The Agora
In the spirit of the Ancient Greek Agora, we invite you to join our vibrant community - a contemporary meeting place for the exchange of ideas, inspired by the practices of old. Just as the Agora served as the heart of public life in Ancient Athens, our platform is designed to be the epicenter of meaningful discussion and thought-provoking dialogue.
Here, you are encouraged to speak your mind, share your insights, and engage in stimulating discussions. This is your opportunity to shape and influence our collective journey, just like the free citizens of Athens who gathered at the Agora to make significant decisions that impacted their society.
You're not alone in your quest for knowledge and understanding. In this community, you'll find support from like-minded individuals who, like you, are eager to explore new perspectives, challenge their preconceptions, and grow intellectually.
Remember, every voice matters and your contribution can make a difference. We believe that through open dialogue, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to discovery, we can foster a community that embodies the democratic spirit of the Agora in our modern world.
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The COVID death rate was a bit all over the place. Florida was lower than California and New York, and Texas was between those two. New York and California had much more strict policies than Florida and Texas, yet they had a higher morality rate.
Why? It's not because masks don't work when worn properly, it's because epidemics are complicated. Maybe people in Texas and Florida got more exercise, maybe not wearing masks exposed people to smaller doses sooner so they got natural immunity sooner, or maybe it's something else entirely.
It's a complex subject. I like how my state (Utah) handled it:
We had a lot fewer restrictions than most areas, but there were enough to remind people that things weren't completely normal. And I think it worked well! Utah had among the lowest deaths in the country, partly because of our high percentage of kids and because outdoor recreation stayed open (so people would recreate outside instead of inside with other people).
That wasn't because people bought the nonsense about the election, at least not directly. The people who showed up to the capitol and fought with the police there weren't there because they were mad about the voting system, they were there because they wanted to start something, and this was a good enough excuse. They don't represent the average conservative, these were far right groups looking for an excuse.
Here's an article about perception of the 2020/election:
That's something like 60% believe it was fair weeks after the election. That's pretty low, but I think there's also a fair amount of less than truthful answers, such as people intentionally misinterpreting the question as whether Trump should've won, and of course the people who refuse to say one way or the other.
So it wasn't like all Republicans thought Biden rigged the election, it's just a vocal minority who riled up enough of the quiet majority to answer a survey saying it was rigged to make it more than a blip.
The fattest turd in this punchbowl.
Two in five people are convinced of dangerous horseshit, and the best you've got is verbosely muttering 'but it's not the majority.'
It doesn't fucking have to be!
There's two main responses to dealing with someone who believes a conspiracy theory:
The first is exactly what you'd expect from a conspiracy trying to cover something up, whereas the second is more likely to be genuine.
If this instance is preventing the latter, we should defederate, and that's what happened with the_donald. But if they're open to good faith discussions and their users and mods are respectful of our rules, we should stay federated. I don't think we have enough evidence to say which it is.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer. Some asshole going 'Ah-HA!' does not matter, if they'll do that in response to aaanythiiing. Preventing their nonsense from spreading is the correct answer. You have to protect people from abuse that works.
Abuse that works forty percent of the time, apparently. Thank god a mere plurality is insufficient to ever cause problems.
TD was a successful propaganda megaphone that only got shut down after it shit up millions of people's feeds for most of a decade. It successfully radicalized god knows how many politically interested young minds. The right answer was to ban that shit, immediately. And when they try mewling about how calling reactionary bigots Nazis makes you the Nazi, ban them again.
Some questions have these things called "answers." We do not need to endlessly discuss them, with assholes, on sites by and for their specific brand of reality-denying assholes. Sometimes "both sides" is the right side and the wrong side - and contrarian chin-stroking is poorly distinguished from frothing wackadoodle denialism.
This god damn website is named heil.hitler and you wanna take a wait-and-see approach to whether they'll cause problems. Frothing wackadoodle denialism is their brand. We don't need to federate with flat.earth, or thejews.did.it, or hexbear. You are allowed to recognize when people openly cause problems on purpose, and not sit around waiting for problems to happen, like it's a fucking surprise.
If someone is arguing in bad faith, report them. If mods don't address it, escalate to the admins. If the admins can't resolve it, then we discuss defederation.
Jumping to defederation because an instance seems to share beliefs with groups that use that tactic isn't right.
No, we must always question what we think we know for certain, but also always use the best information we have. Maybe 99% of the time the answer is unchanged, but that 1% of the time makes the exercise worthwhile.
I know that's not quite what you were getting at, I just think it's important to take the contrarian perspective periodically and see where that leads.
Whether that's useful comes down to execution. Basically, is there quality evidence to back up that view? If not, how can we test it?
It's not, and a lot of the MAGA crowd is criticizing the current administration. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, she had been a long-time mouthpiece for the MAGA movement, and now she's pushing back (see the recent Daily Show piece by Desi Lydic for a comedic summary). She's the last I'd expect to question the president and other Republicans, yet here we are.
Going based on the domain name isn't enough IMO, unless it is literally something like you mentioned. Let the admins show if they'll side with truth or messaging, if it's the former, stay federated, and if the latter, defederate.
