#mrcowboyreturns

Well, there are layers to it.

For one thing, there’s the right-wing perception that left-wing activists are treated with kid gloves, while their guys are being arrested by the feds all around the country. The irony is that they have it backwards: during leftist BLM/antifa/etc demonstrations this year, cops would routinely snap up anyone they could get their hands on only to let them go the next day or so because the DAs had nothing to go on. The cops knew this would happen; it was an intimidation tactic on top of everything else they brought to bear. There’s also the fact that people who might’ve actually been doing something illegal tend to be in black bloc, so it’s much, much harder to discern their identity.

Meanwhile at the Capitol, these yahoos had not only made being anti-mask such a point of pride that they wouldn’t conceal their faces while committing a crime, they went around taking selfies. Maybe the relaxed response from Capitol police made them feel like that was a smart move. But now that they’re getting arrested all around the country and facing felony charges, well, that’s just not fair!

As for Trump being banned from the major social media sites... well, some people cry “censorship” at the slightest obstacle, despite the fact that Trump still has access to, y’know, the White House Press Corps, he can make a televised or radio announcement at any time, and can even push out a message to every phone in America. I think people are generally less concerned about Trump personally being deplatformed than they are about the wave of bans of other talking heads and the average schmucks that followed them.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about Parler being taken down. On one hand it absolutely deserved to be taken down, like, it was criminally badly run (literally, the assholes in charge of it may be in serious trouble for failing to even slightly protect user information in accordance with legal guidelines) and it mostly existed as a refuge for dangerous pieces of shit to form their echo chambers and radicalize people. On the other, this does actually present a free speech problem when it comes to the Internet.

That being, the internet has no public square. Some people have insisted that Facebook and Twitter are so big that they are now the public square, but we have just seen that that’s demonstrably untrue: if a handful of big corporations find you a liability, they can effectively boot you out. There is no actual public alternative, no public access social network.

The problem is, there will never be a good answer for this. There has to be some form of content moderation. Facebook and Twitter have been notoriously bad at it, and played a direct part in fascist radicalization in the US. Facebook itself has been directly tied to massacres and genocides around the world, because they don’t want to spend the money on adequate moderation services in non-English speaking countries. They definitely shut the barn door long after the Trump and Q horses bolted. Clearly, profit incentive is not nearly enough for content moderation. This is one of those things where nobody really has a good answer and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better.

Short answer: That’s Nazi propaganda.

Long answer: The Nazi party gained power primarily through a significant portion of WW1 veterans who bought into the “stabbed in the back” narrative concocted by the very military leaders that pushed Germany to go to war in the first place, middle class Germans who were economically afraid that they’d be as bad off as the Germans who were burning wheelbarrows worthless money to stay alive, a fuckload of anti-Semitism, and... well, yes, to be fair, there was some degree of moral panic over all that progressivism happening in Berlin. Hitler actually hated Berlin because of how progressive it was. Those infamous Nazi book burnings? A fuckload of those books were the work of doctors seeking to better understand how to understand trans people and how to help them transition.

And yeah, there was Communist street violence, but there was street violence from every party in Germany at the time. Like imagine if today’s centrists who are all “I don’t approve of cops choking black people to death, but I can’t condone property damage either” were going out and smashing Starbucks windows and beating people’s teeth out in the street to show how sensible and balanced they were.

It was a crazy time. But what is probably the most overlooked factor in the rise of Nazi Germany was the conservative nature of German judges at the time. German judges were generally monarchist and resented that they were now living under a Republic. If you arrested and put political street fighters before them, the outcome would be like

Judge: You shot a fascist? Such savage political violence. You are guil- oh we have to review the evidence and it looks sketchy at best. Whatever. Guilty. The sentence is death. or Judge: You shot a communist? Not guil- oh, the evidence is damning? Oh, fine. You are guilty but we are sending you to Blackjack and Hooker prison for two years.

Apparently it means different things to different people, depending on your political bent. As I understand it, accelerationism is deliberately making things worse to hasten the coming of The Revolution. White nationalists, for example, imagine the collapse of society would give them the chance to take over the nation and make America a white man’s paradise once and for all (or at least their preferred chunk of it; e.g. the Northwest Territorial Imperative).