From one perspective, this is clearly bad governance. He's using his free speech rights that generations of us died for, to point out hypocrisy.
I'm going to say it, and we'll see if I get arrested for it. Charlie Kirk was one of the useful idiots groomed from high school to push conservative propaganda. One of his assignments was to minimize the cultural impact of school shootings. He died in front of thousands in a school shooting.
Maybe that irony is something and maybe it is nothing. But the essence of conservative propaganda, that will survive any individual propaganda and any individual regime, is the central idea that some of us have rights and freedoms and some of us don't. So any deviation from that idea must be punished very severely.
The second bit he was hardly innovative on. That’s been a thing since at least Columbine.
Others openly suggest capital punishment for nonviolent crimes. E.g. narco boaters, repeat offenders, homeless (see: Killmeade), drugs etc. In fact, we have no sanctions on Singapore, a land where one can indeed be killed for fussing with drugs. There are of course, many other similar examples.
Both the left, right and many between recommend death for many people, in a manner having nothing to do with self defense, response to murder or in alignment with current law. Ouch.
We have a LOT OF PEOPLE TO ARREST! I expect hypocrisy to complicate the process a bit though.
Edit: I should say, by the speed of the dvotes, I'll be on the hitlist too. And upholding the First Amendment and the rest of our Constitution is well worth it.
Edit: what your type tends to be highly obtuse to, is the impending reality of blowback, where your warping of law is turned upon you. But it feels so good now, it must be worth it.
Abuse of power has serious consequences.
i don't like this administration — at all — and I believe we're definitionally in a fascist state now.
the lives of many of my friends & family have been devastated by drugs. 80k+ americans die every year from overdose. i understand why you may disagree with me with and i'm not going to dismiss your concerns out-of-hand but multinational illegal drug enterprises are absolutely an assault on this country in my view. i'm talking about organized criminal enterprises, not dudes pitching eight balls in nightclub bathrooms.
Your term "assault", can legally, imply a prelude to battery. Maybe that's a stupid point.
And I do not wish to dismiss your concerns either.
However, if you endeavor to qualify the transport of potentially fatal materials as violence, such would be a highly abstract interpretation requiring an unprecedented overhaul of the present system.
If someone is caught planning a violent act, e.g. performing internet search queries for "how to do terrible x and accomplish terrible y, the rule of law doesn't permit immediately executing the individual. Traditionally, a trial ensues where possibilities of error and other critical considerations are made in order to ensure greater probabilities of a just outcome, hence Justice. An immediate threat and remote hypothetical threat are treated differently. If Bob knows you plan to kill him on Friday, but he finds you while you're doing laundry and kills you Thursday, while tactically legit, it doesn't work legally. Extrajudicial is what we might call this. But regular folks wouldn't earn the term.
But that's barely the surface. If transport qualifies as violence, then the users that contribute or essentially enable the entire cycle must be included. So now we are killing foreign boaters in the Caribbean and e.g. Hunter Biden on his jetski as he swirls around the Florida Keys high on fentanyl. We'll need to kill his hooker friend too, because she directly supports these transporters.
It gets much sillier from here, all the way until you kill Bill because he spent money at the same pizza parlor as the guy who sold the baggy that overdosed your friend.
And then comes the strange dynamics where you need to kill me because my self-righteous doctor won't prescribe me pain management for my cancer because xyz and I'm looking on the streets for some kind of relief.
But we needn't go that far. We can go back to the top and kill the growers. And their children which might aid and abet them. And certainly a few chemists here and there.
It gets way messier. If you fail to kill me, I might have a grudge. Because I was not trying to hurt anyone. I'm in pain and just want help.
While this all takes place, other artistically inclined persons superimpose their own values upon the law.
But really, a few guys steering a boat full of drugs is not violence. Certainly not an imminent threat especially after they've been identified. It's the potential for violence, but so is our trusty old proverbial hammer.
The heavyhanded, cavalier fancies of this administration may seem fun and well deserved. Whether or not, they set a precedent as they go. I can't predict, but it seems probable that the next administration will turn left. If it does, it will have amassed excuses along with a well rehearsed methodology of spending them. The divisive shitstick of now will become the polar end of the divisive shitstick of tomorrow.
