• @AFaithfulNihilist
    70•3 months ago

    It’s not ironic it’s intentional.

    After 9/11, this country took a hard turn into fascism and boot licking. I was complaining about the new McCarthyism, the demented expansion of the police state, and the march to the right when my aunt interrupted me to say “not everyone thinks McCarthy was the bad guy there.” She said it was such smug indignation I was genuinely shocked there were people that were fans of McCarthy.

    When I said that that kind of un-American behavior leads to stuff like Kent State, she said, “If you can’t be loyal to the troops you get what you deserve.” That’s when I realized that we as a nation were absolutely fucked.

    • themeatbridge
      16•3 months ago

      After 9/11…

      Fascism and bootlicking were in vogue among conservatives since Nixon.

      • @AFaithfulNihilist
        5•3 months ago

        That’s for sure and I think you can make a pretty reasonable case that they only got worse. They managed to convince most Americans that somehow were becoming more liberal despite the fact that we’re in reality we are getting more fascist every fucking year.

        We’ve moved so far to the right as a country that Joe Biden is more of a right-wing Republican than Reagan was. It just so happens that the alternative to Joe Biden is Donald Trump who is somewhere to the right of Hitler, And if Donald Trump were literate we would be in even worse shape right now.

      • @GroundedGator
        2•3 months ago

        Maybe, but there was definitely a dramatic uptick in highschool and college aged groups that wasn’t as pronounced before. I watched friends who had laughed at recruiters only a year before practically run to recruiting offices. I still know people who fully believe Sadam and Iran worked together to hide WMD.

        Funny thinking back to it, those conspiracies were at least plausible.

      • @AFaithfulNihilist
        10•3 months ago

        This nation then reelected George w Bush while it brutally cracked down on protests and got super extra racist real fast and just in time to go murder 170,000 people in two countries that didn’t attack us.

        It’s kind of hard to believe that she’s not sort of typical of American fascism. Our actions as a nation make it hard to believe that American fascism isn’t somehow incredibly widely tolerated and promoted.

        Then we had Donald Trump, and the entire court system seems to be utterly incapable of dealing with this level of corruption or criminality but the right wing and the neoliberal apologists who own most of the revenue driven media seem to think this is somehow okay.

      • @Serinus
        5•3 months ago

        She’s enough of it to be a real problem.

        I’ll grant that most aren’t aware enough to make comments on McCarthy specifically, but they would if they could.

        Way too much of the country is running those things blue line flags and licking boots as hard as they can while thinking they’re doing the opposite.