More context: the video speaks about Oracle and TikTok has been bought by an investor group headed by Oracle's Larry Ellison (which the article also references).
This is just changing goal posts but that aside, Trump got a standing ovation at Davos and got a deal for Greenland. Everything prior to that was a performance. One day he says British troops weren't on the front line in Afghanistan, the next day he says they are the greatest warriors of all time besides the US. He is incredibly good at manipulating public perception to change opinions and get what he wants. What appears to you as chaos or "making enemies" to him is just business as usual.
I think you are heavily underestimating the level of contempt he has built towards Americans and the US in the last month or two. I don't think Europeans, certainly not Scandinavians, will forget this for decades. This isn't like some random normal boycott-type movement that goes viral, I legitimately think Americans are teetering on being persona non grata as a people unless they prove they've divorced themselves from the mess at home.
It might be manipulating people at home, but you're closer (still not close, obviously) to Russia than Sweden as far as a trustworthy business partner or ally now. We're suddenly not making any long term plans that rely on America or American companies where it's avoidable, I don't know if you understand how big of a shift that is.
> He is incredibly good at manipulating public perception to change opinions and get what he wants
Sorry but you are suffering from some kind of delusion here. He's not manipulating public perception in any way that is beneficial to him or the US. He's crashing his own public perception (which was already in the gutter to all but the sycophants and blind loyalists) and taking the US' reputation with him
He is not good at manipulating the public, almost everyone knows what he actually is (there is not much to know at this point anyway). They are not applauding him, they do it because they need US economy to keep things afloat they smile and shake hands because of that. He could be just saying random words or saying only profanities from start to finish, the outcome would be the same, they would still give a standing ovation with eyes rolling.
"I was in the room when President Donald Trump entered and it's fair to say he got a good welcome from the crowd, certainly at the beginning. A standing ovation."
Data? No. None of these companies are making their data freely available for analysis or being transparent about how their algorithms work. People have complained for a while that Twitter / X seems to suppress the visibility and reach of profiles or posts that disagree with Musk’s views. The recent open sourcing of their algorithm is meaningless since there’s no evidence of what they actually have in production or what data / configuration is used with it.
So the best we can do is anecdotal examples. And it’s also obvious that Trump avoided banning TikTok for months, illegally, because he wanted to have another platform serve as a mouthpiece. He now has that by forcing a sale of TikTok to his friend, Larry Ellison.
Celebrities need to stop giving their sht to these SM companies and used Federated social media. So they can own their product and not have to worry about being censored for being anti-government.
Which is hilarious sentence now because this government so pro free speech!!! sarcasm*
But seriously this is something that if my main gig was to create music or some art form, I wouldn't want to be on a corp run platform. I would want to own it myself and the all that data.
There’s lots of myths in social media, some weeks ago I kept seeing people on TikTok claiming that if you put some keyword in you profile(I think it was “Oracle”) or some of your post you will start seeing the protest again because the algorithm will “reset”. I assumed that someone was trying to farm accounts interested in politics or maybe indeed the algorithm steers by the introduction of the new for the account word.
Anyway, considering that the purchase of the American TikTok was done with a purpose and there is documented collusion between the involved tech Billionaires and the political class behind the street executions in American cities that drive those protests, I wouldn’t be surprised that they are actually throttling this time.
Support for ICE is in minority (although a large one). I don't think algorithm would suppress negative opinions on it, especially among viewership of celebrities that don't appeal to the right side of political spectrum.
You should qualify your statement with "amongst the few people I talk to and the narrow spectrum of media I consume."
Also, do you mean minority of the total US population or minority of the voting population?
For one reference point I fully support ICE. And I think it's wild you have local and state politicians encouraging actions against federal agents who are enforcing federal law.
That’s not a very convincing article. One person leaving TikTok claiming she was silenced, and another where a claim of silencing is made but, within 24 hours, the ‘silenced’ video "has more than 220,000 views and over 70,000 likes”. Perhaps there is some silencing going on, but it doesn’t appear that there is much evidence of it in this particular article.
No one can know what TikTok censors or penalizes in its algorithms. All other social media platforms are equally intransparent, what is new is that TikTok is not American.
> according to TechCrunch, this language has been included in the privacy policy since Aug. 2024, and wasn’t changed in response to the Trump administration’s latest escalation of immigration enforcement, and is “primarily there to comply with state privacy laws like California’s Consumer Privacy Act.”
