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State Terror, American Style

paulkrugman.substack.com

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Re: State Terror, American Style

#61

Post by ModernMech »

tdeck wrote: post #59
ModernMech wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you look back at Trump's reaction to J6, you can tell he reveled in the violence that day. Pausing and rewinding Fox News to watch the crowds while not picking up the phone or tweeting to quell it; when he did tweet it served to instigate bloodlust for Mike Pence; and when he was confronted by Kevin McCarthy, who begged Trump to call off the mob, Trump said "Well, Kevin, I guess they are just more upset about…

Also, he pardoned all those people.

And then he hired them as ICE agents.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#63

Post by actionfromafar »

bko wrote: post #37
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you're just saying the article isn't persuasive to normies? I'm OK with that sentiment of yours, but I'm also OK with the article itself and the direction it implies this administration is going. Normies don't persuade easy, that's why they're normies. Trump has worked out how to persuade them: by lying hyperbolically and providing the 'circus' of the bread and circus method. But it's a dark circus, and its invol…

> Normies don't persuade easy, that's why they're normies That's where I disagree with you. Normies persuade very easily. Just give them a better life. Tell them you'll make their life materially better and they'll be persuaded to support it. See those tents on the street? I'll get rid of them. Don't like to step over needles? I'll clean it up. Are you annoyed by having stores put shampoo behind lock and key? I'll st…

Or you know, lie that you'll give them a better life. Take control of all branches of government and keep lying. Works fine in Russia.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#64

Post by tdeck »

bko wrote: post #33
tdeck wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like these policies are overwhelmingly popular, but they are not https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/30/politics/trump-poll-immig...

This is the phrasing of the question: > "Do you think Donald Trump has gone too far, has been about right, or has not gone far enough when it comes to deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally?" 52% said too far. If you phrased the question something like "do you think the federal government has done enough, too much or not enough to deport illegal immigrants" you would get much different results. Or…

You're just moving the goalpost now. Your original argument was that only the media and "terminally online" people have a problem with this. If that were the case, the wording you describe shouldn't matter.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#65

Post by johnnyanmac »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #4
evelant wrote: post #2

It certainly doesn’t feel good to have turned out being correct after warning that this is where we were headed way back in the dubyah years. This has always been the plan, it hasn’t been hidden, corporate media has just succeeded in sanewashing it for decades. Abdication of journalistic responsibility in the name of profits has allowed construction of alternate realities for so many people that these atrocities are…

I think it's because we've gotten so used to avoiding political speech as a method of "civility", we've collectively put our heads in the sand. The people who were shouting their worries and concerns were told they were being political. Politics is just life now a days, I don't know how you can actually excise that.

I was just too young and things exploded by the time I really could start to understand what was gonig on.

I was very early Elementasry for 9/11, Middle school for the GFC. I was early 20's focusing on college in 2016, which would have been the 2nd nationals I could vote in. Then I was only a few years into my career when COVID hit.

The Obama era gave me hopes, but I didn't realize how easily it could be relinquished in the name of corporate interest. I just figured all the checks and balances would keep things from really going backwards. Obviously Trump winning was the first huge red flag, but things seemed fine. But the real red flag I (personally) saw was Ruth Bader Ginsburg not stepping down and instead dying during the Trump administration. Having 3 judges appointed by Trump (plus 3 from W. Bush beforehand) was a death knell for decades to come, even if Trump never got elected.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#66

Post by srean »

tdeck wrote: post #58
lapcat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This appears to be a marked change in subject. How are your questions directly responding to my comment? I would say that, if taken literally, resolving the situation today is not possible. We're currently living in a deep hole that was a very long time in the making (one might even say hundreds of years in the making), and it would likely take a very long time to climb our way out of it. There's no magical, immediat…

Just to add to this. We (many people) voted for Biden in 2020, and that was supposed to be at least part of the solution. What happened? He appointed an AG who he knew would drag his feet and not hold Trump accountable. He continued Trump's illegal asylum policies and even kept building Trump's border wall. They played chicken with Republicans to see who could shovel more money into ICE, and spent 4 years repeating R…

Same with Obama. He let Bush and Bush's administration get away with 0 accountability.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#67

Post by johnnyanmac »

lapcat wrote: post #40
throwaway173738 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How convenient that you have an argument for lumping together both a party that wants to continue the liberal democracy and a party that wants to cling to power at the expense of creating an actual authoritarian state complete with a secret police.

