Skip to main content

Search

Items tagged with: cruelty


9. Ask anyone who has ever lived in a police state or who has good historical knowledge of how police states function what life will be like for us – all of us – as all of this is set into motion.

10. If Trump enacts this barbaric plan, do not expect the so-called "guardrails," including especially the corporate media, to act as the conscience of the nation or to resist the barbarism. To the contrary….

All to solve a made-up problem….

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #immigrants #violence
/5


7. Violence begets violence begets violence. Once you set it in motion in this way from the top of the government, it involves and threatens everyone.

8. When people see that their lust to hurt targeted others is blessed and encouraged by their leaders, that lust to hurt thrives, grows, spreads and begins to turn a society into hell on earth.

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #immigrants #violence
/4


5. All of these possibilites are compounded by Trump's promise to seize direct control of the military and turn militarized force against immigrants.

6. History shows us that any time a would-be strongman dictator takes control of the military and turns it on targeted segments of the population, everyone – especially dissidents and social outcasts – ends up being targeted.

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #immigrants #violence
/3


2. If a nation's government engages in acts of immense barbarism and cruelty, every citizen of that nation is affected and implicated.

3. We may imagine that an act like this will affect "only" them, and not us.

4. Set barbarism and cruelty into motion from the top of a government, and it eventually reaches you and me and not just the targeted others.

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #immigrants #violence
/2


Suppose for a moment that Trump carries through on his wildly popular promise to round up, incarcerate, and deport millions of immigrants. We can hope this does not happen. But all indicators tell us that some version of this plan is already in place, to begin immediately after he's sworn into office.

Ten points to consider:

1. Rounding up, incarcerating, and deporting millions of people will be an act of immense barbarism and cruelty.

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #immigrants #violence
/1


"Kennedy has devoted his life to destroying public health. He’s obsessed with a confused, quasi-fascist idea of purity, which leads him to attack medical interventions like fluoride, pasteurization, and vaccines, as well as perceived outsiders like Asians and Jewish people. That makes him a good fit for Trump and Trumpism. It also makes him a massive danger to the US and to the world."

~ Noah Berlatsky

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #future #RFKJr
/3

publicnotice.co/p/rfk-jr-publi…


"Let’s not make the mistake of thinking the only reason Trump wants to use recess appointments is to get his team of deplorables confirmed. He’s not even back in office, but he’s already at work manipulating elected officials into a position where the Constitution can be tossed aside at will."

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #future
/2


"Trump’s demand for recess appointments is a way of breaking the Senate early on. Once they’ve bypassed the Constitutional dictate that they confirm the president’s appointees, there is no standing on principle to insist on strict adherence to the Constitution."

~ Joyce Vance

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #future
/1

joycevance.substack.com/p/what…


"Never mind that he was the most pro-union president we’ve ever had. Never mind he is a fundamentally decent man; his character is not in question.

It wasn’t enough apparently. …

Biden didn’t fail America — America failed him."

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/16


"Never mind that his administration has been largely scandal free. Never mind that he surrounded himself with some really competent people. Never mind that he took an economy in shambles and turned it around. Never mind that he restored international relations that had been crippled and turned them around, including NATO expansion. Never mind that the infrastructure bill was an incredible accomplishment given the Congress he had to work with."

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/15


"What is going on?

I am starting to see editorials and analyses that are blaming the second coming of the convicted felon on Joseph Robinette Biden. It seems like there is a determined campaign to trash his legacy. ...

We haven’t reached the point yet, like that seen under Stalin, where history would be rewritten and photos edited to remove unpersons who had fallen out of favor and been purged.

Not yet."

~ xaxnar

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/14

dailykos.com/stories/2024/11/9…


"Joe Biden owned the hardships of the post-pandemic — principally but not only economic — and the public simply rejected his presidency because of that. That’s very similar to what has happened when almost every other incumbent party in the West came up for reelection in the post-pandemic era. ...

