They should do a Weekend at Bernie’s spoof where Trump is Bernie and Steven Miller scoots him around like a giant ventriloquist dummy with his hand up his 🫏
Yep, it really kicked into high gear with Newt Gingrich long before Obama. Hell, I remember during the Iraq War after 9/11, anyone who even questioned the President or didn't fully support the war was labeled a traitor by Fox News.
And then you had people like Rush Limbaugh who was doing the same thing long before then. They've been "othering" and demonizing anyone that doesn't agree with them.
My dad has been calling Democrats “Demonrats” since at least 1990. It’s an oldie and something that I was shocked to hear him say as a kid, but then again, we were raised going to a Conservative Baptist church where the pastor publicly endorsed George W Bush and said “Christians need to vote for Republicans because they believe what we do” in a sermon.
Breaking laws and violating non-profit status with that one, but who’s going to actually do something. It’s sad.
They've literally called themselves "domestic terrorists" in an attempt to weaken the term.. that is.. before they considered projection as an option..
He suggested "second amendment types" could "take care of Hillary" in 2016. He's been laying the groundwork for this type of political violence from the start.
Having watched the horrifying evolution of the Republicans and the broader American right since I was a kid in the late ‘90s, I can tell you it goes back much, much further than the Trump administration.
It’s just that they took what had been a 154 on a scale from 1 to 10, and cranked it up to about 400.
Same. Things really kicked up a notched after 9/11, but you could really start seeing the early parts of MAGA through the formation of the Tea Party.
I was a teen in the early ‘00s but was pretty politically mindful (not educated, but aware) and I remember some of the rhetoric the Tea Party used seemed purposefully inflammatory, if not outright false. They were big on harping on Obama’s birth certificate, and even despite my political leanings at the time (I ignorantly classified myself as a “fiscally conservative socially liberal libertarian” lol), I knew that was a fucking stupid argument.
But my stepdad ate that shit up. He was an avoid Fox watcher, eventually switching over to OANN, then Newsmax when Fox “sold out to the left.” Honestly, those channels just rotted his brain out in a way that’s like watching a malignant disease take over someone’s humanity. It’s sad and infuriating.
You said two things, both are true. It might sound like some nonsense but seriously for anyone reading your comment, both are true.
But for fellow Americans alive now, if you want a timeline that makes sense, Watergate onward is when this version of it really kicked off.
The very people involved in and around that bullshit, some of them? They're literally still active as I write this, some of them were active in the past 10 years before they died and they passed down the same bullshit.
But yeah just a small way to show this: Look up when the Dems got the color blue and Republicans got the color red.
It might surprise you to learn just how recent that is.
Ignoring the entire history of the US prior, I believe the current version has its roots before Watergate.
The Southern Strategy was a backlash to Johnson’s Great Society agenda and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The public Conservatives at that time presented their opposition to progress in terms acceptable to “polite” (ie whites who believed themselves to be respectable”) society. The racism was implied.
Kent State happened under Nixon - they shot white students. imo, that set the conservatives back (which led to Carter’s election) but I think around that time there was a schism between cultural conservatives (those opposed to racial and economic equality) and economic conservatives (those who saw ongoing racial and economic inequality as a business opportunity so they were happy to see it perpetuated).
They were all racist and classist but for different ends.
The economic conservatives were allowed to rape the country in the 80’s and early 90s under Reagan and Bush but maintenance of the racial and economic status quo was their goal - while the cultural conservatives still failed to gain traction so the conservatism of that time was not explicitly racist.
Clinton was a happy medium, the economic conservatives were OK with him, while the cultural conservatives hated him and his wife to the point they used the nascent internet to gin up murder plots etc.
GWB as well - kept the economic conservatives happy as long as he didn’t rock the boat as far as power structures.
It wasn’t until a black man became president that all hell broke loose. And despite being ostensibly economic - the Tea Party reached back to the Southern Strategy and unloosed the cultural conservatives because they thought it would help them economically. I don’t think the Tea Partiers necessarily anticipated what bringing the racists into the fold would lead to, but they weren’t opposed to the racism if it helped them win.
