I generally avoid sites like that but I spend quite a lot of time on facebook and IG and there’s posts advocating violence all the time, especially on my local city page. A bunch of thugs even went to my (barely) liberal mayor’s house and camped out there for a few days to intimidate her. I have received death threats.
I’ve been to gun stores around here lately and ammo has been dried up for months. Something’s brewing, and if you don’t think it is, I kind of don’t understand it at all. We’re living through a fascist takeover and I dont know of many of those that dont have an element of violence attached to them.
This might be true. OR… It might be that these people have been emboldened to come out from under their rocks. You can’t deny they’ve been much more brazen lately. I for one, have been shocked to learn these fascist racists live among us in such numbers. I was ignorant I guess
That’s actually comforting. I often don’t realize how bad it was in the 60’s. But the main difference between then and now is that police weren’t nearly as heavily armed or willing to use deadly force. Back then, they beat people with their sticks and sprayed them with water cannons. Now it’s tear gas, rubber bullets, and tasers. Tomorrow… ??
Also, was it mainly hippies fighting police and the establishment? Or were they fighting each other? I can’t tell from that video, but it does look like people were swinging at each other. I’m bad at history
There’s no doubt that extremist right-wing violence is on the rise, but it’s preposterous to imagine that Trump is going to launch a coup backed by the fucking Proud Boys and the boogaloo movement. Trump’s path to holding on to the White House runs exclusively through manufacturing (or hell, who knows, actually winning) an electoral college victory, and then convincing the existing powers that be to accept it. Violence in the streets is just a prop in that struggle.
I don’t think overreacting is the right word. Sometimes I wonder if apocalyptic visions are a sort of defense mechanism. That by fixating on an improbable absolute worst case scenario we distract ourselves from the mundane horrors of our present. You also wrote:
We do know. We’ve been clearly demonstrating who we are for hundreds of years, but we keep trying to pretend we’re something else instead. We’re the culture that does genocide and puts people in concentration camps and murders millions with bombs and has forced sterilization eugenics programs and actively supports brutal dictators with weapons and money and turns a blind eye to the growing homeless camps in every city in one of the wealthiest countries that ever existed where healthcare is denied to those who can’t pay and children go to bed hungry every night. That’s us.
Nobody hopes you’re right and I’m wrong more than me. zikzak may have correctly diagnosed my problem that this apocalyptic vision I have is a defense mechanism. I sure hope so
But the country survived it and 60 years later we still have our illusion of freedom
I’m really hoping things can be fixed through voting. Get all these Dem and GOP establishment fucks who grift in favor of the wealthy out of politics and replace them with progressives who genuinely care of equality and the environment. That might still be possible under Biden, but if Trump wins a 2nd term, that option is dead and will never be realized in time
So what you’re saying is that there won’t be a ton of violence because people are just going to accept our descent into fascism. I don’t believe you agree that’s the right thing to do. Yet, you’re not advocating violence to fight it. What else is there?
I have nothing to back this up, but I want to explore the theory that secularization has led young white people who in the past might be religious conservatives to instead embrace 4chan and Qanon as a source of values.
I neither advocated nor not advocated anything, but most violence is counterproductive (that’s not the same thing as saying it’s morally wrong). That’s why at this point false flags are a thing. It usually helps a cause more on the whole to be the victim rather than perpetrator of violence. That’s not the way it is in the middle of a war, but that’s not where we are.
But, there’s all kinds of non-violent protest and disruption that’s more than just a parade.
If Biden wins, we are going to have a lot of aggrieved white people. Is their reaction going to be more like the Boston anti-busing riots or the Red Summer?
I think some people just don’t understand the potential for violence because they lack the ability to empathize with people who have violent impulses. (Empathy is not approval.) These people are real. They are not just a bunch of cosplayers who are all talk. They made need some sort of stimulus to push them over the edge, but they are primed.
That’s all I’m saying really, is that people are primed. I ask too - why couldnt it happen here? I don’t think this election will be the stimulus required for massive violence. I think it’ll take a lot more economic pain for people to get to that point. People are still comfortable.
But I have predicted some stuff that seemed a little alarmist when I posted it, that have turned out to come true, so I have a tendency now to trust my own intuition with this shit and I have a REALLY uncomfortable feeling.