>Speaking of fascism I haven't seen any convincing outrage on
>the left at homeland security goon squads being set loose in
>our leftist hellholes yet, other than AOC introducing a bill
>requiring them to first tell you what agency they are members
>of before they throw you into a (I guess freshly) marked van.

We'd just wrapped up a tedious week of The Discourse with a general agreement that Free Speech was good, probably, and that the collection of tenured doofuses and Times columnists* need to be protected at all costs against the creeping illiberalism of somebody writing "Wari Beiss" in response to a shitty argument.

Then we had honest-to-God explicit fascism. The uniquely American sort that you can only have with a DHS head named "Chad Wolf" featuring dangerous secret police black-bagging protesters, but without the panache of 30's Italy.

Faced with actual humans risking actual danger to make their argument in public, I think the miserable, diapered babies that signed the Harper's letter pretty much slunk away in shame. The good news is that it proves that they can experience shame, but the bad news is that everybody seems just really embarrassed to have indulged such a water-thin definition of the word "free" by our (apparent) intellectual betters that nobody was really up for revisiting the topic in a more serious sense.

Like watching Omen III and then going back and watching Omen.

>I bet it's Barr that's behind the jackbootism, but the fact
>that you have a loose conglomarate of mayors as the loudest
>voice against a pretty frightening development just shows how
>complacent the party will remain as long as Trump's ratings
>decline by themselves.

And mayors ... aren't really great at that, it seems. By the nature of their job and the way our local/state/federal governments are nested, it really seems like most mayors feel a pretty strong obligation to bow down to capital. That move itself isn't itself fascism, but it does mean you're never going to close the shutters on fascism. They don't want secret police actually scooping people up off the street, but I think they'd also be pretty resistant to dismantling the legal mechanisms by which that happens in the first place. Gotta have the option.


*Chomsky's cool. He's wrong about this, but he's shown he actually cars about Free Speech and not the non-existent right to not be yelled at on twitter.