I think the line between a liberal democracy and fascism is much blurrier than most people think. I suspect the transition from one to the other, going in either direction, is entirely dependent on how much internal forces threaten the ruling capitalist class.

Right now, I think the US is on the decline but hasn’t yet experienced a crisis which really threatens the power of the capitalist class. Fascists seeking power therefore need to manufacture crises in order to accumulate power. That’s where I think the US is at right now.

However, I’m not sure how well it will really work. Democratic state leaders are effectively demonstrating that the existing law enforcement structures are perfectly capable of violently cracking down on dissent. So if you’re a wealthy capitalist, why would you push your bought and paid for judges and politicians to make Trump president for life? It seems like a needlessly risky move in my opinion.

That said, we can only say that the rich will operate rationally to protect their own interests on average. Individually, they can be wildly erratic like Elon Musk has proven to be. As such, the more wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the less predictable the outcomes are.

We aren't supposed to accept that law enforcement just does as it pleases, ignoring our civil rights and protections and donning standard identification markers so that each officer can be uniquely identified. But this is not all that new.

Most of the time we don't know we're being kidnapped by g-goons or the police are ignoring our rights until they're doing it, and we can only hope we get our day in court to challenge the arrest.

Since the development of DEA, the US courts have been carving out more and more exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments of the Constitution of the United States, and by even the 90s (with some big thanks to RICO laws / rulings) we are no longer policed by consent, but by force, because there's no one around with more firepower to stop them.

This was only noticed by minorities, especially in the 1990s with the crackdowns against street gangs and feral youths. At that point we were seeing ur-fascism feature #8 ( The enemy is both too strong and too weak ) where street gangs are described as feral youths who can't be negotiated with, while the same gang is an international organized-crime syndicate.

Then the 9/11 attacks happened, and the PATRIOT act was signed, and DHS was formed, and we noticed that some Americans, typically Muslim Arab-Americans, but sometimes Persian-Americans, sometimes Sikhs...really anyone who looked too middle-eastern, got disappeared by LGMs (dudes who look like cops but without personal or department identification, sometimes without the yellow POLICE plates), and rendered abroad to black sites to get tortured. But much of the US overlooked it because we were sore about WTC1 and WTC2.

(some of us screamed like Cassandra that this was a big move towards fascist autocracy, but I digress)

When Obama took over FBI was searching hard for terrorists in US borders but couldn't find many, and had to invent some (Remember Kellyanne Conway's Bowling Green Massacre? In the actual Bowling Green event no-one died but two refugees were gaslighted by FBI with a budget into doing some inoffensive para-terrorist work, and entrapped into terrorism charges. They're still serving time.)

By then, our massive surveillance state was in operation and all of the US' internet traffic went through NSA, and when there were Islamist militants who were thinking about a plot to suicide bomb an American asset, we'd send a predator drone to literally burn his village down: the CIA drone program killed 50 civilians -- including grandmothers and children-- for every person-of-interest neutralized. We learned that while video games don't make kids violent, making real-world warfare like a video game still meant the operator squeezing the trigger got PTSD. US drone programs had a turnover rate about as bad as German einsatzgruppen (death squads who mass executed villages for betrayal or harboring Jews).

So in 2016 when Trump won, Cassandra over here screamed about the Obama administration disabling all the mass intelligence state and surveillance state assets before Trump could get a hold of them.

We got a break, as Trump pissed off CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, so they weren't talking for a while, but then, somehow, when he had a Heritage Foundation plan and staffers who knew what structures were in place, we elected him President of the United States for a second time. Even despite his insurrection charges (which were stalled until moot).

So yeah, the previous administrations, knowing this was going to be a problem gave the Trump regime is very own SS / Brownshirt secret police (who behave a lot like the Sicherheitsdienst under Reinhard Heydrich) complete with a concentration camp system that is overflowing due to purge quotas.

During the 2020 George Floyd protests, there was a move to abolish ICE who had been hunting undocumented folk and were sent in to brutalize the demonstrations, which only pissed off more Americans, and there was a movement to Abolish ICE (what was always just a paramilitary department to serve the will and interests of the current administration, id est, a secret police).

We are now suffering the consequences of having failed to follow through.

The recipe has been in play for over a decade, probably more. People can't stand up if they have nothing to stand on. Everyone is struggling. What the fuck is fascism if you have to concentrate on just surviving. That's the whole play. They give us just enough to get by so we can live with no time to think. It's not denial, it's an orchestrated structure. The system isn't flawed, it's working as intended

Pull ICE masks, I would let them shoot me just to protect the person they're abducting, fckn nazi's, u wanna shoot an american citizen and make me a martyr? be my guess and see what'll happen

Call your rep - demand Israel pay reparations for attacks.

Third term? I'd be glad if we came to terms with it by his 6th term.

Now? You think this happens at the drop of a hat? The entire system is built that way since decades.

For some it'll probably take til his fourth

What pic are they referencing?

America supported the Nazis during World War II. It was all just a weaken Russia. And it's never really just one thing. You know, it's multiple things. The control structure feeds into itself many different ways. It's almost as if we live in and like a spider's web. Our sole existence on this planet is to support the control structure and that control structure is worse than fascism. Capitalism in crisis creates the populist movements, especially the "good old days types" To crawl out of their crevices and beat their chest, and basically be guided like a horse by the ruling class in order for us to tear ourselves apart in order for law and order to set in and the new standards to begin.. I mean we are one of the most subservient and cucked societies that's ever existed in human history. This will all become more apparent as the climate changes, and we all become climate refugees.I think liberals are becoming more radical and yet they don't realize that the majority of the real left wing in America has already viewed America as a fascist regime for a long time. Also, some of these liberal movements I think will be co-opted and kind of turned into fascist action. I mean liberals are honestly the number one reason why we have no progress in this country. They occupy the space that should be filled with people that understand the evils of capitalism. But we remember Nancy Pelosi talking about a free market economy, whatever the fuck that means. I mean that bitch is too busy counting her money and getting her hair done. To be more specific, America is an imperialist empire, and fascists are the useful idiots of empire. Yankees live in a vacuum. The libturds are always late to the party. I literally could of had kids. I was on the path and I chose not to because I knew too much. And so that's why I can say things so "negatively" and freely. I see the world as it is, not as I want it to be. My ear has been to the ground for a long time. I've read a lot, listen to a lot. I've seen a lot. There is no war but the class war i can guarantee that. Capitalism is a system of the lowest common denominator. It is reflexive based upon emotion and not needs. We won't solve our problems using this current economic system. Artificial intelligence is scary because it's stupid, not because it's actually capable of being accurate or helpful. And we literally feed into it. Without us, it does nothing. It needs data sets. It needs certain things. One of those things will be water. Just basic public utilities is gonna be shit and way out of reach for most people. There will be more homelessness and they'll just throw them in prison and make them work for free. They'll trick you in to taking out credit that you can't pay because they want to put you in jail. All these things have happened in history. It's just a lazy man's solution to a problem, especially when they just view you as cattle. The people at the top are by far the most cruel and unprincipled disgusting human beings that have ever existed in society. We live in an inversion. A world where evolution is an exponential decay function.

We did just have the largest protest in the history of the nation... I think some of us are aware.