It’s not like any candidate was actually good but they did pick the worst one.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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It does happen in slow motion, and every single time, some people see it happening. They march and wave their arms shouting FASCISM! whilst their neighbours call them hyperbolic.
If you read contemporaneous accounts, you can feel the frustration.
Or… I thought I could feel the frustration, until recently (eta: if you haven’t read They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, please do as soon as possible). Now it’s doubly frustrating. I keep wracking my brain, wondering what I can do that they didn’t. I can’t stop this, so I keep saying ‘if you were a German in the 1930s, knowing what you know now, what would you do?’
I don’t know the answer to that. I know many Germans saw it coming and couldn’t stop it.
What the fuck can we do? Because it is absolutely coming.
e: oh, and worse, trump isn’t actually the problem. He’ll likely lose, then everyone will high five that we’ve defeated The Problem, but Trump is just their carnival barker. He could die tomorrow and the threat wouldn’t change. There’s a solid fascist movement in the US and elsewhere that will not stop with trump’s defeat. There are thousands of them in high levels of the US government , and they’ll barely miss a beat without trump. He barely matters, and I’m afraid when he loses, the fascist movement behind this will find a wide opening.
These internal questions are what led to me finally realizing how powerless I really am. I can't even convince my close personal friends to re-evaluate the batshit crazy things they learn online, let alone change the trajectory of a nation.
What's frustrating is that anyone can find a piece of evidence for their argument, and there are propagandists everywhere offering up grand narratives full of such evidence. So when someone is extremely concerned about children getting sex changes, and you say something to the effect of "that's not really happening" they'll just come back at you with a few examples and you're like "yeah but a few examples isn't a statistical trend and you're blowing this way out of proportion" and then they call you a groomer. Like, I'm not okay with it, but also it's not something that we need to be specifically worried about and build an entire political movement around. Like children get attacked by sharks occasionally (probably more often than they get sex changes), but there's no mass political movement to shame parents who encourage their kids to swim in known shark habitats.
Unfortunately this is the state of discourse online these days. You can see it all over this and every site. Any time someone says something that someone else disagrees with, it's only one or two steps before the baseless accusations begin. Just this morning someone called me a Nazi. No discussion or anything, just accused me of being a Nazi because of a position I took on a complex and layered situation. I couldn't be further from a Nazi. But you know... Once they put you on the defensive, then you're not discussing the issue anymore, which is what they want.
Not an answer, but food for thought: https://effectiveactivist.com/
Oooh, neat! Thank you so much for linking this!