The Americans Who Saw All This Coming—but Were Ignored and Maligned | Call them the Cassandras: the people—mostly not white and male—who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they “alarmists,” and how did “anti-alarmism” become cool?

anti-alarmism became cool because calm feels safer than panic, even when panic is rational. but safety isnt the same as accuracy.

It didn’t. It became popular, not “cool.” It will never be “cool.”

The liberals always trail behind the actual leftists, who it must be said were many of the alarmists.

I think most liberals still don’t believe it’s fascism. You can tell by the way they still say things like “that’s illegal” or “he can’t do that”

Because it’s cool to make fun of nerds and left wingers – with their elitism, college degrees, fancy words, scientific studies, news that come from verified sources as opposed from weird blogs and YouTube, and absence of discrimination, fear, or hate of The Other – are nerds. And we’re jocks. Jocks make fun of nerds. It’s cool to make fun of the nerds. You’ll sit at the cool table and wear cool table merch that make people see immediately you’re part of the cool gang. And the cool jock gang is cool. They have house parties. They don’t fret over after school clubs, doing homework, and getting ready for college.

It’s cool to belong to the boisterous. It’s cool to not care about nerd problems. It’s cool to bully nerds.

[For real, you look at Trumpers and it just looks like Trump rallies are just big pep rallies. Their behaviour is very high school.]

mostly not white????? Didn’t Trump have a higher latin and black male vote this time around? No matter the color…the nay-sayers were right.

Anyone with 2 brain cells could see he was on a revenge tour.

Well I’m a white male who called Trump fascist from his announcement that he was running. How did I know? Because the announcement speech was full of fascist rhetoric. I’d recently read *Anatomy of Fascism* by Robert Paxton, *The Eliminationists* by David Neiwert, and *American Fascists* by Chris Hedges. These books have given me a solid means of sorting out who’s fascist and who’s just “conservative.”

The problem really is that our corporate media won’t use the “f” word. They won’t even call out someone using fascist language as being too extreme to participate in elections or debates. They just get to cruise along whereas a true socialist (to the left of Bernie) can absolutely pound sand as far as the media is concerned.

The anti-alarmism because cool when the media and justice system ignored any wrong doing by Trump

I was saying what I’m saying now back in 2015. Yes people laughed and verbally patted me on the head or insinuate that I was out of touch with reality. A lot of my liberal friends said Row wouldn’t be overturned etc etc. Now those same people repeat what I’ve been saying for years and pretend they knew this whole time. What’s interesting is I’ve been screaming from the rooftops that if the midterms are stolen there will be work camps or worse for “antifa” liberals. My newly enlightened liberal friends are still saying I’m hyperbolic. I deeply hope they are right this time. I’m tired of all the “I told you so’s”. Also if trump is alive he’ll run for a 3rd term. Something I also said in 2015.

“…Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have….

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked-if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in-your nation, your people-is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

-Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945

MLK nailed it umpteen years ago:

“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'”

Essentially people prefer comfort and calm over action and confrontation so they lash out at the ones, “disturbing the peace.”

Just yesterday I responded to a comment that assured me that progressives were actually bad for minorities and centrists/moderates are actually better for them.

When I asked how I received no response.

Never the less it’s a sentiment among certain groups that somehow progressives are bad for them because they’re not looking to favor their priorities over others. A rising tide raises all ships, unfortunately some out there take a dim view to not being favored.

“mostly not white and male”

Eyeroll

I sent this email on November 15th 2016 to a “friend” who laughed at my concerns. I come back to this one a lot and it STILL holds up word for fucking word.

“He’s a narcissistic fascist. He wants nothing more than to use the presidency to line his pockets and take vengeance against his enemies,
I keep looking for any indication that this ends in anything short of disaster and every single choice he’s made one week in only serves to confirm my worst fears about his corrupt intentions.

He lacks any knowledge of the iob and refuses to learn the basics. No one with any credibility will associate themselves with him or his administration so he’s left only with eager opportunists chasing their own private agendas with painfully thick ties to foreign governments that don’t have America’s best interests at heart. The spaces he doesn’t fill with ves men he fills with family in an egregious display of unabashed nepotism.

Add to that his still intact business that WILL be profiting in ways we are just barely uncovering now. The conflicts of interest are so glaringly obvious and appallingly unethical that it sickens me to think of what other powers he will wield like a sledgehammer on a completely defenseless democracy.

If you see any evidence that things are not as bleak as they seem I welcome them.”

You still have oblivious fuckwits and bots screeching about doomerism.