The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump

The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political

Asserting that Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the foundations of US democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last 4 years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges.
Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had 2 perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power—a global health pandemic and protests and sustained riots throughout American cities—yet he did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities.
Early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials for the Korean War.
In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and... Joe Biden came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.”
Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars.
When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements or withdrew them.
No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied.
Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage.
Positing Trump as a grand aberration from US politics and as prime author of America’s woes enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity.

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To those who want to actually help Claudia Conway after her mom (Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former aide) posted her underage daughter’s nudes to Fleets, fill out a report on the NCMEC CyberTipline.
CPS refused to help her.
#HelpClaudia


Kellyanne Conway has a well-documented history of verbally abusing, gaslighting, and threatening her daughter. It gets worse when highly public things go viral (such as exposing the truth about Trump and Conway catching COVID-19 last October). Kellyanne coerces false statements.

Insider did a thorough chronological background of the history of exposing her parents abuse and control of her here:
https://t.co/ncjaEyLOSC

We all know that “statement” last year was coerced. She talks constantly about being abused by them.


Personally? I suspect Kellyanne is a narcissist. From my own experience being sexually and emotionally abused by a narcissist, they are obsessed with controlling the narrative (coerced typed statement), discrediting their victim (posting her nudes) & gaslighting

If you haven’t experienced gaslighting or aren’t familiar with it, it’s when someone causing you harm (physical, emotional, sexual, financial, etc) twists the facts and asserts that reality is just you being delusional and you don’t actually understand what happened.
Why am RTg this Rush post? Because @AnjillofLight_ just advised me that @rushlimbaugh is handing his show over to @realDonaldTrump tomorrow 10/9.

Playing both the Rush and Trump Cards

Coincidence the movie The Trump Card is out tomorrow 10/9. https://t.co/RT45TDE8HP


I'm your Huckleberry. I knew it.🤣
https://t.co/gqHfFWfxZO


All the Rush graphics are in linked threads throughout
##FLY##
[OWL]

https://t.co/b9px5Mt3iN


Only the full release of docs can give conclusive evidence.

Dangle Operation
Sanctions are coming
11/4
11/5


Make sure you go to the concession stand and get your popcorn, beverage and candy.
https://t.co/laVxyfS5ax
1. @NYGovCuomo became a pandemic star by contrasting himself with Trump

Cuomo crafted an IMAGE of being determined, honest and grounded in science

But 11 months later this image is falling apart

Follow along for a FACTUAL assessment of Cuomo's

2. Cuomo WROTE A BOOK, published in October, celebrating his own leadership during the pandemic.

Cuomo writes that NY had "confronted and defeated" the virus, and had "achieved what all the experts told us was impossible."

Today, things look

3. Today, New York has 338 people hospitalized with COVID per million residents.

This is the HIGHEST NUMBER IN ANY STATE by a considerable margin.

https://t.co/Hl4fsFxB6l


4. Overall, 46K New Yorkers have died of COVID, which trails only California (47K), a state with 2x as many people.

On a per capita basis, New York has had more deaths than every state but New Jersey.

Cuomo made decisions that made things

5. A new report by NY AG Letitia James (D) found Cuomo's order requiring nursing homes to accept residents w/COVID "may have put residents at increased risk of harm"

Cuomo dismissed criticisms of his nursing home policies in his book as

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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.