this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
740 points (99.5% liked)
Not The Onion
15820 readers
1764 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, makes sense, Hitler is one of Trump's favorite authors.
No, I am not being hyperbolic.
https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trumps-ex-wife-once-said-he-kept-a-book-of-hitlers-speeches-by-his-bed-2015-8?op=1
Trump kept a collection of Hitler's speechs from the 1930s in his nighstand table, and would read from it before going to bed in the 80s and 90s.
When asked about this,
" 'Trump hesitated' and then said, 'Who told you that?' "
This was an article written in 2015.
Yep.
It is mostly just revisiting older news from decades before that... as would be reasonable when a newcomer to politics now seems to stand a reasonable chance of becoming President, might want to do a more thorough journalistic background check on the guy.
Leftists critical of Trump, back then, before even his first term, were ... you know, kind of worried about Trump having Hitler in his nightstand table, very, very obviously seeing him as a role model and source of inspiration...
And then they said things like ... is Trump a Nazi? Is Trump a fascist? This stuff is ... quite concerning, along with his bombastic rhetoric and extremely nebulous and fluid 'policies', that all seem to converge on a return to past greatness, hypermasculinity, racism, sexism... all very much in line with ... a populist, which historically very often leads to fascism...
And then almost every one else in the country dismissed that as hyperbolic nonsense, and 'everything/one you don't like is fascist' was born.
... And now here we are, evidently in the bizzaro clownworld timeline, where Trump is 'the joker, baby' all the Republicans are his brainwashed cult of goons, the Democrats almost all as well sane-washed the shit out of Trump untill way after it was too late... and, as is also predictable broadly by history, the leftists, with few exceptions, fought each other over idpol, purity tests and tone policing, effectively negating any coherent opposition.
Impossible challenge: name a scenario in which the socialists' warnings to the public haven't come true.
Also about the last part, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party (basically the entire thing) has been paid off by billionaires, and is therefore incompatible with leftist idiology. When one side says "we want single payer healthcare" and the other says "we believe in the need for the profit motive in the healthcare industry and we will block any and all attempts at diminishing the profits of health insurance corporations," then those two sides have inherently incompatible idiologies and compromise is impossible.
Also about the tone policing, I believe that was a literal psyop by the neoliberal wing and billionaires in order to push people away from left wing (socialist) idiology. See: the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual, which perfectly describes this method of sabotaging (in this case) a political movement. There's also the side effect of people who buy into tone policing doing the work for them and not focusing on economic issues.
I agree with all of that.
Maybe ... 5 to 10% of Dems, like Federal Congresspeople, State governors... are willing to meaningfully go against pro corporate policies... at least more than half of the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of psyop used to induce or intensify infighting among younger leftists, but I also wouldn't be surprised if ... there really wasn't something specifically aimed at doing exactly that.
I know Russia has been very successfully employing the uh, hyperreality tactic, just fund or assist or influence enough people who are bombastic enough in any political persuasion, publish and spread baseless nonsense all across the spectrum to just sow general chaos...
But I do also think a lot of it really is people just adopting a vocabulary generally shared by leftists and then using it to their own, individual ends.
The thing with the CIA's Simple Sabotage model is that it describes basically every social circle or work environment I've ever been in, or hear about from a friend.
General incompetence and ... wasting time over petty stupid bullshit ... just sounds like the norm in America generally, for pretty much my whole life... but maybe I have just had particularly bad luck with that.