The notion that this shit can be gotten away with is ludicrous. Every breach of integrity that occurs with the present regime sets a citable example for the next to exploit. Anyone not eating ambian by the ton is aware of the unprecedented levels of tension and hostility between the right and left. It's simply predictable what will happen.
We'd be wise to arrange for a slightly smoother transition. Brazen disregard for law will not help. And any attempt to justify it with dubious ideology will come with a serious hangover.
Corruption at the very top is what I'd like to see capital punishment for. Exclusively.
Its amazing how far people are willing to bend over backwards to explain how the speech of these public figures is harmless and non-threatening and none of us have anything to worry about (despite their actions putting the lie to it), but apply an entirely different set of standards to people criticising them.
Much of Kirk's public life and the life of his political allies was devoted to minimizing the impact of and the empathy we should feel for school shootings (because the ends justify the means of furthering his political agenda). He went on to die in one.
This happens every day to other people, and the advice of him and his political allies has always been to get over it and to stop politicizing it. It would be great if they could collectively take it and stop politicizing it.
His murder was wrong. It is not true that he would be some kind of universal "civil disagreement" advocate.
Yeah, he would defend right winger or bigot. He would attack anyone not right wing. The rights of people who were not white conservatives did not concerned kirk. He was literally against civil rights, openly. Blacks are all stupid and trans are all groomers. They all should be fired.
I have no idea about what happened between that "left leaning professor" and student. But there is about zero reason to believe what right wing activist like Kirk says about the issue. As far as he was concerned, left need not exist and need to be punished for existing.
That’s an incredible inversion of defending students from professors demanding conformance to their political beliefs rather than educating.
https://www.professorwatchlist.org/
> He was literally against civil rights, openly.
The silly thing about criticising a public speaker for saying things they didn’t is there are ample videos of them speaking about the topic.
No. He pointed out correctly that black Americans were poorer now than they were in 1950, and pointed out that one cause could be how the civil rights Act (which is not the same thing as civil rights) was interpreted. You can easily look up the many conversations on this topic for yourself.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8A5e3Nb/
> trans are all groomers
Here’s how he handled a trans identifying child:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8A5dgQa/
I found these while searching and thought they were sweet: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8A5S9Gv/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8A59yhk/
* take their class, deliberately do a bad job, and then try to get them fired for bias against conservatives
* take their class and write hate speech in coursework to harass my friend, then withdrawing to avoid the F
At the same time my friend started receiving emails with death threats, hate speech, gore, and hardcore porn from anonymous email addresses. I cannot prove it, but I would be stunned if this was not from the same people.
Kirk and TPUSA knew what happened to targeted faculty.
Ie you can spend over 3 months in jail before an hearing and still be considered to have had a speedy trial. He’d have to wait til after that period to even file a motion for dismissal on speedy trial grounds, and then wait for the hearing on that to happen.
This is part of why plea deals are so common. Even if he were somehow to be convicted, his sentence would probably be less than the speedy trial window. At a certain point, the prosecution will offer to bump it down to some kind of misdemeanor with jail time less than he’s already done so it’s time served. He may as well plead guilty to that because otherwise he’ll keep sitting in jail waiting on a trial and do more time for no reason.
There’s no realistic route where he gets compensated for being wrongly prosecuted, even if he goes to trial and is found not guilty.
The justice system is deeply, deeply flawed and unjust.
In California, the clock for a misdemeanor is 30 days if a defendant is taken into custody, or 45 days if not in custody. For a felony, it's 60 days from arraignment. If the defendant remains in custody after arrest, arraignment must occur within 48 hours of arrest, or on the first business day after the 48-hour period expires if it ends on a weekend or court holiday. If the defendant is freed from custody prior to arraignment, then arraignment can occur at a later date.