The two parties are not the same, but the privately funded electoral system of the US applies to all parties. Democrats cannot escape the corrupting influence of money. Consider, as a revealing example, the Patriot Act of 2001. There was more resisitance to it from Democrats than from Republicans, yet there was still not nearly enough resistance. In the Senate, the vote was 98-1, with only Democrat Russ Feingold agai…

>Democrats cannot escape the corrupting influence of money.

They could. These are not people struggling to pay rent, they do not live paycheck to paycheck. Heck, the median age of congress is 58 so a good portion of them are free to retire and never work another day in their lives.

But they in general choose not to escape it. The money, the networks, the power. I guess the sad thing is that the populace aren't aware enough to properly primary anyone who does turn their backs on them.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#68

Post by piva00 »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #34
piva00 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might take a couple more generations, a lot more misery, and maybe even a complete breakdown of democracy in the USA, for its population to finally learn that Democrats or Republicans are bound to the same higher power in the USA: money. Money is what decides everything, the speeding up of its accumulation brought by neoliberal economic policies under Reagan and onwards just made it abundantly clear that either pa…

How convenient that you have an argument for lumping together both a party that wants to continue the liberal democracy and a party that wants to cling to power at the expense of creating an actual authoritarian state complete with a secret police.

It's not convenient, it's quite sad to be honest. I'm not American nor live in the USA so seeing it from the outside makes me quite sad that Americans believe to be under a democratic system where choosing their representatives matter.

Not even the liberal democracy that one of the parties want is properly a liberal democracy, it is to the limits where it infringes into business needs, and moneyed interests. They can't fight the system that enables them to exist.

There are the token attempts to make it look less than that, to appear more altruistic: ACA, better paths for immigrants to be legally integrated into society, etc. but overall the majority of Democrats are also entirely bound to the powers that fuel their campaigns, money is the only real power in the end.

The issue with the other party increasingly becoming more authoritarian and extreme over time is a side-effect from grievances caused exactly by the issue of the people not having actual any power to course-correct policies, there aren't many policy choices, it's business and money or business and money and fascism. Normal people were led to believe they can just become one of the moneyed elites if they just work hard enough, and government stays out of their way, so they vote against their interests as what they are: common people.

I wish the USA would learn that a two-party system eventually will breakdown, that it will eventually cause the fracture to be too great, and that some members of the politician class would use this wedge as a weapon to achieve power, just like what happened with the GOP. You simply cannot have only 2 parties to determine the political will of 300+ million people, it's impossible that either of them represent the variety of wants and needs of the whole population but you are stuck with that.

Continuing democracy as it was before also doesn't seem to be a good solution, it was exactly the system that brought into power the current tyrants. Too many norms, protocols, and procedures relying on tradition and decorum rather than codified, it was bound to be abused at some point, and it's quite incredible it has lasted this long.

Re: State Terror, American Style

#69

Post by licyeus »

emchammer wrote: post #62

The article features a prominent screenshot of a post from Stephen Miller. I cannot find that post on his account https://x.com/stephenm . Is this a quirk of X being difficult to navigate?

Search "from:stephenm insurrection": https://x.com/StephenM/status/1974647432299327904

Re: State Terror, American Style

#70

Post by JohnFen »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #57
actionfromafar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The "swear an oath to the leader" comes a bit later in the game. At this pace though, who knows? It could be really soon. Something drastic must be done about the midterms, or Trump could be impeached, and that is not in the cards of these people.

I fear that, yes, Trump is on a path to do something drastic to prevent the midterms. It will either be 1) war, 2) martial law, or 3) declaring an insurrection. 1 is dicey. It will require, first, a declared war, not just Trump saying so, and second, the courts agreeing (against all precedent) that we can't hold elections in wartime. This isn't Ukraine; our constitution doesn't have a provision for elections not happ…

> We will see whether he will restrain himself

There's a 0% chance that this will happen. Self-restraint has never been in his nature. That said, Trump isn't the real danger. He's the Useful Idiot for the ones who are.

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