Violence is never justified for any reason. There is no exception to this rule. Sometimes you must use force to protect life or avoid serious harm as the lesser of two evils. But that is not at all the same thing. And some people don't realize, threatening words, sometimes just hurtful words, are their own form of violence. Because they do harm. Often a lot more than action. Because they are easier to get away with and we often don't see the harm they did. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” He meant causing a clear and present danger, or any danger that was open and obvious at that moment. Or, as I once heard, saying of your school "Burn it down!" Because just saying you wouldn't mind if you're school was burned down just expresses an opinion, and has never been illegal. A lawyer friend of mine told me a while back though, it goes much further than just causing a stampede that leads to injury in a theater. It could be yelling "I have a bomb!" on an airplane. That wouldn't cause a dangerous stampede. Because people would have no place to go. But people would feel in great danger. Those are called fighting words, after Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942. Because to start a fight, you don't have to throw the first punch to have started it. But fighting words don't have to just involve a fist fight to not be protected speech. And my law dictionary says ultimately, and in more serious cases, it doesn't even matter if your threatening words were just a joke even. For example, if you walked into a bank laughing, and told the teller give me all your money or I'll shoot you. It wouldn't matter if it was a joke. It wouldn't matter even if she actually gave you the money. Since it was a joke, you would just give it back anyways obviously. But if you made her fear for her life because of your reckless joke, that is all the authorities would need. Need to charge you with armed robbery that is. Because the judge would later explain to you, that was not funny. It never is, to do something like that. And after 9-11, two young men thought it would be funny to sit in their seats on an airplane and pretend that they were discussing hijacking the plane and blowing it up. They were laughing, and pretending they didn't want to be overheard. But it was after 9-11 and people took it very seriously. So they still got arrested and charged with a crime when the plane landed. There are limits though to the idea of what words cause a breach of peace. In Texas v. Johnson, 1989, the state of Texas said that flag burning should be illegal. Because this is Texas, and when we see people do that, we feel like beating them up. The Supreme Court said that really is not the same thing as causing a breach of peace. Because if people want to beat you up for that reason, they're the ones with the problem. Also, where I live, a while back, a hate group wanted to give a speech on a college campus. But a peaceful one. The students said if might lead to violence. But a court disagreed. So a bunch of students showed up, and started causing trouble, some violence in other words. I never supported hate speech. But I have always supported free speech. Because showing up and causing violence to prove your point doesn't prove your point. It actually discredits you. Because like Justice Harlan said in Cohen v. California, 1971, writing for the majority, “The argument amounts to little more than the self-defeating proposition that to avoid physical censorship of one who has not sought to provoke such a response by a hypothetical coterie of the violent and lawless, the States may more appropriately effectuate that censorship themselves.”
Counties that hosted Trump rallies in 2016 saw a 226% increase in hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally in subsequent months. Words matter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rhetoric-does-inspire-more-hate-crimes/
Despite years of falling crime rates, there's been an 84% increase in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes in two years due to Reich-Wing scapegoating and demagoguery. With their constant demonizing of Trans folk, gender-identity based hate crimes are up 78%. Hate Crimes Are Up, Especially Against LGBTQ People. Advocates Blame the GOP.
Cause & effect. Fact check: Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response North Carolina hurricane recovery team relocated amid threat of ‘armed militia’ Government emergency workers in the US responding to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina were relocated over the weekend amid concerns that “armed militia” could pose a threat to their safety. A US Forest Service official sent out a message warning that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately”. The message said that soldiers with the national guard “had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA”.
It's a sad fact of life here, that one person can come on the political / social scene and literally screw most everything up, from the highest court in the land to one of the traditional political parties, to most all social discourse extant and continues to spout outrageous lies on and on and on---and is believed by half the citizens! I suppose we deserve this near complete disruption of most systems if all it took was this one damaged individual to cause all the present, ongoing and presumed coming damage. It was our democracy--if we could keep it. Can anything stand up this constant wave of bullshit? Or is it ALL bullshit? Are there groups of citizens who have been dis-included from political-economic power? Some for generations? Excluded from education because of cost? Being able to see how some people live so easily and / or extravagantly while the so-called American dream for them is a myth? One thing for sure, IMO---this one person has / is showing that this society better damn well become more inclusive and start to provably care for ALL citizens and start to level the inequities out or kiss it all goodbye. And of course, laugh the motherfucker off the stage and thank him for waking us up what can happen if anyone like him comes along again.
