Was driving through downtown Grand Rapids this afternoon and saw a pickup with massive tires, clouds of black smoke billowing out of the exhaust pipes and… the flag of the Soviet Union waving on a pole attached to the back bumper. As I got closer, I saw some stickers with weird symbols that I didn’t recognize, an NRA sticker and a couple Trump stickers.
I pulled up next to the guy and he was an early 30-something dude with long hair and a beard. An ugly dog was hanging out the back window barking his fool head off at traffic. The driver enjoyed flooring his truck every chance he got to spew out more black smoke into the cars behind him.
Is this a thing now? Are some MAGAs going full-on Soviet? Or was this guy just some attention-seeking troll?
Or really meta trolling the MAGAts …. Trump is a little bit like Stalin in his capricious manner. There not a lot of difference between ICE and the NKVD… GULAG = El Salvador prison
Remember when the Republicans could be counted on to be rabidly anti-communist without any cognitive dissonance involved in admiring Russia’s strongman leader? Yeah, I miss those days. I think it died around the time McCain aid of meeting Putin: “I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B."
And we can’t even make it seven minutes without the insane hyperbole. You’re not doing the anti-MAGA crowd any favors by making ludicrous statements like this. ICE is shitty enough as it is, but for some reason I can’t seem to find any of the mass graves of the people they’ve apparently been executing by the tens of thousands at a time. You know. Like the NKVD did all the time.
You don’t think something like this could happen eventually? We’re already imprisoning people for life without due process, I feel like that’s not as bad as murder, but only marginally.
Look, just because we’re sending people in trains in planes to concentration camps prisons in Poland El Salvador doesn’t mean there’s any indication that it can happen here.
You don’t think it’s extremely hyperbolic to compare an organization that xenophobically deports 'forners - and has done so during several Democratic administrations, mind you - with one that murdered ‘enemies of the state’ by the millions?
Only we’re not comparing TFG to Hitler. We’re comparing ICE to the NKVD. Or in your case, the Final Solution. Which again, doesn’t help combat the actual threat of fascism from TFG when you start comparing ICE, which, again, has existed and functioned since 2003 under several Democratic administrations to the NKVD, who’s entire point of existence was to root out and murder enemies of the Communist party, real or imagined. Or in your case, to compare the xenophobic deportations to foreign prisons to extermination camps. Not concentration camps. Vernichtungslager were very different from Konzentrationslager.
I agree that there’s probably some trollery involved, but it’s not a big stretch from the dudes at the trump 1.0 rally wearing “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat” t-shirts…to flying the flag of the former Soviet Union during trump 2.0.
Poster of the Week award for working one’s username effortlessly into the text of a post
He probably is too young to know what The Soviet Union was, and just thinks it’s an ordinary Russian flag.
If he’s really about 30, it would not shock me that he did not know about the Soviet Union.
I lived there when I was 10, in Moscow, and when I mention it to young people, and I don’t mean teens, I mean up to 35, it’s shocking how many people have no idea what it was. College educated people.
Course, even in the 1970s, plenty of people did not understand the distinction between “Russia,” and “The Soviet Union,” including a middle school social studies teacher of mine. Man was that guy a jerk.
I think the anti-communism of those days isn’t just gone, but the debate has now shifted to a different axis. IMHO the fault line in the present day US isn’t one about competing economic systems, with Adam Smith capitalists on one side and Karl Marx communists on the other. It’s about the form of government, with Thomas Jefferson small d democrats one side vs. Donald Trump authoritarians on the other. As far as the fact that the MAGAs embrace Putin, fly Soviet flags, say they would rather be Russian than a Democrat, etc. IMHO that is their way of signaling that they care more about the authoritarian vs. democracy debate than the capitalism vs. communism debate. IMHO they care so much more about the authoritarian to democracy axis than the communist to capitalist axis that they would support an authoritarian communist* over a democratic capitalist. That’s what I take away from such displays.
*. Of course such a beast doesn’t really exist in the present day US government (maybe Tulsi Gabbard comes close ?), which is why they take to symbols rather than saying “we support John Doe - authoritarian communist (R) instead of their (D) democratic capitalist opponent.” But if such a candidate did exist, I bet they would support an authoritarian communist over a democratic capitalist.
