I am not blaming Democrats for Republicans becoming fascists. I am blaming people who overused "fascist" for years for removing the power of that word and gutting it of meaning, and making it useless now that we need it.
Something I warned would happen.
Something I warned would happen.
All this blaming of Ds for Rs going fascist is weird without elaboration, but it misses the point that Rs have been using "I know you are but what am I" arguments forever. Trump does it so often it's become a running gag. The point is to neutralize effective attacks by making the words meaningless.
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Scientists see a pressure system forming. They say it’s a tornado. Someone can’t see a vortex, so they choose not to trust the scientists. The alerts go off on phones and TV. The person ignore them. The funnel appears, and alarms go critical.
Who wasted those earlier alarms?
The self-satisfied smirking indicates how little introspection you’ve done so far.
The overall likelihood of people HADN’T called it fascism is that nothing at all would be different
Is that Dems have allowed Cons to slash our education budget to darn near nothing. They’ve been using this playbook for years. Starve the agency and then kill it once it sucks. Where were you on that Tom?
While this captain can deny it exists.
Appropriate
Enjoy the extra moments of safety it brings you when you see others crying for help, you gutless coward.
Then he’s going to lecture others on when to use the term fascism. Yikes.
What it *is* a cause of, though, is lots of people blowing you off when it finally became time to actually use it.
What is the evidence that a significant number of US voters are suffering "fascism fatigue"?
I assume by default I've misunderstood.
1/2
TBF I think both morals are present but I almost never see the alternative moral discussed.
(Please ignore the "mammy" typo & read it as "many").
https://bsky.app/profile/kathmarval.bsky.social/post/3lkmj5dq5g22o
I thought the best time to fight fascism was early?
I wish you would have listened before and helped stop it when you could. But here we are
People were overreacting to Hitler in the 1920s.
They should have waited until the 1930s to say something.
You are just ass covering because you didn't want to acknowledge fascists.
This is what happens when they have power.
It’s incremental until it suddenly isn’t, anyway.
Therein, it wasn’t misused, it just wasn’t fully mature til recent.
It’s a build up.
It was being built and you didn’t believe until the moments before it was “finished.”
Did you think this through?
The GOP & the bad faith Conservative organizations have continuously work-shopped weaponizing useful words, terms, & phrases by perverting their meanings & intentions in order to divide the citizenry.
No matter how accurate the descriptors, they would dilute their meaning for power.
https://theamericanleader.org/timeline-event/language-a-key-mechanism-of-control/
the fascists have been here for a while and now they are mainstream
maybe if we had dealt with this earlier we wouldn’t be here now
Maybe you should have been more considerate of their arguments before instead of, now, blaming people for ACCURATELY NAMING THE THING THAT'S HAPPENING.
It is absurdly easy to see how Trump is the natural outcome of Republican politics going back to Reagan, if not Nixon.
It's the Town That Made the Wolf King.
Black Americans lived under a legalized fascism during segregation, too.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
In my experience in academia my (correct) claims that he was protofascist where greeted with surprise. If there was a context where that might have been common usage, it would have been there.
*as far as the discourse is concerned, that is. I studied linguistics in college as undergrad & grad, so I'm a descriptivist. My personal take is that language
I don't think fascism has been any more permanently watered down than socialism or any other word. We give it meaning. Mostly, we need better rhetorical/semantic framing strategies
That’s delusional.
I blame those who were not listening or acting for the good of democracy when it was correctly being called out.
Is there a degree of fascism that is tolerable?
Do you even hear yourself?
People who know fascism have been putting out warning signs from the time the seedling broke ground.
The problem is not with the ones who tried to warn us and prevent fascism, it’s with the people who ignored them.
It isn't the fault of Dems that Republicans and Independents refused to see the fascists in front of their faces. That's on them.
Listen to yourself holy shit.
In 2025 we are entering 1940s fascism.
Some of us can spot the difference.
Don't get mad at us because you weren't paying attention.
I am a native German. I have immediately upon Trump 1.0 read up on fascism (again!!) and spoke up as soon as I was sure that first Steve Bannon was indeed a fascist and so on and on ...
Tom is mad that his paving the runways for fascists landed us here.
Born again with fascist cravings
Still, you made me president
Human rights will soon go 'way
I am now our Shah today
Now I command all of you
Now you're gonna pray in school
And I'll make sure they're Christian too"
We've Got a Bigger Problem Now
by Dead Kennedys ‧ 1985
Trump/Rubio/Bondi/Hegseth/etc are SCREAMING about how proud they are about trashing the rule of law and human rights.
Also: We are HERE, right now! 🚨
The fact that Dick Cheney was a psychopathic war monger has no bearing on the Trump administration fascist actions. None.
There is no free pass for prior bad behavior.
There are handfuls of historians of fascism. You are not one of them
“I warned you”.
tfg has been trying to dismantle the tentpoles of the us for years. 🤷🏽♀️
Pointing a bunch of geese and calling each one a goose doesn’t dilute the word.
Putting aside the claim is empirically questionable, the media consumed that by the vast majority hasn't used these terms liberally.
Am I overusing horrendous now too?
*tornado hits minutes later, kills everyone*
I blame _you_ for overusing the tornado warning and making it lose all meaning.
Other people’s homes got hit. Now, either yours had incurred damage or you saw your neighbor’s house blow away.
*That’s* the thing you’re missing.
(Also, perhaps, fire people who repeatedly give false warnings & replace them w/ someone more reliable).
The villagers ignored the warning & lost all their sheep.
So yeah, we were trying to warn about it.
It fits this really well because (a) his falsehoods burned out the response, (b) the actually danger finally did show up, and (c) he was ignored because of (a).
Now do "woke" and "DEI" since White people in particular don't seem to understand that language is important and has meaning.
Is language misuse ANOTHER thing that's only bad when Democrats do it?
If anyone was overusing the term it was the actual fascists seeking to water it down.
Wtf man?
Everyone stop using “global warming”, we don’t want those words to lose their spice?
The only thing that can save us is replacing the culture war with a class war. The billionaires' know it - that's why their media will never talk about the wealth gap.
It's a term in the past used to describe Nazi Germany and alike governments.
Simple and accurate.
Dems are Nazis too
They don't understand that the world is round and air streams are shifting, changing weather patterns.
Don’t blame us that it took you years to figure out what republicans were
This has been building up for forty-plus years, and people like you kept refusing to acknowledge it was happening.
And now you want to blame us for your refusal to recognize reality until too late to stop it.
But a lot of it is happening because of what Republicans did to pave the way for MAGA.
That means crossovers in their soundbites.
The republican party has been a criminal degenerate regressive enterprise since Nixon, leading inexorably, step-by-step, to trump. They have been Jack Nicholson drinking at the Overlook bar, FOREVER. Fascists then and now, wrong about absolutely everything.