[Discussion] Police, White Nationalists, and the Rise of Fascism

Yeah I saw a few people retweet that Maher segment. Like he's mostly full of sh*t the last few years, but he hits this one on the head comments... Guess I need to watch it after all.

Natus wrote:

September 11th was an atrocity but it didn't spell the end of America.

Hard disagree. September 11th did spell the end of america, or more accurately our reaction to 9/11 did. January 6th is a symptom of that fatal injury, the natural result.

thrawn82 wrote:
Natus wrote:

September 11th was an atrocity but it didn't spell the end of America.

Hard disagree. September 11th did spell the end of america, or more accurately our reaction to 9/11 did. January 6th is a symptom of that fatal injury, the natural result.

I agree that our reaction was horrendous, but 9/11 didn't cause the rise of Trumpism, changing demographics did. 1/6 would have happened without 9/11...they are almost entirely unrelated. Sure, the stupid, neoconservative reaction to 9/11 accelerated the divides within the country, but that could have happened without a terror attack. 2016 was Trump's, what, third run for president?

oops. misclick double post.

Natus wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:
Natus wrote:

September 11th was an atrocity but it didn't spell the end of America.

Hard disagree. September 11th did spell the end of america, or more accurately our reaction to 9/11 did. January 6th is a symptom of that fatal injury, the natural result.

I agree that our reaction was horrendous, but 9/11 didn't cause the rise of Trumpism, changing demographics did. 1/6 would have happened without 9/11...they are almost entirely unrelated. Sure, the stupid, neoconservative reaction to 9/11 accelerated the divides within the country, but that could have happened without a terror attack. 2016 was Trump's, what, third run for president?

I actually don't think it would have. Without the heavy security state and rabid nationalism that resulted from 9/11 I don't think we would have or could have had the same downward spiral that lead to 1/6. Bush wouldn't have gotten a second term. We wouldn't have lost a generation to The Forever War nor had the convenient outlet and normalizing of racism that islamophobia and The War of Terror provided.

You forgot ICE. We would have created ICE without 9/11.
That is a direct link to Trumpism.

There is part of me that would absolutely love to see every insurrectionist sent to Gitmo and extraordinary renditioned until they revealed all the people who radicalized them. Never mind that we could see that by looking at their social media.

If they're going to Female Doggo about government tyranny then we kinda owe it to show them just what America's really capable of.

Instead we have violent domestic terrorists petitioning judges that they need to be let out of jail so they can see a football game they bought tickets to or go on a vacation to a country they think is sending us drug dealers and rapists so they don't lose their deposit.

You know what’s seriously depressing? There’s all this justifiable worry about Trump stealing the election or refusing to concede leading to violent conflict. But he could easily just win fair and square*. In fact, he’s probably the slight favorite now.

*To the extent that the electoral college can be considered fair, that is.

gewy wrote:

You know what’s seriously depressing? There’s all this justifiable worry about Trump stealing the election or refusing to concede leading to violent conflict. But he could easily just win fair and square*. In fact, he’s probably the slight favorite now.

*To the extent that the electoral college can be considered fair, that is.

He could, true, but I don't think that's very likely. As with 2016, there will need to be some serious skullduggery for that to happen. But who knows? The media loves a horserace, and they are already hammering Biden just as they hammered Hillary, treating both sides as equal in democratic weight.

Posting here instead of the nfl thread out of respect to the non-Clevelanders and as this is with regard to racism/white supremac(tangentially).

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Mike Tanier on Gruden.

Just think for a moment about the level of staggering, self-absorbed privilege at work here. Gruden was a famous broadcaster with lucrative endorsement deals during this period of correspondence. He had no affiliation with the Washington Football Team, no reason to offer vulgar, unsolicited opinions in writing. All he had were tens of millions of dollars in earning potential and a public reputation to lose. And while the 2011 strike and 2016 protests were major events that everyone involved in football had vehement opinions about, the only motivation Gruden could possibly have for weighing in on Michael Sam or female referees was vicious downward-punching hate and fear. Gruden's emails, like many a father-in-law's Sunday dinner rants, betray him as a tough-talking coward, a weakling bullying the vulnerable to feel strong.

Gruden lost his job on Monday; he technically "resigned," but you know how such resignations go. There's a lot of lost employment going around the Facebook father-in-law community these days. Like Gruden, most of them can't shut up. They cannot stop bragging about where they were on January 6, what they think of their company's vaccine mandate, or whose lives, in their opinion, matter. Society is stuck with people like Gruden because society nurtured them for generations. But we no longer have to venerate them, respect them, or allow them to hide behind the protections of power. In fact, we can and should strip them of their wealth and fame, even when it's expensive and inconvenient, because it's dangerous to keep people like Gruden in positions of leadership.

Goodbye, Gruden. You'll only be missed as a convenient comedy punching bag. As to the rest of the racist, homophobic, sexist fathers-in-law out there: you are on notice. Because if the NFL won't put up with your sh*t anymore, no one will.

I mean, there is always the Republican primary...

Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Natus wrote:

From Will Bunch's column in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

A small but dedicated gaggle of American journalists has been warning about Trump’s slow-motion coup for months. And yet when a late-night comedian, HBO’s Bill Maher, laid out this threat to the American Experiment in a clear and direct eight-minute monologue on Friday night, millions of viewers seemed shocked and alarmed. Clearly they weren’t getting the proper sense of urgency from mainstream elite media in the United States, which has used Biden’s victory as a moment to bathe in the familiar comfort of “both sides are to blame” journalism.

