He'll be the death of us all.

No one's laughing at trump's shit anymore. Anyone with at least a lukewarm iq and even a cursory knowledge of history can see his fascism. It's just the system is rigged to give regressive areas more voting power

You don't even need any of that, he explicitly told everyone that he's gonna be a dictator
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  explicitly told everyone that he's gonna be a dictator
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Eh, that's not what he said. Sure, yes, he said those words, but if you watch the whole thing it's clear he just can't talk like a normal person. He uses words that cause outrage because they get people riled up, and then he goes on to say what he really means. Although who knows man, he's a total liar, and nothing he says has any value anyways.
  
  What got me about that video was the end. He said "We were doing so well. And we were coming together, and coming together, and it was a beautiful thing. And we're going to do that again.". So he personally acknowledged that we were doing well as a country, and more united, and then he came along and started tearing all that down. We've been going downhill ever since. His entire motto "make America great again" is built on a lie that he just acknowledged right here at the end of the clip. It was already great. It stopped being great when he wouldn't shut his fat fucking anus mouth.
  
  But I can't even really evaluate the things he says without sounding like I'm contradicting myself, because the things he says are contradictory from one statement to another. Idk why I even bothered.
  
  They don't say shit in good faith my friend. His whole thing is to say stuff that makes his followers react and exhausts anyone trying to pin him down on anything. Contrary to what anyone thinks he isn't fooling anyone. His rube followers are just happy he's upsetting everyone and wont hold him to a single thing. Everyone else is just tired of his shtick.
  
  The GOP is done veiling their ideas and power plays but it's not like they are being honest. The political equivalent of yelling jibberish at the top of your lungs when someone asks you a simple question. Sad part is the media feeds on it somehow.
  
  That's a very good assessment that I completely agree with.
complaining about the rise of fascism

infers anyone who's not going to vote fascism away is a dunce

mentions lukewarm iq

mentioning iq at all

guess there's just a predetermined, genetic based, level of intelligence hey mate? scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds, comrades.

I'm not American, I dont get a vote, I laugh at trump, and all of America, to keep myself from crying.
- Boy, if there is a predetermined level of intelligence, you sure fucking pulled the short straw on that to take a simple turn of phrase and read that entire fucking reach into it.
  
  But then again you're a tankie so that's not surprising.
- What does this add to the conversation?

I keep saying it, but no one wants to join my radical and poorly regulated militia so this will be everyone else's fault.

my radical and poorly regulated militia

Talk about fighting fire with fire!

Yup, not to say that my country is doing much better or anything, but looking over at the USA it's almost comical how extremely clear their decline into fascism and decay is. It'd almost be funny if it weren't so serious.

Unfortunately it's not hard to see a future where the rest of the world have to fight a war against some future form of christiofascist white supremacist USA.

Not next year or the year after of course, but within my lifetime for sure. People forget how quickly some nations go from progressive and democratic to straight up Third Reich.

It takes a shockingly short amount of time once the slow burn has laid the ground work over the initial decades. The slow burn we're watching now.

Yeah but this slow burn is already like ten years old. The fascists demand retribution for us daring to elect Obama. As soon as they saw the light at the end of that tunnel, they said never again.

If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy. (David Frum)
Against Christofascists sure. I don't see any actual white supremacy coming out of the USA. It is far too blended of a country now. Everyone knows someone, is related to someone, or involved with someone of varying races. Our friends, our families, and our lovers are all races. Sure, there will be little hate groups still, but white people are quickly losing ground to non-whites, and the government is very inter-racial. Whites are already a minority in California, and set to become minorities nationwide by 2045.

But the Christofacism is a very real threat, and the US military is a monumental behemoth of monstrous proportions. Woe to all if the Christofascists gain unchecked power.

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.

I keep wracking my brain, wondering what I can do that they didn’t

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.
  
  and then they call you a groomer
  
  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!

It's too late.