In NY and most red states, the clock is approximately 6 months for felonies. Due to the longer clock, in many of these states the clock begins when the defendant is taken into custody (or the state has a shorter timeframe for trial for defendants in custody). Florida just changed its laws to make the clock start on arraignment, lengthened the time required for arraignment to 30 days for defendants in custody, and made the speedy trial right an affirmative right that the defendant must specifically assert. Unlike pretty much every other state, the clock also restarts if the prosecutor withdraws and re-files the same charges (in almost every other state, the clock is only started anew for new charges.) FL also made the consequences for violation of these rights a mere dismissal without prejudice. (TLDR: don't get arrested in Florida.)
Most defense lawyers will advise clients to waive their speedy trial rights. This is for the lawyer's benefit, not the client's. It allows the lawyer to preserve their negotiating relationship with the prosecutor for future clients. In California, due to the shortened time frames, 99% of the time it is advisable to assert speedy trial rights (especially in felonies, but even in misdemeanors) because the prosecution usually can't get its act together in time. Some forensics can't even be completed in the 60 day window. The defense win rate in proceedings where the defendant asserts their speedy trial rights is so high that prosecutors will always offer a sweetheart plea deal to avoid going to trial.
(Of course the obvious solution is for the prosecutors to just wait until they have an actual complete case before filing charges. But if they did that we wouldn't need speedy trial laws in the first place.)
I watched a close family member go through the process after getting out on bail. The charge was effectively a he-said she-said situation, at a time when that was going especially poorly for the he involved.
He bailed out and took his lawyer's advice to wait the state out. That turned into a 4 year delay for what was technically a misdemeanor charge with a 1-year max charge. The trial was a joke and they offered effectively no evidence beyond one testimony contradicted by another witness directly in the room at the time.
Who knows what would have happened in a speedy trial. If nothing else, a 1-year sentence would have been completed 3 years earlier than the trial he had even happened.
I'm guessing that you have the means to pay your bills for years before having to worry about losing your income and your home. Most folks don't.
If you're in jail, you can't work. If you don't go to work, you'll lose your job. If you lose your job and you're like most people in the US, within a few months, you can't pay your mortgage or rent, so you'll lose your home as well as any belongings in that home.
Which are the biggest reasons why high/no bail forces folks to accept plea deals. "Speedy Trial" laws generally don't even enter into it.
That's a pretty big assumption that also happens to be wrong. I specifically said "if at all possible" because I'm well aware that plenty of people can't put everything on hold for 30-60 days and have to potentially start over after that's done.
If someone can in any way afford it, though, I would always recommend that approach. As soon as one is embroiled in the legal system its terrible no matter what the end result is. Either way the outcome is bad, if you can expedite the process you are better off.
The fact that many, if not most, people are that close is the problem. We shouldn't be days or weeks away from ruin, and should the time come that one has to stand for their rights into the court of law they should be able to afford that fight on the order of a month or two. How can we keep our government in check if we can't afford to fight it for more than a few weeks?
Okay. I've been wrong before, am wrong with this and will certainly be wrong again. My apologies. As such, I hope you never end up in a position where you'll need to consider taking your own advice.
But that doesn't change the overall point -- that sitting in jail for weeks or months, perhaps even years pre-trial will likely destroy most folks' life and livelihood.
Agreed, and no one should be okay with living in a system where its so common that weeks or even a few months is a person's breaking point.
Years is excessive, though in any jurisdiction I know of a person wouldn't be help pre-trial for years if they are demanding their speedy trial. I would like it to be commonplace for people to have cushion on the order of months, I wouldn't necessarily expect years of cushion.
You sure as hell can get paid for it afterwards.
If the sheriff, DA and judge each thought this was a good idea, it's fair for the voters who hired them to take the hit.
Typically the sheriff is always elected, the DA almost always elected, and for the judges it depends, but if they aren’t elected they are appointed by elected officials.
The other thing to remember is that the US judicial system varies tremendously by state. No two states are the same so there is no easy way to summarize it.
Even if they're not, they're local enough positions that electeds have significant--if not final--say over their appointment.
Do we have names of the arresting officers, prosecutors and judge this is in front of?
With that we can determine who above them is elected.
