoyant with a huge influence on contemporary New Age thinking.
We're still sort of at this place where we think of New Agers as hippie and therefore "left" and unlikely bedfellows for QAnon and other racist/antisemitic far right conspiracy theory, but New Age has *always* been tightly linked to fascist thought and race theory.
The Theosophists-- arguably the founders of New Age and certainly a huge influence on Cayce-- played around all the time with race theory.
They were also a strong influence on Nazi occultists.
Telegram is doing *very* little to take down Nazi terror channels now that the Capitol coup attention is past.
We're getting some takedowns, but it moves like molasses.
The good news: when @telegram implements advertising, they'll be extremely vulnerable to activist campaigns.
Telegram has never been revenue-generating, which means there isn't yet a way to pressure them by messing with their profits.
As @nandoodles' work proves, though, advertisers don't like getting called out out for advertising on fascist platforms, much less terrorist platforms.
It's clear from Durov's awkward attempts to get users onboard with advertisement that he's no longer interested in paying for this pet project out of pocket (or whatever his previous funding sources were).
Where there are advertisers and profits, there's leverage.