Fascism isn't something on the horizon. Look at what is happening in Idaho. Within a year or two half of the US states will have criminalized abortion, and all you hear from federal legislators is how important it is that we shovel more money we don't have into other countries' wars.

It's over.

The only power you or I have left is in our immediate local communities, where you can still accomplish the general good.

TIL fascism is when abortion is banned, and not when systems are put in place to enforce single party rule and violent suppression of political dissent.
- All of those are aspects of fascism. Restricting individual freedoms is a core part of fascism.
  
  Not really, no.
  
  It can be, but fascism is extremely malleable as a template and can absolutely not give a shit about abortion (or even actively encourage/enforce it like china during the one child policy) or any other specific individual freedom.
  
  The ones it really cares about are the ones that allow you to dissent and work against the government, so speech and association.
  
  Fascism is fundamentally authoritarian first; specific social and economic prescriptions are tuned as the party/dictator deem necessary.
  
  That's how you can have red fascism like China and Stalinist Russia, and capitalist fascism like Pinochet's Chile.
  
  The US is never going to properly address its issues until it properly identifies them.
  
  What you're dealing with is not fascism imposed from the top down, it's puritanism endorsed at all strata of society by a significant amount of people who genuinely co-sign it, either because they don't understand the repercussions or because they genuinely don't care.
  
  If you're incapable of understanding that people in those states genuinely support banning abortion, for example, and are not actually being oppressed by a minority of powerful people who are denying them their rights, but are instead actively signing away those rights for the minority who want to keep them, you're never going to be able to effectively change this state of affairs.
  
  Sad to see you got some downvotes, your takes here are very technically correct and aware of the big picture and actual facts of the mechanisms.
  
  People hate it when they can't just abuse terms to label people they don't like, unfortunately.
  
  I hate having to tap the "calling the USSR or other AES states fascist is antisemitic" sign
  
  https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
  
  lemmy.ml USSR apologia
  
  Lmao fuck off tankie, you're scum just like nazis and fascists.
  
  Call me antisemitic some more as if you give a fuck.
  
  My surviving jewish family were freed from a nazi death camp by the people you call fascists. Equating the two is holocaust trivialization and antisemitic. I literally link you to a well known mainstream Jewish historian and activist about this issue. Do you think David Katz is a "tankie"?
  
  You call me scum equivalent to a nazi in response. Have words lost all meaning to you?
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union
  
  Oh my god there was antisemitism in the USSR, even among some leadership! Several doctors got killed!
  
  You're right, a few incidences of antisemitism are the same as the holocaust, or the pogroms that the pre-soviet monarchy backed by western liberal democracies engaged in. Or the antisemitism in the post soviet union liberal democracies. /s
  
  You are a deeply unserious person. And a holocaust trivializer if it "owns the tankies" apparently. Great priorities.
  
  Can you point me to the exact sentence where I trivialised the holocaust? Hint: I didn't say anything about the holocaust. All I gave you is a link, the rest is your imagination.
  
  You, OTOH, are severely trivialising antisemitism within the USSR. Stop fucking fanboying.
  
  pre-soviet monarchy backed by western liberal democracies
  
  Please fucking what liberal democracies during Tsarist times? England, France, possibly, am I missing one? And none of that antisemitism was home-grown, it was all the fault of those evil foreigners making poor Russian nobles and priests do stuff? The country most busy with fucking with Tsarist Russia, specifically sending Lenin over mind you, was Germany, very much not a liberal democracy. The age of liberal democracies started after WWI.
  
  or the pogroms that the pre-soviet monarchy backed by western liberal democracies
  
  You gotta be fucking trolling, what fucking western liberal democracies? France?
  
  Western Europe was almost all constitutional monarchies until the end of WW2 and even then what fucking backing of Tsarist Russia? Napoleon trying to conquer it centuries before and then Austria Hungary and Prussia trading with it?
  
  Also who the fuck is trivialising the holocaust now by mentioning it in the same breath as pogroms, as if the scale and systematic nature of the former don't make them completely disanalogous?
  
  I reiterate my former point: Fuck off tankie scum.
  
