Originally published at: Trump campaign threatens critics
…
2 Likes
This bullet-headed cut-rate Goebbels’ entire career, – no doubt intended to culminate as Biff’s press secretary – is a profile of a rapid descent into cage-match chest-beating derangement.
9 Likes
8 Likes
My big hope is that this kind of talk fires up the left (and anyone still lazy about democracy) to come out and vote in record numbers to keep Trump out.
17 Likes
I love how when I read Cheung’s reply, I “heard” it in an outrageous “The Producers” style German Accent.
5 Likes
So Steven Cheung is a real person? I assumed he was a chatbot trained on Mussolini speeches.
11 Likes
I assume he meant they’d be crushed emotionally, but they just can’t help sound like fascists even when denying they are fascists. But I guess that’s also the game they play, actually being fascists while going for plausible deniability that also reaffirms for their target audience that yes, they are indeed fascists.
I still can’t get over that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was coined by deranged fascists to paint anyone who correctly points out that they’re fascists as deranged - while they goose-step around, throwing Nazi salutes and insisting Obama is president. It’s such an extreme form of gaslighting, just seeing it in action makes me feel disconnected from reality.
11 Likes
Seconded.
We’re on the precipice, here, and there are still people acting like it’s business as usual. We don’t have time to slack, and we sure as hell don’t have time to play.
5 Likes
My biggest concern isn’t Trump’s speech, it’s who he empowers with it. Listen to him for more than a few seconds lately and it’s obvious his decline continues, if not even quicker. If he’s elected, you’ll have a situation like with old Woodrow Wilson in that someone else will be giving the orders under Trump, and they will do so with 100% knowledge of what they are doing. And they won’t be in decline.
8 Likes
… it would be hilarious if they weren’t serious 
7 Likes
… Woodrow Wilson didn’t get louder and angrier and sleep less as a result of his impairment
Their whole plan this time is to obliterate all the layers of “bureaucracy” between the POTUS and the hammers and tongs of power
If he gets re-elected it will be the craziest most disintermediated presidency in generations 
7 Likes
His rallies are becoming fewer, even before his court cases became more. His public outings were also on a big decline. He’s not aging well. He had planned to ride a losing presidental bid to TV greatness and die famous in a way he’d never managed to get in any other of his business ventures. Instead he won and now is beginning to face consequences for the first time in his life and he hates every second of it. Even if you’re completely disassociated from reality, the stress of people telling you no when they always use to grovel at your feet will wear you down.
16 Likes
Violent government overthrow is the only way he can escape the legal freight train that is about to run him over.
8 Likes
5 Likes
That’s part of the reason he’s pushing for the insurrection trial to be televised. He’s under the mistaken impression that the “magic” of TV will somehow allow him to take control of the courtroom and turn it into one big stage for an on-going rally. He doesn’t understand that, even if the judge allows cameras in the classroom, his “star power” won’t suddenly render either judge or prosecution his thralls.
9 Likes
None of it is accidental, none of it is a joke. They literally and unambiguously mean what they said, even if they claim that they’re speaking metaphorically or ironically. They are lying about lying about it: they are speaking literally, and they are deadly serious.
Alt-Signaling: Fascistic Communication and the Power of Subterranean Style
I focus here on a dynamic I call “alt-signaling” (see McIntosh and Mendoza-Denton 2020b), associated with Trump’s communicative techniques and extended by his followers. Alt-signaling is characterized by a kind of mirroring between form and content, where allusions to sinister, illicit, or conspiratorial dynamics (whether those projected onto the left, or those plotted by the right) are couched in semiotically indirect, ambiguous, or cryptic forms. The motives for the subterfuge appear to be several, including evading detection or skirting accusations by enemies. But I suggest the form of alt-signaling can also feed the power of the myths it buys into, magnifying the sense of threat while enacting the thrilling fantasy of the subterranean fascistic state-in-waiting.
We have seen variants of alt-signaling for a number of years, as among American fascists who have strategically claimed that their dangerous words are not to be taken seriously. After famously ending a speech by shouting “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory” into an auditorium of Nazi salutes, the white supremacist Richard Spencer contended he had done so in a “spirit of irony and exuberance.” Some neo-Nazi websites urge their posters to use a light tone so that the “unindoctrinated” reader can’t tell whether they’re joking (Kakutani 2018, 158–59).
10 Likes
… I dunno, we have yet to see any judge have the, um, fortitude to do more than fine him pocket change for going off topic 
7 Likes
11 Likes
You’d think we’d have learned this by now, but it seems like some continue to see this as something other than what it actually is… which is a fascist movement bent on taking over the country.
14 Likes
Boy, the subterranean style has really come to the surface at this point…
5 Likes