Wouldn’t matter. Those elected would likely be re elected. This wasn’t Trump advising some federal agency to bully someone he doesn’t like. It was the community organizing. This is the will of the people.
This is just rationalising laziness and nihilism. They may get re-elected. That doesn't mean you can't create a lot of chaos and cost for them along the way.
Like, I wish my adversaries would preëmptively conclude that even attempting to oppose me is not worth it.
> This is the will of the people
You're concluding this how?
That small victory really made me reconsider.
I think civic laziness and nihilism, particularly in Silicon Valley, did a lot to get us to where we are.
Or more accurately, because the only people who do care are the people who benefit from corruption.
"This country is for people like me, I want people not like me punished severely" is very much a mainstream opinion in the US. This is how people win elections, not lose them.
https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/crimefeed/seeking-jus...
Icon backgroundcolor of targetsite reason.com seems to be the same as HN icon backgroundcolor :-D
Go on these people's facebooks, or invite them to Thanksgiving, you'll see the same firehose of shit.
A fun game is to look at Facebook profiles selected from random comment sections.
By doing this, I have come away with even less understanding of people’s believes, motivations, etc.
To be fair, a vigil held in the wake of a death is in mourning. A "vigil" held today for Kirk is a right-wing rally.
Ain't no way people looked at the picture, and genuinely thought "Is he threatening to shoot up the school?". But then again, there are some incredibly stupid people out there.
To me, it mostly seems like manufactured outrage. Someone saw him posting edgy memes, got offended, and called to the cops that the guy was posting about doing a school shooting.
I don't think even that happened. Most likely some law enforcement officials sat down at a table for a brainstorming session trying to figure out a pretext to jail this guy.
It's very easy to see how people could genuinely interpret that as a credible threat of imminent violence. Imagine somebody similar in your area did the exact same thing except with your local high school's name. So this is going to be a very interesting case, because what it's going to come down to is the prosecution arguing that he was aware that it would be interpreted as a threat on the nearby Perry High School, while the defense will claim he shared the meme without understanding the perceived threat it might cause and assumed people would understand he was referencing a previous shooting that occurred at a different Perry High School.
>obviously rather unhinged, a political extremist
Here's another: what meme did he post with a picture of a dying person in? I didn't see that in the reporting.
Someone tell the LHC at CERN folks to avoid Tennessee...
Found this on a linked facebook post - no clue if it's accurate.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=25571453995778528&se...
Spooky shit as it sets precedence for anyone to go after anyone for a social media post on any grounds. That's psychotic.
I wish people would stop pretending that this has nothing to do with politics. Belief that the rules should punish anyone you don't like and protect those you do is incredibly popular, and the dominant ideology of this administration and its supporters. It is a political belief, and nobody is seriously combatting it. Still we act as though there are two sides with a shared goal of creating a better world, and differing ideas of how to accomplish that. It's been pretty clearly demonstrated that the goal of this incarnation of the Republican party is an authoritarian police state dedicated to punishing and eradicating whomever they deem an "enemy within". And a lot of voters are ok with this, so long as it doesn't apply to them personally, so long as they're a favored party.
The apparent hypocrisy is naked and insulting. They'll cry "cancel culture" and censorship over companies deciding not to platform bigots while cheering when the police kidnap protestors or outspoken political opponents. I say "apparent" because this all makes perfect sense when you realize that they never cared about free speech or anything else they claimed to. It was always about "good guys" getting to do whatever they want, and "bad guys" getting hurt. The friend-enemy distinction. No policy goals, no principled stance on issues, just a convenient facade.
Here it is to save anyone else:
https://wopclive.linkedupradio.com/assets/images/2025/IMG_73...
He had years to apologise. It could have meaningfully altered the temperature of our discourse, particularly among young men. He never did. Kirk gets no credit for amends he never made.
"Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump's deployment of federal troops to DC. 'Shock and awe. Force,' he wrote. 'We're taking our country back from these cockroaches.'"
Cockroaches! Literally language of the Rwandan genocide. And it's a Christian saying this about other human beings? The man never changed.
(Obviously, he should not have been shot. But his sanctification is repulsive.)
