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  • It’s an attempt to create a unified narrative that can tie together a number of disparate groups. Groups who have no chance of winning elections or joining another coalition. Groups whose goals and ambitions are so antithetical to public interest that they can never actually say what they want out loud.

    The reason this document is so bizarre and unhinged is because it’s trying to speak the language of people who have to speak in a series of dog whistles to prevent being disregarded out of hand.

    It’s a rallying cry to all those who are upset when they get held accountable for saying what they actually think.

    • I never put it together like that. Thank you. It all makes so much more sense now.

      @undergroundoverground, next to you in this thread, also goes into how they cannot actually define anything as simple as "anti-woke". The rhetoric falls back to meaningless marketing-like-words (e.g. "common sense") that are, perhaps deliberately, open to personal interpretation. The only coherent platform is the one that exists in an individual's head, yet it is distinct from the next guy.

      • I, a non-violent person, really wish a nose-punch on anyone who uses the phrase common sense to bolster their position.

        I feel bad for it, but I also really disdain the notion of common sense. It's common sense to stand loyal to your rapist buddy. It's common sense to throw rocks at people who speak with different dialects or worship strange gods.

        We traded up common sense for deliberation and rationality when we tried agriculture so we didn't have to migrate so much.

    • And here we thought it was bad trying to get a coherent message accepted on the left. Leftist infighting is legendary because the left has no idea how to dog whistle, which is a good thing. But the fact that there are 900,000 splinter groups with wildly different ideologies perfectly willing to fight tooth and nail to be the One True Leftism means the left knows infighting. Experts at it even. That's why leftist policy is so timid and careful usually.

      The right has ridden long and hard on the basic fact that most of their base are too stupid to think hard enough about ideology that they could worry about having to make them all work together. You easily get anti-vax moms riding alongside armband-wearing nazis on the right, because they're both too dumb to realize that they're supporting each other.

      But all that is finally starting to come to a head (hopefully) as the current Democrat contenders are talking actual policy, as in, things they will do on a legal, prescriptive, professional level to enact changes. The right has gotten away with not doing anything for a long time because the left became basically the opposition group instead of actual challengers.

      So they have to put their actual desires on paper, AND get them universally accepted by everyone on the right. It all looks a little different in that light. Seeing abolishment of birth control right next to their desire to abolish Civil Rights is making them sweat. These are NOT universally held positions of people on the right.

      And honestly, most on the right, even the most frothing zealots, they don't really want social disruption and rollbacks to the dark-ages. They are children. They are toddlers. They want to be heard and be recognized that they are angry, and they want to share that anger with the rest of their own little WWE Wrestlemania audience that lives in a fantasy world. That's all. They don't want to work on coalition building, they don't want to phone-bank, they don't want to have debates, they don't want policies signed into law that will change their comfortable lives.

      These are people who really need to discover some kind of Dungeons and Dragons gaming system that appeals to their anger and stupid worldbuilding.

  • So, once upon a time in Germany, around 1931, Reinhard Heydrich (the father of the genocide machine to later feature in the Holocaust) was tasked with starting the Sicherheitsdienst, sister agency to the Gestapo. See, Germany was going through a hard time, and while the communists wanted to try out that business Lenin was doing, the companies and interest behind the NSDAP wanted the people to fall behind an autocratic regime that would take care of them and make sure everyone stayed in their lane.

    And Heydrich (who was still new at it but read a lot of cloak-and-dagger spy stories) worked out that the enemy within rhetoric served to keep the German people lawful. At first he started rounding up the wierdos (gays, sexual perverts, street beggars). Since no one liked the Jews (really, the whole world was on an antisemitic bender), he added them to the list. Then the communists. Then the trade unionists. And then everyone employed in a job that he thought wasn't serving the state very well. He really got going.

    The first concentration camp was a warehouse in Berlin, but it filled up super fast, and in time he needed bigger spaces, and so new camps weren't just ad-hoc corrals but ghettos and more permanent prison camps for the growing contained population, in what was becoming The Jewish Problem: There were too many people to keep in ghettos and camps and (remember that global antisemitism) no-one else was willing to take Jewish refugees. Not even the United States. If only there was a way to make them disappear...

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