From: fedora@fea.st
On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:11:26 -0800, Dude wrote:
>On 1/27/2026 10:55 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
>>
>>
>> Even poor students of history can see what’s happening to the U.S.? ?
>> ROBYN URBACK? G&M
>>
>> In 1935, American author Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen
>> Here, a dystopian novel about the rise of a populist demagogue named
>> Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who becomes the U.S. president after
>> cultivating a cult following for his nationalism, anti-elitism, and
>> quixotic promises. Windrip was fixated on restoring domestic
>> production of material goods and hated the press.?He establishes a
>> paramilitary force called the “Minute Men,” or “M.M.,” who are
>> initially primarily made up of retired military personnel, but grow to
>> include farmers, industrial workers and even former criminals, all of
>> whom to appear to revel in the opportunity to wield control and power
>> over their fellow citizens. M.M. officers spy for the state and
>> violently break up protests, and as Windrip’s presidency metastasizes
>> into authoritarianism, they arrest and execute perceived dissidents
>> with complete impunity. The regime justifies these actions by claiming
>> the M.M. only targets malicious agitators: “The way to stop crime is
>> to stop it!” Windrip declares to great fanfare.?
>> Mr. Lewis’s novel was of course informed by the real-life tyranny
>> engulfing parts of Europe at that time, but his point was that America
>> was not impervious to those same forces. “All dictators followed the
>> same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of
>> sadistic etiquette,” he wrote. “And now, in the humorous, friendly,
>> happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, [Americans] saw the homicidal
>> maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central
>> Europe.”???
>>
>> There is a video,
> >
>Apparently, this guy at the Globe & Mail saw a video on social media and
>has a made a summary judgement. The videos all could have altered using AI.
>
>Didn't we just go through this yesterday?
True, the clapping might not be real. It depends on how soon after
the event the video appeared. It takes a few days to put together a
decent fake.
>Don't take a loaded gun and ammunition into town to a peaceful street
>protest, even if you have the right to carry a concealed weapon. ICE
>will not like that. That's my advice.
The fact that you might get shot has nothing to do with whether ice
can legally shoot you.
> taken this weekend in Minneapolis – nearly a century
>> after Mr. Lewis wrote his book – of an ICE agent clapping after his
>> colleagues execute an American citizen on the street. That American
>> citizen – 37-year-old Alex Pretti – was recording ICE agents
>> conducting their work when he went to assist a woman who was shoved to
>> the ground by one of the officers. Mr. Pretti asks her, “Are you
>> okay?” and then is immediately pepper-sprayed in the face and tackled
>> by a half-dozen officers. One agent removes a firearm that Mr. Pretti
>> had in its holster – which Mr. Pretti had the right to carry under the
>> Second Amendment – and only after Mr. Pretti is disarmed and on the
>> ground, the agents execute him, firing a handful of bullets into his
>> body. It’s in that moment that one of the ICE agents starts clapping.
>> In the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, we see
>> the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had a century
>> ago in central Europe. ?The regime then came out to justify the
>> killing, just as it had weeks ago, when an ICE agent shot another U.S.
>> citizen on the street – Renee Nicole Macklin Good, also 37 – whom the
>> White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently
>> labelled a “domestic terrorist,” though she was actually a mom in an
>> SUV who seemed to be turning her car away from the agent in front of
>> her. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem almost immediately
>> declared that Mr. Pretti “attacked” law enforcement and was
>> “brandishing” a gun, which were lies easily disproven by various
>> videos of the interaction. But White House staff persisted with the
>> fiction that Mr. Pretti “tried to murder federal agents” anyway,
>> telling Americans not to believe what they could plainly see with
>> their own eyes. The people being executed by state agents on the
>> street were effectively criminals-in-waiting, according to the White
>> House, and the way to stop crime, of course, is to stop it. ?Opinion
>>
>> A witness to the killing of Mr. Pretti gave a statement hours later in
>> which she said that the story that the DHS has fed the public is
>> wrong. But just as disturbingly, she said she fears reprisal from the
>> government because she witnessed what actually happened. “I feel
>> afraid,” she said. “Only hours have passed since they shot a man right
>> in front of me and I don’t feel like I can go home because I heard
>> agents were looking for me. I don’t know what the agents will do when
>> they find me.”?
>>
>> Even poor students of history recognize what it means when governments
>> shrug off their own citizens’ rights, as members of the Trump
>> administration have done in insisting that Ms. Macklin Good and Mr.
>> Pretti decided their own fates. They know what it means when an
>> administration blocks investigations, when citizens are afraid that
>> members of a masked, state-backed militia might show up at their homes
>> to interrogate them or worse, when innocent people are executed on the
>> street, and when the public is fed lies about agitators and domestic
>> terrorists. It happens slowly, and then all at once. And as Mr. Lewis
>> presciently noted, it could happen anywhere.
--
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<>> to <<>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian shrinks in horror and warns others away
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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