“This is out of the autocratic playbook. As autocrats consolidate their power once they’re in office, anything that threatens their power ... becomes illegal,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said.

“This is out of the autocratic playbook. As autocrats consolidate their power once they’re in office, anything that threatens their power … becomes illegal,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said.

Donald Trump is ramping up his rhetoric depicting his political rivals and critics as criminals, while dropping a long trail of suggestions that he favors outlawing political speech that he deems misleading or challenges his claims to power.

In a speech Friday in Aurora, Colorado, the Republican presidential nominee blasted the immigration system and lobbed a rhetorical grenade at his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“She’s a criminal. She’s a criminal,” said Trump, who was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York hush money trial. “She really is, if you think about it.”

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    • Scolding7300@lemmy.world
      2·
      23 minutes ago

      If Hitler got to power with plenty of supporters, so there’s plenty of room for propaganda to work in other cases too

    • TheAlbatross
      69·
      8 hours ago

      Do you remember growing up and asking “how was it even possible that someone as monstrous as Hitler was put in power? He wasn’t shy about his intents!”?

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
        3·
        25 minutes ago

        I think this go around it’s worse than Hitler.

        We didn’t have mass communication in the same way during the rise of Hitler.

        We didn’t have access to a wealth of information that ran counter to the programming during the rise of Hitler.

        We didn’t have the amount of available access to other parts of the country and the world during the rise of Hitler.

        We didn’t have the example of Hitler during the rise of Hitler.

        The thing that’s so fucking surreal this time is that people should largely know better, but don’t.

        So now, we’ll watch in 4k ultra hd the rise of a wanton fascist who spouts provable lies daily: an anti-science, anti-tech, anti-globalist ignoramus who likely could’ve never rose to prominence without an international micro-blogging website enabling him.

      • drunkpostdisaster@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 hours ago

        I was always a really good lier as a kid so I never wondered that. I just figured people these days are to educated to fall for it.

    • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
      42·
      8 hours ago

      A lot of people are more interested in hating people that are different from them than making informed decisions.

    • Catma@lemmy.world
      19·
      7 hours ago

      Decades of unfiltered right wing radio declaring Democrats as literally evil and propogating the idea of Republicans being the party of God. When your rival is the embodiment of evil you cannot ever work with them or compromise with them lest you be destroyed.

    • NineMileTower@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 hours ago

      I don’t think it’s as close as the news says it is. They want eyeballs. I think it will not be as close as these polls say.

        • apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world
          3·
          6 minutes ago

          So did I but it must be said that none of these elections in recent memory have been fair elections. The Democrats win the vote totals. Voter laws in “red” states are so thoroughly fucked that they exclude and oppress voting rights so that the Republican voters outnumber the voters who may vote against them. Then you have gerrymandering on top of that. Despite the prosecutions of Republican voter interference, nothing systemic has changed to make voting a fair competition. Any discourse on changes to these problems seem to get silenced.

          The current system is broken, seemingly intractable, and favors Republicans. Wash, rinse, repeat every four years.

        • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
          2·
          2 hours ago

          And so did everyone else.

          A lot of people don’t want to look into the mirror, but it really says a lot about the Democratic party that 3/3 of their picks have struggled so hard against someone like Trump. Trump is vile dog shit but what does it say about you (the royal ‘you’) when you can’t even come off as something more appealing than that?

          • evatronic@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            54 minutes ago

            A huge swath of Republican voters are not voting for Trump. They are voting against “Democrats”. Propaganda in the US has turned politics into a team sport, and you always root for your team, even if your team is having a rough season.

    • PunnyName@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 hours ago

      The correct question others should have posited when the idea of race was created by white supremacists.