Ha! I had not read this Stack yet when I made this general reply on BlueSky: "They like to say An TEE’ fah, to make it sound foreign. Compared to Anti-Fa, which is short for Anti-Fascist."
Wow, this is powerful, badly needed, and as a long time reader, I think it's up there with your best writing! I hope this is read far and wide. And isn't it ironic that the people who defended the bakery who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding are more than happy to "prosecute" Home Depot? And they're complaining about the equivalent of "triggering speech..." when Free Speech is actually the right to offend! FWIW a few outlets on the non-MAGA "right" that I follow are noticing and identifying this blatant fascism: The Morning Dispatch (especially Jonah Goldberg), Yaron Brook, and some on The Free Press. Take care, and keep writing as much as you can, Laura!
All of this has shades of Kirov's murder in the USSR, which was the pretext for the Great Purge which sent millions to their deaths. While it's dangerous to try to overlay past history onto current events, the rhetoric is strikingly the same. Someone has read their Soviet history. Are we about to experience a "Miller/Patel/Bondi-zhovshchina? " But it's always about the irony, isn't it?
Great piece, Laura, deeply troubling, well considered. It is always hard to separate what is merely ugly and stupid from what is authentically dangerous in our society, because we have had political violence before, including a civil war and in the end, the ship of state sails on, things righted themselves, better angels and so on, and anyway, who wants to embrace a future so dark?
But in the darkest days of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Kent State shootings, the various assassinations, the Chicago police riots during the Democratic national convention, and all the rest of the societal upheaval of the time, it never felt this dark, and there was never such a unified machinery of power willing to completely subvert the constitution and turn the mechanisms of national government against their political opponents. Will they come for me personally? Probably not, but I am afraid they will come for many people who never would have expected to find themselves in a federal lockup somewhere or having their careers destroyed as casually as one might kill a mosquito.
The rhetoric sure is insane, isn't it? But the real world response I see out in the streets tells a different story. I'm going with Johnathan Larsen's take. This is like the 1970s all over again. Actual terrorists doing bombings, shootings, assassinations but we got through it and we'll get through it again. By sheer force of overwhelming numbers against the fascists.
Oh my God. Please be careful, Laura.
Ha! I had not read this Stack yet when I made this general reply on BlueSky: "They like to say An TEE’ fah, to make it sound foreign. Compared to Anti-Fa, which is short for Anti-Fascist."
Wow, this is powerful, badly needed, and as a long time reader, I think it's up there with your best writing! I hope this is read far and wide. And isn't it ironic that the people who defended the bakery who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding are more than happy to "prosecute" Home Depot? And they're complaining about the equivalent of "triggering speech..." when Free Speech is actually the right to offend! FWIW a few outlets on the non-MAGA "right" that I follow are noticing and identifying this blatant fascism: The Morning Dispatch (especially Jonah Goldberg), Yaron Brook, and some on The Free Press. Take care, and keep writing as much as you can, Laura!
All of this has shades of Kirov's murder in the USSR, which was the pretext for the Great Purge which sent millions to their deaths. While it's dangerous to try to overlay past history onto current events, the rhetoric is strikingly the same. Someone has read their Soviet history. Are we about to experience a "Miller/Patel/Bondi-zhovshchina? " But it's always about the irony, isn't it?
Great piece, Laura, deeply troubling, well considered. It is always hard to separate what is merely ugly and stupid from what is authentically dangerous in our society, because we have had political violence before, including a civil war and in the end, the ship of state sails on, things righted themselves, better angels and so on, and anyway, who wants to embrace a future so dark?
But in the darkest days of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Kent State shootings, the various assassinations, the Chicago police riots during the Democratic national convention, and all the rest of the societal upheaval of the time, it never felt this dark, and there was never such a unified machinery of power willing to completely subvert the constitution and turn the mechanisms of national government against their political opponents. Will they come for me personally? Probably not, but I am afraid they will come for many people who never would have expected to find themselves in a federal lockup somewhere or having their careers destroyed as casually as one might kill a mosquito.
The rhetoric sure is insane, isn't it? But the real world response I see out in the streets tells a different story. I'm going with Johnathan Larsen's take. This is like the 1970s all over again. Actual terrorists doing bombings, shootings, assassinations but we got through it and we'll get through it again. By sheer force of overwhelming numbers against the fascists.
Here's hoping, but we're a very different country than we were in the 1970s
Newspeech defers now to doubletalkspeech.