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‘This feels like a repeat’: Republicans try to get a handle on their town hall problem
(www.huffpost.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Lol. Trump and Vance just sucked Putins cock for the world to see last week, while cancelling US Farmers contracts to USAID and mass firing USDA during a bird flu pandemic destroying our egg supply.
There is no final straw. This is what we got.
I'm not saying we need to take action immediately. Letting this toxicity stew for a few months is to the Democrats advantage. But the vast, vast majority of conservatives are brainwashed peasants who will not change their opinion.
GOPs explicit goal is to seek control of the majority of the majority of voters, which is only like 16% of people. (60% voters best case, 30% Republicans, only 16% of hardcore Republicans to keep in check). That's all they need to continue to stay in power.
What we can do is try to split that 16% group explicitly and try to turn them against each other. Farmers who lose government contracts, hawks who don't want to work with Russia, etc. etc. it's all microscopic fractions of a fraction of people but it adds up.
This view is naive. Trump isn't doing a terrific job dismantling US democracy, but he's still making headway. Wait a few months and some of those democrats might be in ICE prison camps.
The prison camps will take years to build. The current plan is to send people to Guantanamo Bay, which literally doesn't have enough room to make a dent in our protests.
The ideal is to wait long enough to convince the maximum number of dumbass MAGAts that they've been tricked by Trump. This number is smaller than people expect, but its not 0%. I'm already seeing some questions being posed in my Republican circles (ie: "Why isn't Trump more focused on these Federal cuts?") but not the right questions (ex: "Why is Trump so dumb??").
So the current environment is to our political advantage. We need to move before things reach the concentration camp or authoritarian stages of course, but we have some degree of time to work with.
The prison camps will take years to build (or not; never underestimate humanity's capacity for cruelty), but they don't need to be there for the new Gestapo to wreak havoc on Americans. Hitler definitely didn't need to wait for years.
Hitler relied upon the Reichstag fire to sieze power.
The Nazis were the specific kind of political entity to judo-reverse protesters and "prove" to the public that it was the Communist opposition who were truly the enemy. As the German public demonized the Communists, the Fascists gained in power weeks after Hitler took power.
The opposite is happening here: ever so slightly, public opinion is turning against Elon Musk (maybe not Trump yet, but DOGE is becoming a toxic word right now). A leftist "attack" in these times could consolidate the right much like the Reichstag fire did (or for a more American example: the two assassination attempts on Trump only allowed his side to grow stronger).