  Ok, fuck me, you got me mad enough to answer, gr8 b8 m8.
  
  I want this on record that the only reason I am wasting my time replying to your tankie ass (and yes, I checked your post history, you're a tankie, surprising absolutely nobody) is so that if someone runs into this pathetic excuse for a rebuttal they don't believe for a second that I bought this as an actually valid response.
  
  My surviving jewish family were freed from a nazi death camp by the people you call fascists.
  
  Who asked?
  
  Who the fuck cares, and for that matter who the fuck believes a rando on the internet just happens to have the right personal anecdote to pull rank in an online conversation? Fuck off with that shit. If I told you my wife is jewish and her grandfather died in Auschwitz would you believe me? Would it make you reconsider the validity of my argument? Of course it fucking wouldn't.
  
  What does conquering and breaking up an enemy installation have to do with what form of governance is running a country? The soviets broke up auschwitz because they broke up every installation they ran across, as you do when conquering enemy land. That has nothing to do with whether stalinist Russia was or wasn't a fascist shithole.
  
  Not all fascist regimes committed the holocaust. Most of them have committed genocides, and yes that very much includes the soviets, but talking about Fascism at large is not an invitation to barge in, well-achshually-ing as if the only fascist regimes to ever exist were the fucking Axis in WW2, no matter how much your obvious commie ass would like to believe that.
  
  Hell the Axis didn't even include all the explicitly fascist countries of the time, (since Franco's Spain wasn't in it) let alone all of the ones that came and went since.
  
  I literally link you to a well known mainstream Jewish historian and activist about this issue.
  
  Sure, and? Neither being well known, mainstream, nor an activist are indicators of your understanding of political theory and the specific meanings and ideologies behind currents.
  
  Technically speaking fucking Alex Jones is a well known mainstream activist if you go by raw numbers and popularity, and i doubt his opinion is worth listening to.
  
  But even then, you absolutely shat the bed on linking the guy because, spoilers: I never even brought up the holocaust until this point, nor have I compared it to the holodomor and other genocides.
  
  Nor would I, because I am not a fucking idiot.
  
  No part of any definition of fascist requires the genocidal zeal the nazis exhibited, and if it makes you feel better I will fucking happily concede that Hitler's bloodlust is still undefeated in both unyieldingness and devotion.
  
  Doesn't change jack shit about the definition of fascism or whether the soviets and maoists fit it, unfortunately for you.
  
  Do you think David Katz is a “tankie”?
  
  I have no idea who that is, nor do I care.
  
  Ok, I lied, you got me curious, and you conveniently misspelled his name.
  
  Because when looking up David Katz you find a highly distinguished history professor at Brandeis, but actually you linked one Dovid Katz whose academic background has fuckall to do with history since he's a fucking philologist.
  
  So, do I think he's a tankie?
  
  No, I don't think so.
  
  Is his arguing against comparing the holocaust and other genocides at all relevant to this discussion?
  
  Absolutely fucking not.
  
  You call me scum equivalent to a nazi in response. Have words lost all meaning to you?
  
  Let's see. You're arguing that the only aspect of fascism, an entire political movement whose impact is so strong and so damaging we are still feeling its effects a century later, that is worth addressing is the holocaust, instead of its far more consistently present, pervasive, and insidious characteristics of inevitably building a liberticidal, autocratic, centralist dictatorship whose morals change at the drop of a hat based entirely on the convenience of the political leadership of the regime.
  
  You know, like every fascist regime, self-proclaimed or de-facto, other than Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy which also did the holocaust.
  
  Plus you bring this up as if not committing the most deliberate and industrialised genocide in recorded history makes stalinists or maoists not genocidal. A silver medal is as good as sitting on the couch to you, isn't it?
  
  Furthermore, I would argue you are doing so because you are trying to protect your sacred cows of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao from being rightfully identified as just another flavour of fascist, and not out of genuine interest in highlighting how bad the holocaust truly was.
  