“I’m astonished that more people don’t see, or can’t face, America’s existential crisis,” Hillary Clinton — who lost that 2016 election to Trump despite 3 million more popular votes — tweeted recently. Her words were reported in a strikingly on-target column by media critic Eric Boehlert headlined: “America isn’t guaranteed a happy ending.” He also quoted the former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens: “We can’t imagine the ending of American democracy, but it can happen.” ...The future of American democracy depends, frankly, on whether journalists stop burying their head in “the work” of balanced-but-misleading reporting and admit that, yes, actually, we are at war.

This is dead-on though, and credit to Maher, I don't think a word of that monologue was wrong.

The thing is, Maher saying those things is nothing new. I'm glad it is getting attention now but he has predicted Trump's initial victory and slow moving coup for 5+ years now. He can be a bit of a dick on certain things but give him credit where credit is due.

OK, so what can be done at this point to stop it?

I do appreciate the consistent naivete of the people replying to that tweet thinking that if Republicans will peacefully boycott the vote. It's like the people who think the entire U.S. military apparatus would be Team Blue in a Civil War because.... I guess because they totally swore to do so, which is totally how these kinds of conflicts work.

gewy wrote:

OK, so what can be done at this point to stop it?

It needs to be a "hair on fire" moment for every non-MAGA. As Maher said, "I hope I've scared the crap out of you." It's happening in real time, and it's obvious what the play is going to be, but the Dems are moving too slowly and the media, as I always say, wants a horse race. It's going to be too little, too late.

And god forbid the Biden, the DoJ, or the FBI do anything outside of properly circumscribed parameters. The media and the GOP will scream bloody murder, of course. Sarah Kendzior is the current Cassandra about how this is all going to play out, disastrously for the country as a whole.

To steal an image from a different thread, the January 6 Commission needs to stop being Joey
IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/ZB3AhIQc5fOqzU88fr/giphy.gif)

gewy wrote:

OK, so what can be done at this point to stop it?

Put pressure on lawmakers to take this with deadly seriousness. Let others in your community understand or convince them of how deadly serious it is. Organize. Create mutual aid groups. Understand this likely will not have a quick, clean, happy resolution.

And learn to operate a firearm.

Can't, Obama took away my guns.

In what should be surprising to no one, a recent study shows a statistical correlation between historical lynchings and confederate monuments.

“We can’t pinpoint exactly the cause and effect. But the association is clearly there,” Trawalter said. “At a minimum, the data suggests that localities with attitudes and intentions that led to lynchings also had attitudes and intentions associated with the construction of Confederate memorials.”

In other news, recent study finds correlation between lynchings and cross burnings.

Paleocon wrote:

In what should be surprising to no one, a recent study shows a statistical correlation between historical lynchings and confederate monuments.

“We can’t pinpoint exactly the cause and effect. But the association is clearly there,” Trawalter said. “At a minimum, the data suggests that localities with attitudes and intentions that led to lynchings also had attitudes and intentions associated with the construction of Confederate memorials.”

In other news, recent study finds correlation between lynchings and cross burnings.

In other news, two branches of local tree connected to same trunk, story at 11.

I just can't believe that the official response to Trump generally and the 1/6 coup specifically has been so weak, from Mueller then to Garland now. By and large, the GOP is doing all of this in the open. The lukewarm response is inviting more eroding of norms, more criming, more incendiary rhetoric. And the GOP has deliberately sickened and killed many hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of them their own supporters. What will they do when they have no guardrails and all the eager power of the state behind them? This is why I continue to insist that they cannot succeed, not in 2022 or in 2024. The consequences are far more than the end of a democratic United States.

I can believe it. I am disappointed, but never surprised when Democrats are spineless or supplicating their corporate donors. It's just history repeating itself.

Prederick wrote:

And learn to operate a firearm.

I can think of a few reasons, but I'm curious what specifically you envision happening that we would need firearms?

gewy wrote:
Prederick wrote:

And learn to operate a firearm.

I can think of a few reasons, but I'm curious what specifically you envision happening that we would need firearms?

I think of it like knowing how to drive stick. I'd never own one, I hope I never have to use one. But, in an emergency, it would be good to know how to operate one safely.

gewy wrote:
Prederick wrote:

And learn to operate a firearm.

I can think of a few reasons, but I'm curious what specifically you envision happening that we would need firearms?

I think it's fairly obvious, but okay:

The U.S. is almost certain to see a level of political violence unlike anything in modern history over the next decade or so. The rhetoric, the polarization; pretty much every person with any knowledge on these subjects I've read over the last 2-3 years has agreed that we are in a very not-good-place that bears significant resemblance to many other places that had descents into political violence (many of the people I've seen saying this are people who fled from those places!), and there seems to be almost zero effort to turn us from this cliff.

Maher's example, which I cannot find a single quibble with, ends at Inauguration Day, and it's very hard to not to see violence coming after it.

Do I know the full extent of how bad it will get? Of course not. There is a myriad of ways it could suck. Personally, I think the best-case scenario right now is "low-level insurgency." However, I feel pretty safe in saying it's going to suck, and since I don't know how badly it'll suck, as Mix said, it's never a bad idea to learn how to drive stick. I am firmly aligned with Ida B. Wells these days.

Yeah, I guess I’m more wondering just how bad people think it’ll get. Are we talking Ireland in the Troubles or Australia in The Road Warrior? Police brutality in Portland or Warsaw Ghetto? That kind of thing.

No way to predict it. The concern is that the possibility of outcomes is fairly vast, but the "good" outcomes really aren't good.

Prederick’s advice is straight out of every single leftist group I’m a part of. It’s great advice. The one caveat I might add is: if you’re not comfortable getting comfortable with firearms, that’s ok. There’s lots and lots of jobs at the mutual aid that don’t require using a firearm.

But - and this is especially true if you’re not a straight white male, but even SWMs are at risk if they voted blue - they will come for you, and they are already comfortable with their firearms.