It weeps for betrayal, intended or not
Some time ago now, I think, the twenty-four-hour news cycle fast-forwarded through itself and became an ouroboros self-devoured from inception. On the personal scale, I feel I should mention that I made it to my ENT appointment on Friday and received useful news about the state of the inside of my head that made the hassle of the COVID-19 test worth it and in the process had the closest thing to an actual date with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks that either of us has been able to manage since the late winter and then I spent most of the rest of the day having what I identified after the fact as PTSD. Yesterday was better, except for the news. Today I have just read that the man in the White House has declared antifa to be domestic terrorism, which should perhaps feel more like the gloves have come off than it seems to: the dogwhistles have been ordinary whistles for so long, surely it can't be the first time he has openly acknowledged that the government of the United States is now a fascist regime? What else does it mean to be anti-fascism and designated an enemy of the state? Well, bella ciao. The Minnesota Freedom Fund is now encouraging donations to local, especially Black/BIPOC-led organizations, so here's the Massachusetts Bail Fund and Black Lives Matter, because they still do. Previously this evening I watched a movie I enjoyed very much. How to be a person in a burning world. It's not like I haven't read the literature.
rushthatspeaks that either of us has been able to manage since the late winter and then I spent most of the rest of the day having what I identified after the fact as PTSD. Yesterday was better, except for the news. Today I have just read that the man in the White House has declared antifa to be domestic terrorism, which should perhaps feel more like the gloves have come off than it seems to: the dogwhistles have been ordinary whistles for so long, surely it can't be the first time he has openly acknowledged that the government of the United States is now a fascist regime? What else does it mean to be anti-fascism and designated an enemy of the state? Well, bella ciao. The Minnesota Freedom Fund is now encouraging donations to local, especially Black/BIPOC-led organizations, so here's the Massachusetts Bail Fund and Black Lives Matter, because they still do. Previously this evening I watched a movie I enjoyed very much. How to be a person in a burning world. It's not like I haven't read the literature.
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TRUMP: I wanna do (outrageous, illegal, totally unsupported by anyone other than his whacko son-in-law thing)!
EVERYONE, INCLUDING LAWYERS, THE GENERAL CITIZENRY, WHAT FEW NON-BATSHIT ADVISORS ARE LEFT, THE MEDIA: You cannot do that, it is illegal, wrong, has never been done before in this country, violates the ethos of this country, and you don't even know what day it is probably.
TRUMP: But I wanna!
EVERYONE: NO.
//months pass during which Trump proposes and does a lot of other horrible enraging things
TRUMP: I wanna do this thing you told me I couldn't do!
EVERYONE: //exhausted
TRUMP: //does the thing
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Per the Globe article:
"The practical effect of the president's declaration was unclear. While domestic terrorism is defined in the 2001 Patriot Act bill — and law enforcement could use the designation to seek enhanced powers to investigate members of the group — there are no current designated domestic terrorist organizations.
"There's also no explicit law against providing support to domestic terrorist organizations — unlike groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations. The Antifa movement is largely decentralized, with activists organizing their protest activities online or in small, decentralized groups."
It's entirely possible that the man in the White House doesn't even know what antifa means other than "people who don't like him and Fox News doesn't like." I just don't want it to become a quick and easy route to stripping protesters of their constitutional rights and black-bagging them. That is the sort of thing I worry about with this government.
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Not necessarily. It's worth pointing out that his legal support for this move is bupkes and the enactment of it is not yet obvious. But it's still dangerous that he said it. (Stochastic terrorism.) And the message was received.
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Of course. It's not my term; I first started hearing it in 2016. The formal definition is "the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable." It's all about the clean hands of plausible deniability: I didn't tell that counter-protestor to murder that protestor. There has never been any communication between us. I didn't even know that counter-protestor existed. Oh, I did repeat over and over again that the protestors are terrorists, animals, enemies to be met with deadly violence. But it's not my fault if some crazy stranger took me seriously. So sad that the shooting started, and so many people I have demonized are dead.
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