Harris and Harris’ campaign are a distraction from this necessary conversation, a form of denial."

Of course, always easier to blame women, no?

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/13


Josh Marshall agrees with a TPM reader who says that "digesting the mechanics of campaigns were sort of beside the point now." As he notes, "The problems and the roots of Democrats’ defeat ran far deeper." And "the recriminations conversation" is a colossal waste of time.

He writes,

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/12

talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a…


"As Hitler, so Trump; as Nazi, so MAGA. …

Dorothy Thompson made the same mistake many of us, myself very much included, made in her assessment of the resident strongman: she believed the German people would be sophisticated enough to see through Hitler’s grotesque lies, just like we all believed the American people would be sophisticated enough to see through Trump’s."

~ Greg Olear

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/11

gregolear.substack.com/p/sunda…


"What is true: Trump, and the right, are very good at taking basic respect and empathy for other humans, and portraying that as dangerous: social justice, wokeness, diversity, equity and inclusion have all been converted into terms of mockery. Trump did not win because someone you were on a zoom call with used pronouns, or Latinx, or some college grad corrected you for using the word homeless."

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/10


"This is a lazy pre-existing [corporate media] narrative to be sold, not because of any actual analysis of the electorate. These are writers who for various reasons have committed to an anti-woke narrative. And once you have committed to that narrative, you are determined to force it into every story, no matter how misleading."

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/9


As Don Moynihan notes, while the media and their fellow travelers pile on in a big gloat fest accusing Democrats of losing support because they're too "woke" and promote identity politics,

"You will never guess who did run on trans issues: Donald Trump."

As the Harris campaign bent over backwards to de-emphasize identity politics….

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/8

donmoynihan.substack.com/p/who…


"Choosing to write stories that 'blame elitist Democrats' ignores the real story of what happened on Tuesday. That distraction normalizes the grotesque, existential threat of Trump's electoral victory. Trump could not buy more favorable and helpful coverage if he paid for those stories with Elon Musk’s billions."

~ Hubbell, ibid.

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/7


"But the media is (again) sane-washing Trump's depravity. Rather than acknowledge—or even mention—his dominant campaign themes in analyzing his victory, the media insists that Trump won because Democrats are ;elitists; who somehow ;alienated' major portions of the electorate or that Democrats lost because Kamala Harris and her advisors refused to run her campaign in the manner demanded by the legacy media."

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/5


"The defining feature of Trump's campaign was its appeal to racism, misogyny, and white supremacy. He pushed those themes despite pleas from his advisers to focus on the economy. Having campaigned on themes of hate and division, he won decisively. The most compelling inference from those facts is that Trump's campaign themes appealed to a broad swath of the voters who supported him."

~ Robert B. Hubbell

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/4

roberthubbell.substack.com/p/s…


'An important lesson from Nazi Germany: Dumb people are more dangerous than evil people. Ignorance will destroy America like it destroyed Germany during the Nazi era."

~ Oliver Markus Molloy

Molly quotes W.E.B. DuBois:

"Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States."

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/3

badchoicesmakegoodstories.subs…


A lot of people who chose to vote for Trump are now in for a rude awakening. They made their choice thinking that only someone else is going to be hurt.

They're about to find out otherwise. And this includes all those superior beings who think want to waste time now pretending that the Democratic party is the problem, and not the party determined to bring us fascism and the voters who have chosen to give the party free rein.

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future
/2


"When the dust settles, I expect the people who assess elections will tell us disinformation was key in 2024. It wasn’t the economy, it was the disinformation about the economy. ...

It requires education and discernment to separate fact from fiction, and often that's lacking. That’s the problem: educating people so they can make judgments about what’s true."

