In hindsight, "Stand Back and Stand By" does not sound quite the same as the first time...
...I heard it in the debate?
It sounds more intentional.
It sounds more planned.
It sounds more threatening.
It sounds more like orders were being given.
It sounds more like seditious conspiracy.
= new reply since forum marked as read
to journalism and journalists, and they know it. tRump often spoke about closing down newspapers and arresting reporters, and of course every year many journalists are arrested, "disappeared," murdered in lawless, authoritarian nations.
Then there was/is the whole QAnon thing, with people expecting tRump to use the national emergency broadcast system, or some such thing, to alert them personally that it was time to attack and take over the nation, arresting and holding people for execution. All of them supposedly just waiting eagerly for tRump's orders for where to go and who to attack.
PLUS, many of tRump's MAGAs. This was the context within which he made many statements like this.
he reason WE know this is the free press.
of the harnessing of aggressively anti-elite, anti-establishment nasty-negative emotions that is populism. Yes, Hitler presented as a populist leader, as did tRump, but so did many other power-seekers espousing almost all ideologies. Brazil's Bolsonaro, Venezuela's Maduro, France's Marine Le Pen, Hungary's Orban, UK's Boris Johnson, Israel's Netanyahu, on and on.
If you're a nasty, dangerous creep who can't hold a job and responsible political kingmakers wouldn't let you enter the house to deliver groceries, much less put you in high office, populism can still be a means to power.
I don't think anyone doubts tRump and his special supporters have studied Hitler's techniques, but there are many, many others, successful in today's world, to study and seek advice from. Populist leader Putin for another. All would tell their followers to stand by for their call to lawlessness.
Apparently Caesar's adopted son Octavius (Augustus Caesar) may have many living descendants. That'd be fun for some to someday "discover," though apparently genetic testing that far back would miss a lot, even most of who actually were.
Warping of heavy Roman classicism was apparently very popular with Hitler and Mussolini fascists, though from what I've read the big building binge of that general era in DC mostly lost out on the special fascistic imprint. Thank goodness. Lots of that pretty neoclassicical though.
As for that last, I've just assumed surrendering to all of one's worst character traits as required by The Leader, or just team as available, must require suspension of thinking. How else to explain them? All in service to The Leader and his great cause of course.
I'll never know such happiness.
Thanks for pointing them out. Likely largely bombast, but.... And National Guard captains? The name alone suggests they need to be drowned at birth.
In looking up this group, I saw this on Esquire. Seems like a valid alternate working definition of the fascism developing around tRump:
“by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood”, in which “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion”.
A lot of what Paxton describes has evolved into instinctual behavior in our present politics. These elements of fascism are already here. Its vocabulary and syntax have long been an important part of our national dialogue. They simply have not yet fully coalesced. God help us if they do.
I hope this group, also gathering at the Willard Hotel, ends up as some obscure names in a long list of people convicted and serving time after the nation's mostly moved on.
THIS one mentioned in Mother Jones as one of a bunch, for instance.
“You always record what everybody says, and you put shit out there, and you follow people around and take pictures,” Michael Kenny, a member of 1st Amendment Praetorian, or 1AP, a shadowy group of former military members that has worked with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, told Staci Burk on the March 1 call. “You talk a lot publicly, and that’s what makes you a target.” Burk is onetime Republican activist who is now studying for her law degree. “There was a number of people, you ruffled their feathers,” Kenny said moments later. “If you put anybody in jeopardy of prison time, or you know, if you might hurt them financially or whatever, people get edgy, you know? People don’t think clearly. You need to think about the easy way.”
She considered it a death threat and initially pulled back from talking to the J6 committtee, then resumed.
They turned it into tee shirts and a rally cry.
By the way--anyone know if it is true that "proud boy" is a rancher's term for a gelding that acts like it still has balls? 
Treating them a bit like boggarts--Riddikulus!
The devil hates for people to laugh at him.