This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.
Get used to it. Both TikTok and X(twitter) have been used and will be used to manipulate the public opinion in favour of Trump. I'm aware that I can't prove it; however, this explains how Trump won, and how he will win again - manipulating the zombies.
That a handful of private companies (of which, Ellison has big investments in several) have cornered the market on NAND and DRAM -- with some sources saying that these reservations extend into 2029 -- should be far more concerning. They're sprinting toward super-intelligence, while potential competitors can't even buy equipment. Both pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant arguments will seem fatuous when we are all slaves.
The whole point of the forced sale of TikTok was for the American-Israeli hegemony to exert control over the narrative of the platform. And now it is doing exactly that. Color me surprised.
pretty impressive how quickly Ellisons managed to make this whole situation suck and reek badly. they'll turn down the heat & stuff the frog back in the pot, then crank the heat up a bit slower this time, but there is just going to be such endless utterly preposterous censorship and algorithmic biasing for the right wing & ultra capitalist agenda, on and on now.
incredible beyond words that this was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. letting the us government set up whatever arraigned marriage it felt like for buying a social network is some wild meddling with businesses. and here we are, with the ultra capitalists doing exactly what they want to with one of the most popular social networks.
They've claimed this is the result of or at the behest of 'ultra capitalism'. I don't even mind hyperbole--call it fascism if you want--but at least use the dimensionally-correct terms. This is like when people call everything 'neoliberal'.
I’m reading “ultra-capitalists” here as “those that control an extreme proportion of capital” rather than “those who believe really strongly in capitalism as a system”, though tbf that venn diagram may well be a donut…
Technically, Venn Diagrams don't show _degree_ of overlap :)
Although re your actual point: the current admin only gifts things like this to a chosen few; a small subset of those with extreme capital. So it seems much more appropriate to call it cronyism, or some such thing, rather than capitalism in the sense of merely controlling capital.
I recently saw an interesting explanation. The point was, that capitalism is not (just) an economical system. It's a system of power in which capital can (and almost always does) overrule everything else. If you take this stance, capitalism is to blame for all the good and bad things that happen in the capitalist country. Democracy is just the way how capital rules.
Aren't all country-scale (economic, governance, etc.) systems also 'systems of power'? It's not like the most powerful people of the USSR didn't leverage that system.
Whatever the rules are, people end up adapting to and gaming them to entrench and grow their own position, typically at the expense of everyone else.
It's a contradiction only if you understand democracy as a theoretical ideal. Practical democracies, as implemented in western countries, in recent decades proven themselves to be completely controllable by capital, both the democratic elites and democratic masses.
I think we should rather go with practical outcome not the stated theoretical ideas. It's also a good way of evaluating communism and probably other systems.
You should use Google and try to understand what the person you’re replying to is saying. Because they’re correct and there’s a nuance to it under the law.
Ellison’s Murdoch killer flexing its muscles for a mild warmup.
They got Paramount and CBS and TikTok, are allied with Twitter, and still have a chance of grabbing Warner.
I don’t think American billionaires ever particularly liked Murdoch, an Australian, controlling so much of the media environment in their country. Maybe they’ll make an offer for Fox News that the Murdoch heirs can’t refuse.
Finneas (Billie Eilish's brother) isn't one for virtue signaling from what I've seen over the years from his posts. He keeps it very real and down to earth as far as celebrities go.
He's not a celebrity then is he, his sister is. And if a video is being poorly received it'll be not pushed by the algorithm, irrelevant of what your other posts are, so difficult to see the connection you're drawing.
Since when is speaking out against fascism virtue signalling? Like, how bad does it have to get before it's just speaking out against the attrocities happening around us and not virtue signalling? Or are celebrities just flat out not allowed to do it?
> Because if it were actual fascism, like the Hitler/Mussolini kind, you'd be arrest/dead the moment you spoke anything against it.
This is... a pretty confused view of history, really. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and consolidated power over the next year. At this point there was a lot of criticism of the regime, both internal and external. Things got rapidly worse after, of course, but there certainly was a period where the Nazis were in power but that there was public criticism.
Even as late as 1938, there was significant public discontent RE Kristallnacht in particular.
> Because if it were actual fascism, like the Hitler/Mussolini kind, you'd be arrest/dead the moment you spoke anything against it.
