“The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other. This technique is as old as the hills; it was practiced in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.” -Bertrand Russell, 1940
A gaggle of paid writers for the Axios blog have this morning posted an article questioning the veracity of persons in diverse neighborhoods around the country, of imagining encounters with the recently unbridled agents of ICE. My fast response:
A different trio of Axios contributors (safety in numbers?) co-authored a piece this week concerning Trump’s declaration of there being 30,000 beds waiting at Guantanamo Bay for the untried “illegals”, and not one thought to spend the 30 seconds on a search engine needed to learn that the facility’s capacity has never detained more than 800. Deportations have averaged one-thousand per day since the behind closed doors inauguration, with millions more intended to be abducted from their lives. Obviously this administration is learning how expensive it is to fly them out to unwilling nation-states by the mere dozens, or else Gitmo wouldn’t be on the table. But we’re expected to presume they will just reinvest that unjustifiable sum into expanding the place, and as ever without the condoning by the Cuban government itself? Is Axios expecting an official announcement for the construction of concentration camps?
Even the extant tribes of Native Americans are being given unprovoked justifications to exist in fear, the only confusion being in the palates of informational gatekeepers. Meanwhile, Colby Hall’s drunks at Mediaite, which markets itself on giving a middle of the road look at the media itself, have ignored all of this.
This is the state of corporate, purportedly nonpartisan news media in the USA, at the moment and ass to mouth. When everyone’s most concerned with themselves, then everything’s just competing shades of rightwing. The executive privilege none dares challenge means there is no legal pathway to self-defense for ANYBODY, ANYWHERE, but tell us again why you deserve paying subscribers be kept in sensory deprivation tanks as rights and resources and subscribers themselves are made to vanish in real time.