It’s Matt Taibbi. Unhinged framing designed to inflame populist rage is something he’s been doing since the 2008 financial crisis when he made his career on it.
He used to aim “left” with it but seems to have drifted in the same fashy direction as Greenwald and other populists as well as a lot of former “Chomskyan” leftists.
This thread is about the FBI, aka the actual jackboots, compelling private companies extralegally in order to shift democratic narratives.
And you're saying it's conservative to be opposed to that?
I understand it lined up with the liberal side regarding the election but that doesn't make Taibbi (or myself) a conservative for opposing it. Distrusting the FBI ought to be a liberal value.
I'm a leftist and not a liberal. I recognize that the FBI is a largely unrestrained organization that's responsible for a lot of evil, including the assassination of civil rights figures.
Fascism is when you're critical of federal agencies having a privileged relationship with the media to the point of weekly meetings to influence moderation policy? What?
Actual fascists attempted a coup on January 6th 2020. Taibbi is working to bolster their case by deliberately slanting and spinning this stuff.
Here’s the blind spot I think a lot of people have, including perhaps Taibbi.
It’s fine to hate things about the current system. It’s fine to be critical of the FBI or any other part of that system. But if you want to have a revolution, the first thing you have to get right is suggesting an alternative that is better than that system, not one that is profoundly worse.
A totalitarian state run by a con man is profoundly worse than the current system. I will back the current system any day over the alternatives put forward to date.
For the record I don’t think the radical left has any better ideas either.
There’s a whole crop of people who lived thorough Iraq and the 2008 bailouts who have lost sight of that. Taibbi is probably included here. Greenwald too. They’ve forgotten that most revolutions result in something worse than what was overthrown because everyone is paying more attention to who they are against than to who they are fighting for.
Sorry bro, entering a building without any greater plan and then leaving peacefully is not a "right wing coup" and Trump supporters are not Fascists, they're just a little odd. The fact that it isn't a coup and was not a coup is why its participants cannot be charged as such.
If you want to see a "fascist coup" plan, go look at Golden Dawn being busted with blueprints to parliament that indicated they were going to break down the walls with tanks.
What you're effectively saying here is that people should not be concerned about massive FBI overreach and should discard what he has covered elsewhere because 'orange man bad', when Trump barely factors into anything here. That's deranged, and it's not going to be taken seriously outside of your bubble.
It failed because the bombs were found and because Mike Pence defected or at least chickened out at the last minute.
That’s why they were chanting “hang Mike Pence” not “hang Nancy Pelosi.” What you saw was a rage filled riot in the wake of a failing coup attempt.
Had the bombs gone off and Pence stopped the count a state of emergency would have been declared. I’m not totally convinced of this part but I’ve read that they were expecting a bunch of radical left counter protestors and that the role of the mob was supposed to be to start a big street brawl with Antifa or whoever was supposed to show to help feed into the state of emergency ploy to suspend the election.
It was more elaborately planned than Hitler’s beer hall putsch which was a bunch of Nasis getting blasted at the bar and having a street brawl with police that ended in a very asymmetrical gun fight.
Luckily it probably will end here this time though since Trump is too old, Flynn and Bannon are too obviously kooky, and DeSantis doesn’t have it in him. He knows how to troll the woke for attention but I don’t get hard core fascist vibes from him. He will try to do a Viktor Orban but it won’t work here because America has courts and federalism, and he doesn’t have the balls to attempt a coup. Say what you will about Trump but he did have balls.
He used to aim “left” with it but seems to have drifted in the same fashy direction as Greenwald and other populists as well as a lot of former “Chomskyan” leftists.