It looks like you have paramilitaries roaming your streets - not wearing ID or proper uniforms, covering their faces to avoid identification, not answering to usual democratic controls - executing protestors.
In the latest incident, they seemed to be beating and spraying a woman with a chemical agent for filming them, and then executing a bystander who tried to help her. The regime then tried to deny reality and falsely claim that they'd attacked said paramilitary operatives.
In any Western democracy (and I'm not sure if the US is currently part of that category) there would be a public investigation, but they seem to have been squirrelled away and the politicians who have spoken out about it have been threatened.
This all seems to be fascistic by any reasonable standard.
Really? Is that why they have vests with labels that say "POLICE FEDERAL AGENT" front and back? Maybe literacy is an issue.
> covering their faces to avoid identification
Same reason SWAT and special forces covering their faces. Because just like them, ICE arrests and deports violent criminals, cartel members, human traffickers, etc. Dangerous people that could identify their faces and then track down and kill their families in retaliation, exactly what lib-dem ANTIFA & co anarchists would love to do to them if they could see their faces.
And also then, why are the "protesters" assaulting them covering their faces as well if the good guys are supposed to show their faces and only bad guys cover their faces according to your logic?
>In any Western democracy (and I'm not sure if the US is currently part of that category) there would be a public investigation
Public investigations are meaningless now in this specific partisan case since the people have already made up their mind on who's guilty. So if the officer would be publicly investigated and then cleared, them dems would just say it was all rigged anyway.
>Pretti are all wearing street clothing, and all wearing different clothing
On top of which they have matching ICE issued vest with inscriptions.
>He got executed anyway.
Yes, accidents like this will happen when you shove law enforcement officers with a gun on you. Similarly, a lot of people also got "executed" by police without even having a gun, but just by simply by being uncooperative and pulling out their wallets from their back pocket with a sudden motion towards them as if they were pulling a gun. That will get you killed.
There's etiquette when dealing with police that people seem to have forgotten.
> On top of which they have matching ICE issued vest with inscriptions.
It's a fascist theme to have paramilitaries not wearing uniforms. See for example the mukhabarat in Syria. It makes them more intimidating, because they look undisciplined, and adds confusion to protestors as to whether they are dealing with someone who is part of the legal system. Why on earth would they not be issued with uniforms?
> Yes, accidents like this will happen when you shove law enforcement officers with a gun on you.
Pretti did not shove any "law enforcement officers". The first physical contact is a shove on Pretti by one of them.
The first time they seem to be aware that he has a firearm is when they disarm him, and the execution happens after that, so I don't see how that is relevant.
>they disarm him, and the execution happens after that,
You're leaving the part out where a gunshot is heard right before they "execute" him. The officers with their fingers on the trigger pointed at him during detainment, got scared of that gunshot and jumped on the trigger by accident. It's an unfortunate accident but not an execution. Read up the legal definition of execution. This is not it.
Fascism takes hold in stages; Nazi Germany didn't go from 0 to 100 in one day. You have to nip it in the bud before it grows up.
Right now, ICE goes out of their way to beat and arrest protestors and steal their cameras. They're not yet mowing them down but by that time it would be a little late to do something about their conduct. Remember that the current US president admires how the CCP crushed the student protestors in Tiananmen square with tanks and guns.
>You have to nip it in the bud before it grows up.
Sure, but if you use fascist tactics to fight fascism, are you not a fascist yourself?
And people conveniently focus only on the symptoms(rise of fascism) but not on the main cause that leads to it.
Like Hitler didn't just randomly get to power one day out of nowhere because the average German citizen was living such a good life. He was just one of the symptoms to a major problem that the Weimar republic didn't address and instead used fascist tactics to get rid of Hitler before he could gain power, and then guess what happened.
Similarly, Trump is also only but a symptom to a larger issue. Using fascist tactics to get him out of power, only makes the counter response greeter, and not make the core problem go away.
What fascist tactics did they use to get rid of Hitler? If you're referring to his time in prison, he was put there because he staged a putsch.
Beyond that, much of the establishment and industry tried to work with him using a softly, softly approach. They thought they could steer him, temper him, leverage his popularity for their own ends. Of course, that didn't work out for them
>What fascist tactics did they use to get rid of Hitler?
November 1921 (Munich): During a speech at an NSDAP rally in a beer hall, an unknown assailant fired shots at Hitler from the crowd amid a melee, but he escaped unharmed.