> Twenty-five years ago this month, all hell broke loose in my country, which is tucked away in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Hordes of members of the Hutu ethnic majority, armed with machetes, spears, nail-studded clubs, and other rudimentary weapons, moved house to house in villages, hunting for Tutsis, the second largest of Rwanda’s three ethnic groups. The radio station RTLM, allied with leaders of the government, had been inciting Hutus against the Tutsi minority, repeatedly describing the latter as inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” and as inzoka, or “snakes.” The station, unfortunately, had many listeners.
> The promoters of genocide used other metaphors to turn people against their neighbors. Hutus, by reputation, are shorter than Tutsis; radio broadcasters also urged Hutus to “cut down the tall trees.”
> In urban centers, government soldiers and well-armed members of the Interahamwe militia affiliated with the ruling party set up roadblocks filtering out Tutsis and killing them by the roadside. It was an easy task to pick them out. Ever since independence from Belgium in 1962, national identification cards specified ethnicity.
> Within 100 days, an estimated 1 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were Tutsis, lay dead. The worst kind of hatred had been unleashed. What began with dehumanizing words ended in bloodshed.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/rwanda-sho...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/charlie-kirk-professor-...
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-black-women/
[3] https://meidasnews.com/news/charlie-kirk-wants-coca-cola-spo...
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-biden-death-p...
Or is this comment also unacceptable?
Where is the demarcation?
I only tried to be mildly cynical here, because I actually can't come up with any other justifications here. I don't think there's anything non-inflammatory that can justify this outside of ideological reasons. If anything can think of any, let me know.
This is completely out of bounds for the United States. But that's the Woke Right for ya.
It will be interesting to see the eventually empowered Left use reflective (identical) tactics to seal the coffin of the Second Amendment. And one could almost pity the... 'woke' Right for not seeing it coming.
I lean right. But I'm getting vertigo.
I think China must have put prions in our Tupperware a long time ago. We're a dead fuckin ringer for hopeless.
Surely the other posts are completely benign and there's nothing of interest in there, right? Surely the journalist had a reason for only reporting on the contents of one of his posts, and not the others, and that choice wasn't intentional in order to present a biased interpretation of reality. Surely.
Yes because the sheriff explicitly stated it was the trump quote picture, and nothing else, that got the man arrested, charged and thrown in a cage.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2025/09/23/tennessee-l...
The article even links to the above.
Makes me wonder if you even read the article or already knew what I just said and are being dishonest.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2025/09/23/tennessee-l...
> https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2025/09/23/tennessee-l...
There isn’t anything there that wasn’t in the original article.
The Reason article is making this seem like it's entirely political and unreasonable. I don't think an arrest should have been made, that is too far. This seems like an unfortunate coincidence but someone looked at all this and reported it as a threat. The fact Perry High School's name is highly relevant here was not included.
> The Reason article is making this seem like it's entirely political and unreasonable. I don't think an arrest should have been made, that is too far. This seems like an unfortunate coincidence but someone looked at all this and reported it as a threat. The fact Perry High School's name is highly relevant here was not included.
All of this was in the first article. With far fewer intrusive ads.
i.e. If you post an anti-MAGA meme to Facebook or reddit from an identifiable account you could be charged as this man was. Perhaps the U.S. will try to extradite you. (I would hope most nations have sensible checks and balances to prevent extradition over this sort of thing, but it would still be a PITA.) However, the U.S. might also choose to wait and then arrest you if you ever travel to or through the U.S..
The U.S.'s slide away from freedom of speech could have a huge global impact on people who might think it doesn't effect them. We are far too reliant on American social media.
Canada, the E.U., etc. should be looking at protections to prevent social media companies operating servers in their jurisdictions from sharing information with the U.S. government. It's no longer a hypothetical situation. There is a real threat that is clearly evident now.
EDIT: If you're an emigrant:
More than just a PITA, you could still fail; see [1].
Also - I can't find the source right now - I remember hearing about Russian emigrants in Europe being charged with serious crimes in absentia over criticism of the war, and they were slated for deportation because the bureaucracy still considered all such Russian warrants as valid. The US would probably be harder to excise in this regard.
