That is not how they think, and it’s not what they “know”. Actual conservatives know things like 'politics makes strange bedfellows" and “we can agree to disagree”. Fascists on the other hand institute purity tests as a first order of business. That test gets more and more narrow as their power grows. Fascists believe people who deviate in the slightest way from their standards are degenerates who need to be cleansed from society. We know a lot about fascists. They are not conservative.
Every time there’s a mass shooting, we hear that “all the signs were there.”
It’s easy to draw the line backward and connect all the glaring dots. What’s infinitely harder is to try drawing the line forward (prospective) and figure out who the next mass shooter is among the legions of potential shooters who otherwise fit the ‘profile.’
It’s a wee bit like “Economists have correctly predicted 12 of the last eight recessions.”
We have far too many of the dots lined up for my taste right now. Where it goes from here is beyond my prognostic ability.
And the worrisome elements of MAGA … don’t do the nuance that somebody (@bump ) referenced above.
TL:DR: Yeah, @Broomstick . I am feeling a bit Tutsi-ish these days.
This SNL sketch from 1988 is oracular.
I think Victoria Jackson and Dennis Miller both turned into what they were parodying there.
The “MAGA-types” are angry, irrational, paranoid, watch media that endlessly reinforce those traits and their delusional worldview, have openly been discussing civil war and attacking anyone who doesn’t agree with them politically, and are very heavily armed.
“Antifa/leftist extremists who rioted a couple years ago” are mostly imaginary and the few that exist are widely scattered, disorganized, not generally armed and don’t have a massive left-wing propaganda machine constantly encouraging them to take up arms against their political opponents.
Fear of one of those is entirely rational.
The political structure is also different in the US. Local authorities can be a problem, with county offices such as Sheriff being filled by election (and remember that some US counties are huge, some cover as much area as small countries).
So… you might not be worried about Federal authority, but state or county (or even city in some circumstances) might be a threat.
History doesn’t repeat exactly, and as I said, the political/legal/social structures in the US are considerably different than in German, or many other nations, in part due to technological constraints 200+ years ago in trying to maintain order over a vast territory. These structures can be very robust in some sort of disasters/crisis (command is dispersed and not concentrated in one spot), but problematic in others (other times it’s like trying to herd cats).
As an example - the multi-generational terror campaign waged by the Ku Klux Klan was often a case of neighbor killing neighbor, with local authorities either complicit or actively participating. In the US the Feds can be far away in both time and distance, which makes your relations with your neighbors (or lack of such relations) very important.
Shop owners would disagree with you.
At any rate, if you live in fear of your MAGA neighbors, you’re being paranoid IMO.
I’ve got MAGA neighbors who are heavily armed and mutter about killing leftists, liberals, democrats, gays, etc.
Am I living in fear? Not to the point of changing my habits or moving. But completely ignoring that sort of thing is very foolish.
OK so show me ANY law
restricting liberals from civil service (1933)
setting a quota for liberals in schools and universities (1933)
limiting the participation of liberals in the medical and legal professions (1933)
prevent liberals from preparing taxes (1933)
removed liberals from civilian jobs in the military (1933)
preventing liberals from being actors (1934)
When those sort of laws start getting passed then maybe you should start comparing the US to Nazi Germany. One of the history teachers at my school has said that the horror of The Holocaust is marginalized because anything bad is compared to it. This thread is a perfect example of that.
As a gun owner and avid shooter, I’ve known many, many, many gun owners over the past 40 years. Many of whom are conservative-leaning, and some who belong to citizen militias. Never once have I heard any of them mutter something about murdering liberals. Yet you have neighbors who apparently tell you this. I am skeptical of your claim, to say the least.
Firing bullets as long as the trigger is depressed is the working definition of a machine gun. They are illegal in private hands, even for a law enforcement officer. What you’re probably hearing are semiautomatic weapons requiring a trigger pull for each round, which describes virtually all guns in use today.
I’m not crazy about hearing gunfire from surrounding properties during the day, but if it keeps down the population of garden-eating, car-crunching deer, it’s worthwhile.
*noting that I live in a moderately red county in a highly red state (Kentucky) which nevertheless just voted down an anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution. No one stops eating and stares at me when I walk into Red State BBQ**, but then again I don’t wave my arms and rant about “machine guns”.
**you can eat vegetarian there, but it’s not easy.
Nitpick: they’re not illegal to own; you just have to just through some hoops to own one. A good friend of mine owns a full-auto M-16. It’s fun to shoot every now and then, but it gets expensive quickly. It turns money into noise, LOL.
Oh, so you know for certain that all the rioters were ANTIFA/left-wing extremists"?
I ask because I’m aware that the right-wing media and social media bubble that has been stirring up fear and hatred of the left have endlessly pushed the narrative that all the BLM protests were characterized by rioting, looting and violence, and that all the rioting, looting and violence was done by BLM protesters who were also ANTIFA/left-wing extremists.
This is, of course, not remotely true - the vast, vast majority of protests were peaceful, very few of the attendees were “extremist” by any measure, the repeated assertion that “ANTIFA” is an organized left-wing extremist group is untrue, the conflation of protesters and rioters, looters etc is a deliberate smear and unproven, and there were plenty of right-wing groups (encouraged by the aforementioned right-wing media and politicians up to and including Trump) that attended the protests specifically to stir up trouble.
But I suppose if those shop owners were foolish enough to believe those right-wing narratives, they might disagree with me.