1923 (Thuringia): An unidentified person attempted to shoot Hitler during a rally, but Nazi supporters outnumbered opponents, forcing the attacker to flee.
1923 (Memmingen): Another unknown individual tried to assassinate Hitler with a rifle but retreated when confronted by his followers.
July 15, 1932 (Munich): An assailant fired shots at Hitler and SA leader Ernst Röhm while they dined at Cafe Heck, but both were unhurt.
1932 (Nuremberg): A bomb was planted in the lobby of Hitler's hotel, but it was discovered and removed before detonation.
1932 (Berlin and Munich): Two additional attempts occurred, one involving potential poisoning at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin (where Hitler and staff fell ill after a meal, suspected to be deliberate contamination), though details are limited and perpetrators unidentified.
Attempted assassinations by unidentified lone wolves, spread out over decades, are not "fascist" tactics. Obviously they are very bad for a political climate, but I think that's stretching the definition beyond any use.
You originally implied the Weimar Republic itself used fascistic tactics. But your examples show nothing of the sort (and are obviously just an LLM dump, which disinclines me to continue this conversation)
You think the appropriate punishment for interfering with a simple administrative act is gunshots to the back of the head? Are you even reading what you're saying???
Police have the right to defend themselves if they fear for their lives. It was terrible accident indeed that could have been voided if he'd not physically interfere or have a gun on him.
You have government-backed thugs with guns running around murdering people who take photos of them.
You have something that looks worryingly like the Ceaușescu's Securitate "disappearing" citizens - including a little 5-year-old boy - off the streets.
Justify that.
Justify kidnapping a terrified little boy who should be at school with his friends, and locking him up in prison.
Go on, justify those actions. Let's see if you can.
> including a little 5-year-old boy - off the streets.
YOu're a victim of fake news propaganda if you actually believe and parrot that BS. That 5 year old boy was not "disappeared", but taken by ICE to child protection services facility.
What were they supposed to do? Abandon him in the middle of the street after his criminal dad ran away from him leaving him behind and his mom wouldn't take him?
First, they’re screaming OH, THE HUMANITY! over censorship before their favorite puppets take the wheel. Then, they’re the first ones ridiculing anyone else for complaining about the exact same thing.
You're missing the point, celebrities just happen to have a huge reach and noticed the reach being cut.
This probably means everyone else is also getting their reach crippled.
Remember that even with clear video evidence, the administration lies about the events and tries to spin it as domestic terrorism.
So imagine what they are doing, and will do, without video evidence.
This is probably one of the darkest times in America... You have an administration that normalizes lying and violence, and a tens of millions of Americans that are choosing to close their eyes and suspend their morals because they're scared and confused.
Only TikTok in the U.S., though; everywhere else it's Bytedance still.
Trump got empty hands, he got totally played by the nice words of Rutte.
Edit: Your conversation is really mind boggling:
"Trump got a great deal on Greenland!"
"What deal?"
"How would I know?!?!?!"
It might be manipulating people at home, but you're closer (still not close, obviously) to Russia than Sweden as far as a trustworthy business partner or ally now. We're suddenly not making any long term plans that rely on America or American companies where it's avoidable, I don't know if you understand how big of a shift that is.
Sorry but you are suffering from some kind of delusion here. He's not manipulating public perception in any way that is beneficial to him or the US. He's crashing his own public perception (which was already in the gutter to all but the sycophants and blind loyalists) and taking the US' reputation with him
“There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” ― Lao Tzu
Let's run the clap-o-meter.
- Trump: https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=1dLbyqmpVH39KtY1...
- Carney: https://youtu.be/CQOr9FcSf-M?si=vb4Z9fSOewRyV_7S&t=1130
Edit: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm24vjvy3n1o
"I was in the room when President Donald Trump entered and it's fair to say he got a good welcome from the crowd, certainly at the beginning. A standing ovation."
People were leaving and stopped paying attention during Trump speech. It was just ... bad.
So the best we can do is anecdotal examples. And it’s also obvious that Trump avoided banning TikTok for months, illegally, because he wanted to have another platform serve as a mouthpiece. He now has that by forcing a sale of TikTok to his friend, Larry Ellison.
Which is hilarious sentence now because this government so pro free speech!!! sarcasm*
But seriously this is something that if my main gig was to create music or some art form, I wouldn't want to be on a corp run platform. I would want to own it myself and the all that data.
21st century brownshirts, if you will.
