Mom’s side: Jews escaping Europe for the usual reasons (19th century)
Dad’s side: Spaniards in California who became American when California did

Yes I firmly believe this is what makes the Dutch city where I live special: the city officials are obviously obsessed with it. They spend so much time lovingly creating public gardens and cute little places to hang out.

There are a lot of folks out there, ostensibly on the left, who take it upon themselves to spread the propaganda of the regime (their victory is inevitable; there will be no consequences for their actions; elections will be irrelevant)

At least most of the rightwing grifters are getting paid for it

i think if you post like this without offering concrete steps people can take to prepare for and respond to interference or without any acknowledgement of the success (or lack thereof) of this strategy then you are basically engaged in voter suppression.

Even Schumer called for Miller to be fired. A lot of them talk about him.

I felt this way, too! And I remember trying to soothe myself with that thought: resistance will increase, just try to be patient. Here we are a year later and I am overwhelmed with admiration for the bravery of ordinary people.

There’s a book about this: “It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office,” by Dale Beran (2019)

It wasn't just democratic decision models they rejected. It was also the form of reason upon which democracy is premised: using empirical evidence to form judgment. As more people repeated this maxim, a thinly veiled authoritarian impulse, it was clear that this was gonna have spillover effects

I spent the last 15 years listening to tech executives complain, "This isn't a democracy!", which seemed to mean, "Other people shouldn't get an opinion," when confronted with very legitimate evidence that their org structure was totally dysfunctional and they lacked any vision beyond "make money"

Woke 1: the loser I knew in college who wrecked his brain with drugs, posting about how Kamala actually would have also started concentration camps and would have been "objectively worse"

Woke 2: Bill Kristol ranting about how we must destroy ICE root and branch

There's a book I read in grad school, Purify & Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre & Genocide, by Jacques Semelin, a French historian. One of his primary contentions is that these movements are generally accompanied by an intelligentsia that gives them form and legitimacy.

The very word “genocide” was coined by a Jewish lawyer whose life’s work was to enshrine it as an international war crime— the obvious implication of which being that it was not a one time super special word that could only be used in this instance.

Only a guaranteed disaster if we assume the politics of these places stays static as their demographics change. It appears threatening, sure, but we’ve got to remember the zeitgeist will also shift with the movement of people (and whatever else happens along the way).

A friend sent this to me the other day

Yes, and they mistake the map for the territory. They believe the theory they have learned is a correct depiction of society, rather than just a lens through which to contextualize certain dynamics. It's a perverse irony where they are just as trapped in their assumptions as the worst reactionaries.

MAGA is defined by its total lack of a theory of mind for its enemies, and the fact that DHS and ICE still haven't wrapped their brains around the fact that their opponents also are able to highly effectively use the Internet to message, organize, and communicate really highlights that.