Really? I see lots of them on social media.
That skepticism seems both odd and unfounded to me.
YMMV, of course.
[“My grandmother smoked four packs a day from the time she was six years old and lived to be 112. Smoking isn’t bad for you.”]
ETA: My argument would be:
There are definitely people who think like that (the rabid MAGA types, as described);
There are definitely people who talk like that.
And they live … somewhere.
I see that’s the case to a limited extent. But in addition to jumping through all those federal hoops, you have to live in a state that hasn’t banned them and then only are allowed to have one made before May 1986. I really doubt people are going deer hunting with such a weapon.
I’ve known many many gun owners in my time.
Hell, I’ve gone down to a range with friends, borrowed their guns, and done a little shootin’ myself.
I’ve also been shot at more than once so I have directed experience that not every gun owner is a big, sweet teddy bear.
Yes, I have neighbors who make threatening noises. One of them went to jail for gouging out the eyeballs of a teenager who trespassed on his property (I no longer live down the street from that guy). So there are very much some nasty people living around here.
I also have customers at the store where I work who speak of violence - not to me, I’m the help, I’m invisible I guess - but to people waiting in line with them.
Also, unless you’re in a group that’s the target of their ire you may be unaware of just how much toxicity lies beneath the surface. The classic case is the wifebeater who is a saint to everyone else outside his family. Sure, he’s the nicest guy, would give you the shirt off his back… unless you’re his wife.
Feel free to remain skeptical. If nothing else, it’s less stressful to tell yourself there’s no danger in extremists.
If anything like this ever happens in USA, it is definitely going to be different and Nazi Germany probably won’t be a very useful parallel.
Here is some stuff that has happened in Shawano County during my memory. In the 1970s there was a takeover of a local retreat by Native Americans for a month. It was the 1970s, that was really more of a liberal thing. There is a religious commune just north of the city of Shawano that has existed for decades. At one time they bought a bunch of storefronts in downtown Shawano (population 9,000.) Some of those were repossessed but I think they still own some things and a couple of gas stations. I wouldn’t view that group as being conservative or aligned with Trump.
There was a group called the Posse Commitatus in the late 1980s early 1990s that had some quasi rural compound and had grievances or whatever. That would seemingly be seen as more Trumpish. Eventually the leaders were arrested for not paying taxes or whatever and the thing died.
Now, yes you have people with Trump flags. They maybe order guns off the Internet, read and post on the Internet. If they have kids, the kids go to public school. They likely don’t go to church, church attendance is likely declining in Shawano as it is everywhere. There are more minorities in Shawano than when I grew up by a significant margin, discounting Native Americans who lived on a reservation in the next county.
I’m not sure what some “takeover” would do in Shawano County since it’s always been Republican anyway. Which houses do the liberals live in, is their house really any better than yours? What’s the method of organization?
Public shootings are horrific but mostly there seems to be no rhyme or reason. Except schools, where in Shawano there are probably more kids of conservative parents than liberal ones. With the Internet maybe stuff like Koresh or Posse Commitatus is harder to organizae because the yahoos are just busy on the Internet instead of connecting with their fellow locals, I don’t know. In today’s society two Trumpists that live in Shawano may not even know each other because of that.
How can a thread about pre-Nazi Germany be a perfect example of marginalizing the Holocaust??
Yes, because
- The noise scares off the deer
- The recoil without break makes them hard to aim, and
- You won’t have much meat or trophy left if you do manage to hit the animal
Please dispel my ignorance here - the OP asks about “pre-Nazi Germany.” Other than Dseid, ISTM most folk have responded WRT Nazi Germany. I personally lack sufficient knowledge as to what the dynamics were and what Jews perceived in the time BEFORE Nazis took control - presumably in the Weimar Republic pre-1933.
It will be curious to see how the US handles a large percentage - presently still a minority - who aggressively deny facts, disrespect intelligence and competence, are heavily armed, wish to impose their prejudices on others, and tolerate violence in support of their prejudices.
We recently stopped visiting a family vacation home in SW Michigan after FIL died, but the last few times we had visited we clearly felt “less comfortable” with the locals. The amount of gunfire definitely increased over the years, and the Trump displays were increasing and unpleasant to us. As a liberal - and someone strongly opposed to everything espoused by Trumpists - there are large swaths of the country in which I would not consider living or owning property. Recently our paper had an article on the politics of far SW WI. Apparently right at the IL border there was a town of some 16k pop, but every exit you went north, it rapidly got deeper and deeper red. I feel sorry for sane people living in such areas, and if I were so situated, I would seriously consider moving if at all possible.
The other day we were discussing friends - how you get them and how you lose them. I referred to one person with whom we had cut ties as a “Trump casualty.” Trump gave such people the freedom to openly express their most unpleasant feelings.
It truly is an unfortunate change from previous times. It used to be that I might feel someone was a “fiscal conservative” or supported military intervention more than I. Or they had strong conservative religious beliefs such that we disagreed on significant issues. But none of those alone caused me to think they were a “bad person” or someone I would not wish to socialize with. Politics was not so “weaponized” as “us vs them.” The 2 parties could agree on a great many points, with disagreement at the margins.
Now, IMO the right wishes to oppose EVERYTHING Dems support, and are willing to threaten to burn the system down or take up arms if unsuccessful. Truly an ugly situation. I’m HOPING demographics are in more reasonable persons’ favor, but the immediate future appears likely to be ugly.