American creating deepfakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show Russian documents expose the workings of a Moscow network that has become a potent source of fake news targeting American voters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/23/dougan-russian-disinformation-harris
True, Hitler was still a quintessential political animal and had a political vision, as bad as it was. Orangina is a quintessential reality show persona playing at politics, not the best comparison. Both in rhetoric and general modus operandi, he is much closer to a “chaotic evil” African banana dictator, while Hitler was way too sophisticated and “lawful evil” to compare. But I guess Hitler is a more well-known and therefore more usable symbol in political propaganda than obscure banana dictators would be. I am not sure how many of his voters, and him too for that matter, could even find more than 2-3 countries on the map of Africa (still can't wrap my mind around this being a reasonable assumption about someone competing to run a superpower btw), you have to go with something that will stick more.
It's not mere hyperbole. "In her discussion with host Anderson Cooper, Harris focused on the reiteration yesterday by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general John Kelly, that Trump had spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler and expressed a desire to have generals like Hitler’s. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said Trump “met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.” The ideology of fascism is associated with Italian journalist and politician Benito Mussolini, who articulated a new political ideology in the 1920s. Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter what socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince their neighbors that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production. The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini to give up on socialism and develop a new political theory. Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that some men were better than others. Those few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They must organize the people as they had during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate. This hierarchical system of government was called “fascism” after the bundle of rods tied around an axe that was the ancient Roman symbol of authority and power. Italy adopted it, and Mussolini’s ideas inspired others, notably Germany’s Adolf Hitler. These leaders believed that their new system would reclaim a glorious past with the ideology of the future, welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers. They set out to eliminate those who didn’t fit their model and to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way. But while today we associate fascism with this European movement, its foundational principle—that some men are better than others and have the right and even the duty to rule over the majority—runs parallel to that same strand in United States history. Indeed, Nazi lawyers and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws for inspiration, and Hitler looked to America’s Indigenous reservations as a way to rid a country of “unwanted” people. For retired Marine general John Kelly to have spoken out against Trump before the 2024 election was a huge deal. As Secretary Buttigieg put it: “It’s one thing for some leftist group to call you a fascist. Quite another when it’s a fellow Republican. And absolutely astonishing when it’s your own chief of staff.” But Kelly was not alone. Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told veteran journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.” In tonight’s CNN town hall, Vice President Harris told Cooper that she agreed that Trump is a fascist. She noted that when a four-star Marine general comes out two weeks before an election to warn Americans that one of the candidates is a fascist, we should see this as “a 911 call to the American people.” Trump is “increasingly unstable,” Harris said, “and unfit to serve…. [T]he people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House, in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, all Republicans by the way, who served in his administration, his former chief of staff, his national security advisor, former secretaries of defense, and his vice president have all called him unfit and dangerous. They have said explicitly he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. They have said he should never again serve as President of the United States,” she said." Heather Cox Richardson
This is rich. The left is promoting violence! This from a paper that backs Trump, who,let us recall, has offered to pay the legal expenses of anyone to "knock the crap " out of protestors, he called the two Boston men who beat a homeless man with a pipe compassionate, has said he wold be "a little more violent" with protestors, has claimed,“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” has said “I’d like to punch him in the face,” in reference to a peaceful protestor. He supports waterboarding (and worse), supports police violence, called an attack by supporter on a peaceful black supporter by a man who said he might have to kill him next time “very, very appropriate” and the kind of action “we need a little bit more of.” He has said, ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’, said so what as his insurrectionists chanted hang Mike Pence, has attacked the free press and called it the enemy of the people, called "some" Nazis good people, wants to terminate the Constitution, set up interment camps, deport one in every 15 U.S. citizens (20 million), wants to be dictator on day one, etc. etc. etc. Shall I go on? Donald Trump is the accelerant: A comprehensive timeline of Trump encouraging hate groups and political violence. Here are 20 serious points of comparison between the early Hitler and Trump: 1. Neither was elected by a majority. 2. Both found direct communication channels to their base. 3. Both blame others and divide on racial lines. 4. Both relentlessly demonize opponents. 5. They unceasingly attack objective truth. 6. They relentlessly attack mainstream media. 7. Their attacks on truth include science. 8. Their lies blur reality--and supporters spread them. 9. Both orchestrated mass rallies to show status. 10. They embrace extreme nationalism. 11. Both made closing borders a centerpiece. 12. They embraced mass detention and deportations. 13. Both used borders to protect selected industries. 14. They cemented their rule by enriching elites. 15. Both rejected international norms. 16. They attack domestic democratic processes. 17. Both attack the judiciary and rule of law. 18. Both glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths. 19. They proclaim unchecked power. 20. Both relegate women to subordinate roles.
