Beyond Slippery...

Yesterday ABC put Jimmy Kimmel on "indefinite hiatus" which is firing him without saying fired because of contracts. You'll see a lot of headlines about ABC firing him over what he said, but that's not accurate. They fired him because the head of the FCC threatened them if they didn't. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way."

Yesterday Trump declared that Antifa was a major terrorist organization and that the administration would be going after members and anyone who funds the organization. The headlines will read that Antifa is a terrorist organization. The problem is Antifa isn't an organization. It's a philosophy. Antifa stands for anti fascist. Anyone who is against fascism is technically part of Antifa. Think of it like feminism (I use this example on purpose) there isn't a group that you belong to if you are a feminist. It's an ideal, it's a philosophy, it's a belief, it's not an organization.

But labeling Antifa a terrorist organization, when there is no organization, isn't innocuous. It's dangerous. If nobody is Antifa, then everybody could be Antifa. And, I mean, the USA used to be filled with Antifa, until somewhere along the line a not insignificant portion of our population decided that fascism was actually not so terrible. As long as it was "their" fascists in charge.

I'm not sure if you are aware of the lists that started soon after Kirk's shooting. Where people copied and pasted social media posts they found to be offensive. A lot of them being people quoting Kirk's own words. But those lists were then turned into a doxxing blueprint, which was the purpose of the lists. Phone calls to employers were made, death threats were sent, a lot of people have been fired. The number of people lining up to snitch out their social media "friends" is stunning.

We are not on a slippery slope to authoritarianism or fascism. We are in a toboggan racing down the ice luge. I mean, if you're lucky you have a toboggan. Some of us are on a piece of cardboard and hoping it holds together before we crash.

Years ago Jon Stewart interviewed Bassem Youssef about censorship in Egypt. You might have heard Youssef being described over here as Egypt's Jon Stewart. He is a comedian. He had a satiristic tv show. In one of their first interviews he talked about how President Morsi was silencing his critics. He ended up being arrested by the Morsi government for insulting the president and Islam. He was silenced because satire tells the truth and dictators cannot have that happen. Thank goodness we aren't Egypt where comedians are fired for saying things the government doesn't like.

I'm not sure if you remember when Kim Jong Il died and they arrested people for not mourning correctly. They didn't show enough sadness. Didn't cry loud enough. Weren't distraught enough. Thank goodness we aren't North Korea where we demand people react a certain way to someone's death.

Everyone remembers the McCarthy hearings, or at least learning about them in school. And about how Joseph McCarthy did terrible things under the guise of rooting out communists. But people don't talk a lot about how neighbors turned in their neighbors or employers gave lists of their employees to the committee. How you could threaten someone with a phone call saying they were a no good commie to get them to do what you wanted. Thank goodness we aren't living through the Red Scare anymore.

We are already on the slope. We were standing at the edge of it last October and when November came people voted to slide on down.

I don't think all of them realized what exactly they were voting for, a lot of them have lived in bubbles with Fox telling them soothing lies and brewing hatred for anyone who isn't like them. I think they thought people on the left who warned that this was going to be the end of democracy as they knew it were overreacting. That when Trump said you'd only have to vote in one more election and then never vote again he was kidding, or misspeaking, or joking. When he said he would run again in 2028 and maybe more, that "some people are saying" he should be a dictator that he was kidding. As his former fixer Michael Cohn always says, Trump doesn't joke. He's telling you what he's going to do and getting you used to the idea.

The current administration is using the killing of Charlie Kirk as their Reichstag fire moment. This is it. We've reached the point where you must say the right thing, in the right way, or risk losing your job. Or worse. People are being snatched off the street. Yesterday during an "immigration raid" they broke down the door of a house and arrested an American Citizen, even after they realized their mistake they still handcuffed him in front of the cameras because they could. I don't know how to tell you things are beyond bad if you don't already realize it.

For so long the only thing that mattered to a large contingent of voters on the right was "owning the libs" if they could "drink liberal tears" it would be enough. Who needs health care, affordable groceries, a clean planet, human rights if the libs are mad? Just keep turning up the heat on them and we will pretend that none of it will touch us. Even though all of those things are going to affect them just as negatively. Pepe the Frog has been a far right mascot for ages, you know the metaphor about the boiling water right? Well, Pepe, you've cooked us all.