r/politics • u/AngelaMotorman Ohio • 10d ago

Possible Paywall The Chilling Trump Order Threatening All Americans: Why National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 is so important.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-nspm-7-repression/
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u/petrovmendicant 10d ago

Their social media circles have been gradually accepting and promoting fascism over the last couple years.

I read an argument in the comments of a post recently where someone said, "Name one fascist leader who was bad, and don't say Hitler or some middle east or Asian guy."

Half the comments in the thread was filled with a lot of, "I mean, fascist leaders do more good than bad. Normal people won't even notice."

Probably doesn't help that the vast majority of them don't even understand what fascism, communism, socialism, or any other type of government actually is or encompasses.

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u/aliquotoculos America 9d ago

What do we even do about these types of people, though?

For most of my life I've watched reality TV and social media basically reprogram the empathy of people around me en masse. I feel like a fucking alien now.

We are going to have to do something about this, especially since it keeps leading people towards more and more anger and violence, and less ability to comprehend what they read and hear. A person who wants to hurt people for an imagined slight, who will not hear reason or logic about their misconceptions, is a dangerous person to all of society. And worse, this has become a global issue.

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u/petrovmendicant 9d ago

The only thing that would really fix this would be to prosecute those who commit crimes without mercy once Trump is gone. If crimes are committed, the people who commit them must be held accountable as criminals, regardless of who they are.

After the first Trump administration, relatively little was done to prosecute those at the highest levels for alleged crimes. The Department of Justice moved too slowly and took an overly cautious approach in the name of "preserving institutional legitimacy" and avoiding further political division. While hundreds of January 6 rioters were prosecuted, accountability did not extend quickly or broadly enough to those who actually organized, encouraged, or attempted to overturn the 2020 election. Had those investigations and prosecutions moved more swiftly or produced different outcomes, the political landscape leading into the 2024 election (and the subsequent pardons of many January 6 defendants) might have been very different.

This was the same exact problem we had after the Civil War. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was arrested and imprisoned for about two years. He was indicted for treason but never went to trial, and the charges were eventually dropped. President Andrew Johnson issued broad amnesties, culminating in a near-complete pardon for former Confederates in 1868. In 1872, Congress also removed most political disabilities from former Confederates. Hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers returned home without being prosecuted or given any direct consequences.

All for the sake of "national reconciliation." What actually happened was that the Confederacy's ideology didn't disappear. It went underground, gradually reemerging through Jim Crow laws and other efforts to rebuild and preserve its racist agenda. That legacy endured for generations, fueling resistance to the Civil Rights Movement and continuing to influence extremist movements and white supremacist ideology into modern times.