[1]https://www.dw.com/en/germany-shelters-russians-persecuted-f...
UK and Germany come to mind where the police/law will go after people for what they post.
That's just for developed countries. Consequences are worse in developing countries.
Not necessary.
I don't think there's any countries that allow extradition for actions that aren't crimes in their own country. Extradition treaties, as far as I know, aren't straightforward conveyor belts that let any countries hoover up anyone inconvenient for them, the requested countries don't want to let go of their own people for no reason, and can deny these requests as they see fit.
Being held up at an entry point to the US is a real worry, but at this stage I feel like they're not quite psychotic enough to be causing international drama over a Facebook post, so actions like these will probably remain domestic for a while.
The location where these websites are hosted probably doesn't matter - if you posted something the US doesn't like and you end up in a situation where they can get to you, no one would care about where exactly you posted it. All bets are off.
I am French, and we recently convinced Scotland to extradite a French man who was denying the existence of the Holocaust and gaz chamber, which is something you could do in Scotland if you do it without violence.
So indeed it’s possible.
But I don’t think it’s the same as extraditing for a meme.
Also, one other differentiator here is that the man, as you described him, was a French citizen. The post up above implies extraditing foreigners from their countries of residence to the US, which is on a whole other level of insanity. Imagine what would've happened if France tried to extradite a Scottish man from within the UK for online posts.
Source?
I suppose. I honestly read it as suggesting he, personally, had to come up with that money. The law is cruel. But as positioned, it seems like you'd just have an industry of secondary lenders.
Once more, it demonstrates that MAGA only cares about free speech as long as it serves their own interest. This is almost comical when you think about J.D. Vance' speech in Munich.
Thanks to reason.com for strongly calling out the BS!
No wonder 2025 is the first year that extremist left wing violence has exceeded extremist right wing violence for the first time in 30 years.
I’m curious. Have any of the people who actually bought into that been falling away? Has the 180 degree flip away from free speech actually popped the bubble for anyone?
Absolutely not. Right here on HN, you see the "moderates" and "center right" people: completely ignore what's going on, never call him out by name, blame both sides, or pretend it's just lefties being hyperbolic again.
Douglas Mackey was also convicted of posting fake election stuff like "avoid the line. Vote at home" with a phone number. But it looks like he was later cleared.
So the memeing can get you in trouble and people will either say you were "just memeing" or "posting dangerous misinformation/threats" depending on their political stance.
I have many friends who already left the US or prepared to leave at a moments notice. None of them are actually political, but they are aware that 1984 is already fully implemented and at any point in time it could get very, very ugly very quickly.
iancmceachern•3mo ago
nerdponx•3mo ago
mindslight•3mo ago
baobabKoodaa•3mo ago
JumpCrisscross•3mo ago
Are they? MAGA has made it a point to purge the former GOP of conservatives.
baobabKoodaa•3mo ago
JumpCrisscross•3mo ago
In any case, we have polling around non-MAGA Republicans [1]. And contrasting Trump 1 and 2 seems to show how having non-MAGA Republicans, many of whom identified as conservative and didn’t endorse the 2020 coup attempt, makes a difference.
[1] https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines...
baobabKoodaa•3mo ago
JumpCrisscross•3mo ago
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply no conservatives are MAGA. Just that I would be surprised if a majority of self-identifying conservatives identify with MAGA. (I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of former conservatives were now MAGA.)
The difference is meaningful, because by unifying MAGA and conservatives one loses resolution on a powerful breakaway faction. (The main reason we had a free and fair election in 2020 is because some Republicans upheld their oaths to the Constitution.)
boston_clone•3mo ago
JumpCrisscross•3mo ago
Good comparison. One of the victims of the Night of the Long Knives were the Strasserists [1][2]. It’s absolutely legitimate to point out when the German Socialist movement was coöpted by Hitler.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism
baobabKoodaa•3mo ago
JumpCrisscross•3mo ago
You’re really going to reduce a historical event to platitudes?