It’s really hard to say which video will work or not. What people react to and what not.
All I’m saying is that this could also potentially be explained by "The Algorithm" per se.
Anyway, considering that the purchase of the American TikTok was done with a purpose and there is documented collusion between the involved tech Billionaires and the political class behind the street executions in American cities that drive those protests, I wouldn’t be surprised that they are actually throttling this time.
Also, do you mean minority of the total US population or minority of the voting population?
For one reference point I fully support ICE. And I think it's wild you have local and state politicians encouraging actions against federal agents who are enforcing federal law.
The Gestapo, too, was federal agents enforcing federal law.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53939-more-americ...
No one can know what TikTok censors or penalizes in its algorithms. All other social media platforms are equally intransparent, what is new is that TikTok is not American.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cp374n3ggngt
Social media that actually have a large audience and that cannot be easily pressured by the US government?
This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140241306955
They raise alarms because they have low TikTok view counters. But mass killings of Iranian protesters is Iran's own business.
incredible beyond words that this was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. letting the us government set up whatever arraigned marriage it felt like for buying a social network is some wild meddling with businesses. and here we are, with the ultra capitalists doing exactly what they want to with one of the most popular social networks.
excellent write up for this absolute madness of a court decision, TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
Although re your actual point: the current admin only gifts things like this to a chosen few; a small subset of those with extreme capital. So it seems much more appropriate to call it cronyism, or some such thing, rather than capitalism in the sense of merely controlling capital.
Whatever the rules are, people end up adapting to and gaming them to entrench and grow their own position, typically at the expense of everyone else.
That’s a contradiction.
It's a contradiction only if you understand democracy as a theoretical ideal. Practical democracies, as implemented in western countries, in recent decades proven themselves to be completely controllable by capital, both the democratic elites and democratic masses.
I think we should rather go with practical outcome not the stated theoretical ideas. It's also a good way of evaluating communism and probably other systems.
And if they wouldn’t, they would be blocked or prevented of doing business in the US.
Wasn't there something about an amendment to their constitution? I believe it might've even been the first? Something about freedom of speech?
Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I could've sworn conservatives kept harping on about it.
It only restricts the Federal government (later extended to state governments IIRC?)
This is one of many reasons Federal government is now partnered with private business.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
They got Paramount and CBS and TikTok, are allied with Twitter, and still have a chance of grabbing Warner.
I don’t think American billionaires ever particularly liked Murdoch, an Australian, controlling so much of the media environment in their country. Maybe they’ll make an offer for Fox News that the Murdoch heirs can’t refuse.
Because if it were actual fascism, like the Hitler/Mussolini kind, you'd be arrest/dead the moment you spoke anything against it.
If you can freely call your leaders fascists for years, then it's not actual fascism.
This is... a pretty confused view of history, really. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and consolidated power over the next year. At this point there was a lot of criticism of the regime, both internal and external. Things got rapidly worse after, of course, but there certainly was a period where the Nazis were in power but that there was public criticism.
Even as late as 1938, there was significant public discontent RE Kristallnacht in particular.
Every political party had public criticism before they could gain absolute power to silence that criticism.
It looks like you have paramilitaries roaming your streets - not wearing ID or proper uniforms, covering their faces to avoid identification, not answering to usual democratic controls - executing protestors.
In the latest incident, they seemed to be beating and spraying a woman with a chemical agent for filming them, and then executing a bystander who tried to help her. The regime then tried to deny reality and falsely claim that they'd attacked said paramilitary operatives.
In any Western democracy (and I'm not sure if the US is currently part of that category) there would be a public investigation, but they seem to have been squirrelled away and the politicians who have spoken out about it have been threatened.
This all seems to be fascistic by any reasonable standard.
Covering their faces to avoid doxing and being attacked at their homes.
Really? Is that why they have vests with labels that say "POLICE FEDERAL AGENT" front and back? Maybe literacy is an issue.
> covering their faces to avoid identification
Same reason SWAT and special forces covering their faces. Because just like them, ICE arrests and deports violent criminals, cartel members, human traffickers, etc. Dangerous people that could identify their faces and then track down and kill their families in retaliation, exactly what lib-dem ANTIFA & co anarchists would love to do to them if they could see their faces.
And also then, why are the "protesters" assaulting them covering their faces as well if the good guys are supposed to show their faces and only bad guys cover their faces according to your logic?