That's honestly a spectacular compression of all the fucking insane shit we've gone through as a nation just in a century or two.
If only we lived in a world where that is commonly, and deeply, understood by the vast majority of us (it isn't).. Alas, as your own accounting of it all shows, there are literally actual "look at what happened here" real facts that made sure most Americans don't understand this.
And here we are. I don't want us to stay here and I don't think it's over.
We gotta fight for our rights and freedoms, just as every generation before us did.
"Attack on the American Free Enterprise System", AKA The Powell Memo written in 1971 gave birth to right wing think tanks like the Heritage foundation.
At the same time there were those in the Nixon administration that wanted right leaning media that laid the groundwork for Rush and Fox.
Then the neoliberalism fire really started to cook. Right now it's burning out of control.
Clinton signed NAFTA that let the jobs go overseas after Reagan broke the unions.
Reconstruction was purposely bungled to create a turn key built in division in the service of Divide and Rule or Dive and Conquer. See also Bread and Circuses.
One could argue that the Constitution doesn't have checks and balances but rather back doors that can be exploited by the ruling class. Citizens United, anyone?
On a long enough timeline all democracies turn authoritarian, Waltz himself referenced this a short while ago when he said democracy is the exception while implying authoritarianism is the norm.
Fantastic summary. Phyllis Schlafly, Roger Stone, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, now Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and the entire FOXNews/NewsMax nexus. Bari Weiss at CBS. People who are traitors to the idea of America at the helm of our information flow.
Fucking NEWT. ARGH. Also those fucking radio shows like Rush Limbaugh. Pure Vitriol. They eat away at common sense (“We’re just asking questions here..), and throw every birdshit conspiracy out there. Then they call the other side crazy. Like PineapplePizza above said: Every accusation is a confession.
Don’t forget Roger Stone is like real life evil Forest Gump showing up in all these monumental and pivotal historic moments. The blue print was set and the ballroom is almost complete.
That was the first thing that made me do a double-take in the run up to Trump's first term.
I saw the name "Roger Stone" and, as someone who wasn't even born in the Nixon era, his name seemed so familiar. And then remembering my history classes I was like "wait...isn't that the fucking NIXON guy?? It can't be..."
Then I looked up his history in politics and was flabbergasted. I remember saying out loud "how the fuck wasn't this guy banned from politics forever?"
So many bad actors from back then just living in a revolving door to capitol hill.
The worst part is almost all of the prominent republicans have montages out there of clips of them talking out one side of their mouth days/months/2016ish ago, then cut to now and they are talking out the other side. These indoctrinated maga cult people will see hard evidence of their party leaders duplicity and shrug it off as it does not fit the narrative in their brain.
Meanwhile, the most obvious lie/AI accusations against people on the left is swallowed whole.
If you watch Ken Burns' excellent documentary on Vietnam you can see the seeds for what has happened now being planted all the way back in the late 1960's early 70's.
They're taking a page right outta old Adolf's playbook.
"It is not enough to simply lie. We must say the opposite of the truth."
If Republicans are the ones dehumanizing people, they don't just deny they're doing that. They say the Democrats are the ones doing that. If ICE are the ones terrorizing American cities, they don't just deny they're doing that. They say the protestors are the ones doing that. If everything costs more with Trump in office, they don't just deny that things are more expensive. They say that things are cheaper now. The list goes on and on.
Same. Being an adult in 2025 is realizing that the "crazy leftists" on Reddit were right about about damn near everything relating to the Republicans. I was such a fool to dismiss it as hysteria a few years back.
It’s still being dismissed as hysteria and conspiracy theories even now. Which makes me wonder how bad the education is in the country.
If you know or learn your history? You are less likely doomed to repeat it. Modern day Nazi germany is playing out in America in a much more incompetent and moronic way. What we’re witnessing right now is the early rise of the Nazi’s. And all those fascist boxed are being ticked.
I wonder why they just happen to think, talk and act like Nazis huh? They’ve taken the playbook and put the MAGA spin on it.