~ Joyce Vance

#Trump #Republicans #fascism #cruelty #future #disinformation
/1

joycevance.substack.com/p/the-…


A photo by Dorothea Lange of Kimiko Kitagaki, tagged and numbered like the luggage surrounding her, as she and other Japanese Americans awaited their forced removal to an internment camp for Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, in World War II. The photo is in the National Archives, and is available for sharing online at Wikimedia Commons.

It CAN happen here. It HAS happened. And we refuse to learn from our barbarism in the past.

#fascism #cruelty #USA

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…


"It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds, needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. It is harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations."

~ Ibid.

#fascism #Nazis #cruelty
/5


“Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth — that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. It is easy to say: if we could just root out the despots before they take power or intercept their rise. If we could just wait until the bigots die away."

~ Ibid., p. 267

#fascism #Nazis #cruelty
/4


"They are husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, children, uncles, nephews, all gathered at a ticker-tape parade on a brilliant, sunny day celebrating what we know to be a horror….

It was two years past Kristallnacht. They knew that Jewish friends and neighbors had been rounded up, publicly humiliated, taken away, never seen again. And the people in the crowd were smiling and happy."

~ Ibid.

#fascism #Nazis #cruelty
/2


“The Nazis could not have risen to power and done what they did without the support of the masses of people who were open to his spell. I could not stop watching it [i.e., film footage of Hitler entering Berlin on 6 July 1940]. The smiling, shining faces in this carpet of exuberant humanity—this massive number of people could not all be what we would consider evil."

#fascism #Nazis #cruelty
/1

~ Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (NY: Random House, 2020), p. 265


"White Christians made Donald Trump president — again. …

Exit poll data from CNN and other news outlets reported that 72% of white Protestants and 61% of white Catholics said they voted for Trump."

~ Bob Smietana

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #future #Christians #WhiteChristians

religionnews.com/2024/11/06/wh…


"We are perched on the precipice of meme-ing ourselves into authoritarian dystopia, handing unchecked power to a narcissistic criminal demagogue because the price of bacon increased. ...

We are the only species capable of clinging to ideological zealotry. And we are the only ones who can make ourselves extinct."

~ Brian Klaas

#fascism #cruelty #USA #Trump #future
/24

forkingpaths.co/p/the-tattered…


"Presented with a choice between electing the first black, female president on a promise of a sunnier future, and a racist, misogynist, twice-impeached convicted felon hawking hatred and retribution, they picked Mr Trump."

~ The Guardian

#fascism #cruelty #USA #Trump #future
/23

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…


"Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. …

The principal problems that got us to this bleakest moment in American history are intertwined. They are the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem."

~ Rebecca Solnit

#fascism #cruelty #USA #Trump #future
/22

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…


"The reason this felt so much worse than 2016 was because it was impossible to say Americans didn’t know what they were voting for."

~ Emma Brockes

#fascism #cruelty #USA #Trump #future
/21

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…


Sensitive content


Sensitive content


Sensitive content


“'The Confederacy won,' says [Carol] Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University. 'It paints a picture of what Americans are willing to embrace,' says [Michele] Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown and an expert on healthcare law…."

#fascism #cruelty #USA #Trump #future
/17

democracynow.org/2024/11/6/car…


"They knowingly voted to once again tear families apart and put babies in cages and commit what will almost certainly be horrific human rights abuses against immigrants. They voted to make life harder for me and my daughters because based on their conveniently misogynistic and bigoted interpretation of the Bible. ...

I am done being nice to people just because we are related."

~ tonyahky

#fascism #cruelty #USA #Trump #future
/16

dailykos.com/stories/2024/11/6…


"America was given the opportunity to let a Black and Asian American woman move us beyond a decade of Trump’s racist, sexist, and toxic form of grievance politics with a broad agenda grounded in joy, compassion, and opportunity. And America, specifically the majority of white Americans, said: 'No thanks. We’re good.'”

~ Kimberly Atkins Stohr

#fascism #cruelty #USA #Trump #future
/15

bostonglobe.com/2024/11/06/opi…