1/

There's a bunch of different black pills that members of my tribe and adjacent tribes are tempted to take.

One is "the game is all over, the commies won."

Friend, censoring dissident voices, building walls, and lying about everything is not what winning looks like.

2/

That's what terminal rot looks like.

When the Soviet Union was rolling out rural electrification and sending the barefoot sons of farmers to study math and engineering, they didn't HAVE to lie about change and growth

The lies started later, when growth dropped to or below 0

3/

Compare the Soviet Union in 1955 to 1975 or 85. In 55 there were lots of true believers.

The Berlin Wall didn't go up the day WWII ended.

It went up 16 years later.

For 16 years, the story that "Communism is better" was plausible enough that they didn't NEED a wall.

4/

The American Cathedral didn't NEED to censor people say "the election was stolen" in 1976, because no one was credibly saying such a thing, and everyone believed in the basic morality of the Other Party.

5/

The urge to censor, to crush, to humiliate, to silence ... that's not an urge that a strong, stable, self-evidently successful government needs to indulge in.