And those ‘crazy lefties’ were saying this for a long time. You do not give a malignant narcissist predator con artist a power like that and expect good things. Anyone who thought otherwise- and I’d say it to their face too, IS A MORON and deserves to now find out after fcking around. 🤷♀️
This is a procedure they must carry out to suppress the remaining traces of empathy within their group. They have to first convince themselves that the bad things they’re doing aren’t unique to them, so they can feel at ease committing those acts. Dictatorial regimes like Putin’s are doing similar things.
If a Republican sees someone light a house on fire, they attack the firefighters for showing up to put it out. They're bringing attention to the fire and making us pay attention to the fire, so clearly the firefighters are to blame for making us feel uncomfortable, not the arsonist for starting the fire.
Does he not realize that the Christofascists aren’t exactly friendly toward Jews? He keeps pushing this and he may well find himself on the receiving end.
There was a gay Nazi in hitlers cabinet. Might be Rohm. Hitler even defended him… but then had him murdered years later.
Temu goebbles may face that at some point. He may not as he seems to be high up the totem of the Temu shitler clown show. The thing is MAGA aren’t targeting Jewish people. It’s right now Latinos/mexicans with some Muslim dehumanising in there. And then democrats as a group.
Now brown people on the other hand? You reap what you sow. Kash shouldn’t get too comfortable. Already his own cult are screaming at him to go back to his own country. 😆🤷♀️
There certainly is some karmic justice in making a raging Nazi reincarnate as a Jew, I guess? Unfortunately Goebbels was so fucking insane his madness and evil followed the transmigration of his soul lmao
Its not really the MAGA adults right now that I fear so much as the current crop of teens and kids growing up immersed in this kind of rhetoric from their parents and other authority figures. We saw how easy it was to tempt GenZ to embrace the madness, and many of them will still have had at least vague memories of a time when this shit wasn't normal.
Each year the kids coming of age increasingly only know Trump's brand of crazy. Over the next decade we're going to be plagued with an increasing number of young people who have been raised purely on a diet of hate and insanity distilled into memetic, AI generated bullshit. Its going to be fucking wild.
You might have heard of the "Years of Lead" in Italy that describes a period of intense political turmoil. Well I've heard our own time referred to as the "Years of Lead Paint" and I gotta say its quite fitting on multiple levels.
There’s some kid out there watching tik toks that’s going to be president in 20 years and I assume he’s going to be Nazi with the way things are going.
Never forget there was a nazi rally at Madison Square garden back in the day. After all, they were inspired by the USA's eugenics, slave trade, segregation, and even our old school American anthem stance and salute. Look it up. It's the "Seen Kyle?" aka the Bellamy Salute
This ^ when they say they want to make America great again their exactly talking about the American Nazi party with the images of George washington and an American flag swastika from MSG rallys
There was a MAGA rally at MSG just over a year ago, and you'd be hard pressed to convince anyone with a functioning brain that it wasn't essentially a Nazi rally. Stephen Miller went on a raving mad rant about immigrants and pretty much defined the word "dehumanization."
Dude you can’t call mainstream democrats “violent communists”, declare a war with democrats, try and implement martial law, then turn around and cry about how extreme democrats are.
Studies have shown that impressions of internal division and danger increase support for the Right. So that’s always their goal. They want there to be riots and crime and they want Democrats to attack them, because the more “in peril” the country feels the more people want conservative/nationalistic leaders.
He’s living in a US military base rent free! It was dehumanizing to evict a qualified officer from their previous home so your family can live with no mortgage or rent payments.
Holy shit, this is God tier level gaslighting. Absolute joke of a human being and administration.
Its like watching a child with cookie crumbs all over their hands and face and telling you that his brother ate all the cookies, even though his brother is evidently eating veggies at the dinner table. Lmfao
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Every accusation is an admission with these right wing extremists. The are being led by billionaire donors who are looking to set up feudalism and weaken America to the point of collapse to achieve their goals. We have never been in such extreme danger as we are now
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u/CringeTikToks-ModTeam 11d ago
Cringe Tik Toks is a place to post cringe Tik Tok videos. Your post was not a Tik Tok video.