What people call themselves matters. It may not be strictly correct. But it’s an identity, and that predicts how they’ll align in a crisis or movement.
baobabKoodaa•3mo ago
JumpCrisscross•3mo ago
I know. A platitude is a trite and obvious remark.
Whether the Nazis are true socialists is a red herring. The point is the people who called themselves socialist before the Nazis were systematically purged by the Nazis once they coöpted their party. It would be incorrect to say self-identified socialists were responsible for everything the Nazis did; it would be correct to say they enabled them to rise to power.
Most importantly, however, would be observing that right before the Nazis consolidated power, it was the former socialists who could have been peeled away, potentially to huge consequence.
mindslight•3mo ago
Yes, exactly! They are lying to themselves, and as a group. They're not conserving our society, but rather throwing it away. I'm not doing a rhetorical trick - they are doing a rhetorical trick, and I am calling it out.
baobabKoodaa•3mo ago
mindslight•3mo ago
Yes. I keep saying - we need to stop doing this. "Conservative" makes it sound like what they are doing is gradual, measured, and familiar. Maybe not in narrow progressive circles where "conservative" has gathered strong negative connotations, but still in the wider general world. Using "conservative" as a synonym for Republicans/reactionaries/fascists is helping to support their movement.
Bratmon•3mo ago
mindslight•3mo ago
zzzeek•3mo ago
we're living in the utter pinnacle of unfettered conservatism today.
mindslight•3mo ago
Imagine for a minute, if you will, that there are reasonable people who believe in some conservative values, but don't examine the rest of the party platform (or its results) all too hard. Now imagine that by pointing out where Trump falls short or is even directly opposed to those values (eg 2nd amendment), you might actually make them come around to seeing that we need to oust this autocratic child-raping anti-American scumbag. That would be a good thing, right?
I do get that Trump is just the tip of the Party's spear, and the whole pantheon of corrupt congresscritters / supreme council members / corporate backers really needs to go down with the ship. But that didn't work for 2024, and I'd say at this point we're losing our society and our country faster at a faster rate that those enablers' reputations are being damaged, so that seems like a terrible strategy. First and foremost, we need to stop the hemorrhaging.
zzzeek•3mo ago
mindslight•3mo ago
> (which would mean they actually did not vote for Trump)
There is a difference between these two things, no? I've talked to people who voted for Trump subsequently regretted it after they saw what he is actually doing. Low. Information. Voters.
Our goal should be to leverage this difference. It's self-defeating to simply assume everyone that voted for Trump in 2024 continues to support cozying up to middle eastern autocrats, covering up the Epstein case, bully pulpit led cryptocurrency fraud, middle of the night raids on entire apartment buildings, deploying National Guards to occupy American cities and attack protestors, deliberately inhumane treatment of deportees while mostly letting businesses continue on as usual, etc. Or even that they support things that Trump did in his first term, like attacking the second amendment (eg his leadership around Kenneth Walker / Breonna Taylor).
Of course some of these topics are more subtle and lend themselves to propaganda bubbles. Like dwelling on the concentration camps probably isn't the best idea, since it's so easy to shut off one's empathy. But these are the angles of engagement we need to be looking for - unless we're just going to watch our Constitutional Republic being destroyed for four years, while hoping there might be some pieces left to pick up at the end.
Bratmon•3mo ago
Is there any evidence that there is any significant group of people who voted for Trump but are opposed to any of those things?
Because the evidence I've seen suggests that each of those things increased support for Trump anong his base, and the only open question is "By how much?"
mindslight•3mo ago
> I've talked to people who voted for Trump subsequently regretted it after they saw what he is actually doing.
Don't focus on his "base". They're demented slobs like him, or foreign AI-bots boosting destructive messages to harm our country.
Focus on the people who were misled into thinking the grass would be greener on the other side, as they were frustrated with the status quo and believed Trump's word salad implied some actual reform.
rsynnott•3mo ago
mindslight•3mo ago
heavyset_go•3mo ago
But yes, in general, I agree with your point, in a colloquial sense, the Venn diagram is usually a circle.
lawn•3mo ago
Many who initially supported Hitler found themselves dearly regretting their actions.