Relevant post, but you know that none of what you posted will matter one bit to trump lovers-believers. Shame, that.
Both in rhetoric and general modus operandi, he is much closer to a “chaotic evil” African banana dictator. OK. We can compare Trump to this archtype, a sort of cartoon, yes. Inqury is good. But we might also compare Trump to actual current political leaders who are closer to home and in the news. Venezuela's Maduro regime and Cuba's Manuel Diaz Camal come to mind. But this may be a little too close to home for most Democrats. The failed state centered economies. failed re-disbution of economic plumbs. The ferocious supporters of the regime who are government employees and beneficiaries of what remaining largesse remains in those nations. The cult; not a cult of leader but a cult of party. the hyper politicization of everyday life. Denial of political all discourse as verboten, off limits, corrupting. State centered media. That our current administration has pandered to these regimes would also negate Democratic willingness to visit this comparison. So much better to proffer up a cartoon of Hitler for comparison where critical thinking is limited. We are offered a portrait of The Omen and Rosemarys Baby all rolled into one. Otherwise thinking, Intelectual people are taking this bait and acting on it. The Hitler charge is an assault on genuine curiousity on the powers of the two political blocs competing in this election.
Linking US Democrats to Maduro and calling them socialists or even communists is a ridiculous level of political propaganda based on political and historical illiteracy. From an European perspective Harris is center-right and Sanders a moderate, and I would argue that most Western European countries have a more functional democracy and a higher quality of life than the US. There is no real socialist anywhere close to getting into power and the whole country is right - skewed. The problem with Maduro is the same as with truckloads of other both right and left-leaning SA dictators throughout modern history. It is in a totalitarian structure of power and undermining democratic procedures, it is irrelevant under which ideology, it can be done from left or right equally. In my political memory from Reagan in childhood onwards, Trump shows the most totalitarian and anti-democratic traits amongst US presidents, so if anything he is the one that presents a Maduro-style danger, not Harris.
Post 15? What the fuck are you typing about? Discard the gibberish and make some understandable points.
Mayor Adams defended Donald Trump Saturday, slamming claims from Democrats that the Republican nominee is a “fascist” who could be compared to Adolf Hitler. “I have had those comments hurled at me by some political leaders in the city; my answer is ‘No,’ ” said an embattled Adams, when asked about the criticism of Trump. “I know what Hitler has done, and I know what a fascist regime looks like. I think, as I have called for over and over again, that the level of conversation, I think we can all dial down the temperature,” added Adams, a moderate Dem currently facing federal corruption charges. Adams made the remarks while speaking at a Manhattan news conference outlining what he called “large police presence” being planned for Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and President Biden began hammering Trump this week after claims emerged that the former commander-in-chief had praised Hitler while in the Oval Office. The allegation surfaced in The Atlantic and was later confirmed by retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s one time White House chief of staff.
