But with guns.
Would never have happened if the toaster had a gun
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This is what happens when the US President declares the media âthe enemy of the American peopleâ.
Yes just like the time he said school children, cinema goers, church goers and pedestrians were an enemy of the United States
Dumb rating
The whole thoughts and prayers thing is just insulting now.
As always, the simplest explanation is the most likely. A nutter with a long standing grudge against the newspaper in question. Sadly for the lefty headbangers, nothing to do with Trump.
Aye, nothing to do with Trump. The man running the country where you can buy a gun as easy as a tub of ice-cream
When did he buy the gun?
An ice cream van
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Not an entirely ridiculous propositionâŚ
In a Walmart last week
I used to be horrified by these shootings⌠then I was angry⌠Now Iâm fully supportive of them. If they want guns in their society let them enjoy the fruits of their labour.
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Exactly. Theyâve made a choice that all of these killings are worth it because a few lads who were fighting the Brits nearly 300 years ago thought everyone should have muskets. Morons.
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Labane is âfanatically committedâ.
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism â a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget âpost-fascistâ â what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesnât arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections â weâve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority â it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesnât matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. Thatâs been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of âalternative factsâ impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
Moral boundaries
But when youâve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.
It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Letâs do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: letâs see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.
To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a âmistakeâ by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run â and the trial has been a huge success. Trumpâs claim last week that immigrants âinfestâ the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course âverminâ. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment â it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.
âDeviousâ infants
And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it â his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us â should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trumpâs overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.
This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, âyet but young in deedâ. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow.
Another moron who doesnât understand the US system of government. Congress is the legislative branch of government and writes the laws mate.
Another hysterical left wing moron who can only see evil from the right and never sees it from the left. Extremely right wing and extremely left wing ideology are equally dangerous. Fintan should spend a bit of time in Venezuela and report on the glowing success of socialism there. He wonât though because like yourself he is blinded by extremist ideology.
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