>In any Western democracy (and I'm not sure if the US is currently part of that category) there would be a public investigation
Public investigations are meaningless now in this specific partisan case since the people have already made up their mind on who's guilty. So if the officer would be publicly investigated and then cleared, them dems would just say it was all rigged anyway.
The paramilitaries that executed Pretti are all wearing street clothing, and all wearing different clothing. They look like a mob.
> Dangerous people that could identify their faces and kill their families in retaliation.
Well that's convenient, because it also allows them to kill protestors or their families without any consequence.
> Why are the protesters assaulting them covering their faces
Pretti didn't assault them, and wasn't covering his face. He got executed anyway.
On top of which they have matching ICE issued vest with inscriptions.
>He got executed anyway.
Yes, accidents like this will happen when you shove law enforcement officers with a gun on you. Similarly, a lot of people also got "executed" by police without even having a gun, but just by simply by being uncooperative and pulling out their wallets from their back pocket with a sudden motion towards them as if they were pulling a gun. That will get you killed.
There's etiquette when dealing with police that people seem to have forgotten.
It's a fascist theme to have paramilitaries not wearing uniforms. See for example the mukhabarat in Syria. It makes them more intimidating, because they look undisciplined, and adds confusion to protestors as to whether they are dealing with someone who is part of the legal system. Why on earth would they not be issued with uniforms?
> Yes, accidents like this will happen when you shove law enforcement officers with a gun on you.
Pretti did not shove any "law enforcement officers". The first physical contact is a shove on Pretti by one of them.
BBC did a frame by frame analysis: the first shove happens at approx 1:00 in this video. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/l0057wmt/bbc-verify-an...
If you disagree, please provide a source.
The first time they seem to be aware that he has a firearm is when they disarm him, and the execution happens after that, so I don't see how that is relevant.
You're leaving the part out where a gunshot is heard right before they "execute" him. The officers with their fingers on the trigger pointed at him during detainment, got scared of that gunshot and jumped on the trigger by accident. It's an unfortunate accident but not an execution. Read up the legal definition of execution. This is not it.
Right now, ICE goes out of their way to beat and arrest protestors and steal their cameras. They're not yet mowing them down but by that time it would be a little late to do something about their conduct. Remember that the current US president admires how the CCP crushed the student protestors in Tiananmen square with tanks and guns.
Sure, but if you use fascist tactics to fight fascism, are you not a fascist yourself?
And people conveniently focus only on the symptoms(rise of fascism) but not on the main cause that leads to it.
Like Hitler didn't just randomly get to power one day out of nowhere because the average German citizen was living such a good life. He was just one of the symptoms to a major problem that the Weimar republic didn't address and instead used fascist tactics to get rid of Hitler before he could gain power, and then guess what happened.
Similarly, Trump is also only but a symptom to a larger issue. Using fascist tactics to get him out of power, only makes the counter response greeter, and not make the core problem go away.
Beyond that, much of the establishment and industry tried to work with him using a softly, softly approach. They thought they could steer him, temper him, leverage his popularity for their own ends. Of course, that didn't work out for them
You originally implied the Weimar Republic itself used fascistic tactics. But your examples show nothing of the sort (and are obviously just an LLM dump, which disinclines me to continue this conversation)
Think about what you're saying. You're trying to defend the indefensible.
It's what fascist regimes do to anyone they deem noncompliant.
Impressively, you managed to misrepresent a fact with every single word in your sentence.
You have something that looks worryingly like the Ceaușescu's Securitate "disappearing" citizens - including a little 5-year-old boy - off the streets.
Justify that.
Justify kidnapping a terrified little boy who should be at school with his friends, and locking him up in prison.
Go on, justify those actions. Let's see if you can.
YOu're a victim of fake news propaganda if you actually believe and parrot that BS. That 5 year old boy was not "disappeared", but taken by ICE to child protection services facility.
What were they supposed to do? Abandon him in the middle of the street after his criminal dad ran away from him leaving him behind and his mom wouldn't take him?
Damned if you do, damned if you don;t.
This probably means everyone else is also getting their reach crippled.
Remember that even with clear video evidence, the administration lies about the events and tries to spin it as domestic terrorism.
So imagine what they are doing, and will do, without video evidence.
This is probably one of the darkest times in America... You have an administration that normalizes lying and violence, and a tens of millions of Americans that are choosing to close their eyes and suspend their morals because they're scared and confused.