• PhilipTheBucketOPA
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    2 days ago

    This country is pretty friendly to fascists.

    Actually… maybe that’s not true. Back in Nixon’s day I think it was. The media was pretty honest about Nixon, and most of the country liked what they saw. Nixon and Reagan managed to have enough success putting all this Republican stuff into practice, though, that enough of the country realized they hated the fuck out of it when it was happening to them in real-life reality, that they had to start telling wild professionally-concocted lies about what they were up to.

    They invested money into it like the space program. That was the whole genesis of Fox News, that started the whole misery of modern industrial scale weapons-grade-lies media. Roger Ailes with quite a bit of foresight realized that the American public really needed to not be able to understand reality if he and his friends were going to be able to get anywhere.

    And then, much later, the Russian government said, “Check this shit out. You guys are amateurs.”

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      Nixon also did shit like signed off on the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

      The old fascists still cared about society functioning they just wanted to control it. Trump doesn’t give one fucking hoot how bad things get as long as he gets to be in charge.

      • PhilipTheBucketOPA
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        2 days ago

        Yeah. If Trump had talked to Nixon about colluding with the Russians to overthrow American democracy so he and his friends could steal a bunch of the wreckage, even Nixon would have clocked him and hauled him down to the Justice Department to sit in the dock for treason.

        Of course, the germ was there even in Nixon. Just like Mr. Mayer’s system, it could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself, it was compelled to go all the way.