  If you cared about that you wouldn't need to downplay how horrendous other genocides are to single out the nazis, you can roundly condemn them and the soviets as genocidal without making an equivalence.
  
  Being genocidal and being exceptionally genocidal both earn you a one way ticket to "shoot on sight" land in my book, debating which one is worse is thoroughly pointless from a moral standpoint and a red herring from a political science standpoint as being a fascist does not require a kill count (though it usually predicts a pretty fucking high one.)
  
  So yeah words have meanings, and tankie means fascist scum dressed in red, as opposed to dressed in black or dressed in brown.
  
  I completely agree with your gist but
  
  whose academic background has fuckall to do with history since he’s a fucking philologist.
  
  Dude, don't do philology dirty like that. They're reading dusty old tomes all day long and you need a lot of historical knowledge to make proper sense of them. We couldn't read hieroglyphics without their work, and their extrapolations have been proven by Hittite (which was discovered after the reconstruction of proto-Indo-European and looks exactly as expected). The two disciplines feed into each other. Dr. Daniel Jackson is a philologist and at least as cool as Indiana Jones and do I need to mention J.R.R. Tolkien.
  
  Dude, believe it or not my own mother is a philologist, so I know that damn well.
  
  I know that the discipline is important but I'd be a bit gunshy to look at a random philologist for earthshattering insight on the nature of a political movement whose impact clearly touches the man on a very personal level.
  
  The best part is that I don't even have to, Katz is not even wrong, it's just that this tankie fucker is instrumentalising an argument against minimising one side to minimise the other and frankly I hope he catches the bus the wrong way for that one.
  
  Being genocidal and being exceptionally genocidal both earn you a one way ticket to “shoot on sight” land in my book, debating which one is worse is thoroughly pointless from a moral standpoint and a red herring from a political science standpoint as being a fascist does not require a kill count (though it usually predicts a pretty fucking high one.)
  
  Okay, so people who support liberal "democracies" like the US currently backing genocide should be shot on sight then? Or just the governments responsible?
  
  The problem with "those genocidal communists" is that liberal democracies are significantly more genocidal. You want to go with the least bad system.
  
  Take the notion that man-made famine counts as genocide. 8 million people starve under the capitalist world order every year.
  
  You want to go with the least bad system.
  
  Take the notion that man-made famine counts as genocide.
  
  Hahaaa there's your true fucking colors. Called it.
  
  Fuck off tankie scum, I hope someone punches you like the colorswapped nazi you are.
  
  Nazi Germany actually had a more liberal view of abortion than the laws that a lot of Republican states are now passing (for reasons that you can probably imagine, but still)
  
  Nazi Germany isn't the only form of fascism, and had other individual freedoms even more restricted. Nazi Germany was a far-right, reactionary state that violently suppressed Workers and stripped their freedoms, just like American conservatives are attempting to do and are working towards.
  
  How liberal was their view of social equality in regards to varying races?
  
  You DO see how disingenuous your example is, right?
  
  The Nazi stance on abortion wasn't "liberal", that's ludicrous. It ranged from being forbidden for parents of German blood to encouraged or even forced in other cases, it was all about their ideas of racial hygiene. Not even the GOP is that racist, or can you imagine them mandating abortions for mixed-race couples?
  
  The only case where this might be true is even the ban on abortion for German couples did not mean a ban on abortions in medical cases. German (not just Nazi) law generally considers it, as is proper, self-defence. Honestly I don't think a legal system which doesn't consider it such can consider itself a legal system at all, Radbruch and everything.

I got banned from a web forum in 2015 for calling Trump a fascist. This shit should not have been any sort of surprise to anybody paying attention.

Read world news. This is in no way just America.

No but this post is about the US

They're not even bothering with destroying things behind the scenes. They're doing it right out in the open, because nobody has the teeth and cajones to stop them.

Which Republican candidate would you have preferred to win? Most of them are more fascist than Trump.

At this point it likely doesn't matter. The US has fucked itself so hard. They'll either fall or spend decades trying to get back to where they were.