We must always question whether woman are people. What if the answer's different, this time?
We must always debate which race is best race. We must always entertain the idea trans people cause hurricanes. We must always seriously consider and politely discuss the blood libel.
If you know that kind of open-ended wank wasn't what I was talking about, why did you fucking say it?
We're not talking about academic criticism of open-ended questions with troubling loose ends. We are discussing bigots. This is a forum of bigots, by bigots, for bigots. The questions they ask are not worth your time or mine, even when they are sincere.
If you'd still split hairs about 'real conservatives' like they're not marginal fair-weather whiners when the horrifying shit they proudly voted for harms them - this site is not for them. This site is for the rest of the assholes, the diehards, the reactionary extreme. Hence the fucking name.
Based on what evidence? The name? A handful of posts, that could likely be randos posting to trigger others? It's a small instance with very few posts, we don't have much data on what the users and admin(s) there want.
If it's not worth your time, just ignore them. Block the instance and move on. Until they actually cause harm, there's really no reason to defederate. That's my point.
How aggressively does someone have to announce they're a right-wing crank, before you'll believe them? My guy - if a site tolerates posting reactionary shit "to trigger others," that's the line you want. That's what you think is beyond the pale. That's moderation failure that was entirely predictable by just looking at the site.
We do not need abundant examples of what this niche shitpost factory is about, when it is named shitpost dot factory. Their fucking brand is in the fucking name and I'm yelling this at my screen as I'm typing this because dealing with denialist horseshit is only marginally less tolerable than dealing with denialist horseshit apologism.
Christ.
There was a point where the actual Nazis were just a political party. Where the local consensus on the label, Nazi, was that it was pricks in bad outfits loosely associated with violent agitation. Would you have told me, a century ago, that Der Sturmer should be judged on its merits, until we have sufficient evidence they're not merely biased? I mean surely everyone's biased. Perhaps we should write in to Herr Streicher with corrections, and see if staff writers walk back their vitriolic rhetoric. We should eat the whole turd to be sure it's not a crab cake.
Yes we do. Names don't mean anything.
Look at our instance's name, what does that say about our instance? Should others have defederated because we have profanity in the domain name? No, that's ridiculous. I'm guessing the admin thought the name was funny. That's it.
I'm guessing "maga.place" was picked because it was available, the creator is conservative, and they thought it would annoy the liberals on Lemmy. All of that is fine, and none of it indicates that they're nazis or extreme right-wingers or anything like that.
Yes, and I say that today. I don't dislike The Blaze, Breitbart, or Fox News because of their bias, I dislike them for their poor credibility. Likewise for various leftist "news" sites that we see posted here with dubious credibility. I would similarly reject that rag probably the first time I look at it, because it's obvious that sourcing assertions is not on its priority list.
I believe in free speech, and if Lemmy is going to be an actual competitor to Reddit, it needs to attract people from all ends of the political spectrum, with the caveat that bad behavior is not tolerated. I don't care if someone is from the left wing, the right wing, or some other wing, they should have a seat at the table as long as they're respectful and bring evidence to support their assertions when in communities that expect that.
And that's the thing. If you don't like what maga.place posts, you don't have to sub to their communities. You can even block the entire instance so you don't see their content. That's exactly the same as not buying Der Sturmer, and not shopping at places that sell copies of Der Sturmer. Defederation is more like banning Der Sturmer from the country, and I think that's a violation of the basic expectation of free speech.
Bigotry and swearing are not the same thing, and you fucking know it. A site named We Are Racists™ does not get the benefit of the doubt, unless it's instantly evident that's some kind of joke. This site named for extremist conservative rhetoric proudly declares it's for extremist conservative rhetoric and exclusively contains extremist conservative rhetoric.
They're not acting fascist because it's funny.
Reactionary conservatives 'owning the libs' is fascist behavior. It is extreme right-wing rhetoric. It is rooted in a worldview that's all bad faith, campism, and proudly intolerable behavior. Why the fuck would you ever excuse it.
Why the fuck don't you dislike racist blogs, for their racist bias? They could be doggedly accurate in the specific details of their reporting - and they'd still be doing it from a hateful and divisive worldview, with intent to spread and deepen that over bigotry. Accurate statistics about gang violence and birthrates don't make hyperfixation on those things any less racist!
You are defending the honor of a literal Nazi newspaper, on the basis of 'hey, maybe they did good field work.' We are talking about people tried at Nuremberg. "Don't buy it" was obviously not a solution, despite your diehard libertarian bent. Sometimes problems come and find you.
Nobody needs "all ends of the political spectrum," when that includes Nazis. We don't need Nazis. Bigotry, as a political worldview, is explicitly forbidden on this server, and good fucking riddance. No service needs to be all things to all people, and hey guess what, most people choose services based on what they don't include. Reddit being cool with fascists was a world-changing problem, and a big part of why I fucking left.
You are why bigots spread. 'Nazis should get a voice so long as they act polite and bring evidence' is a literal invitation for bad-faith "scientific racism" horseshit. Free speech means the government won't arrest you for being asshole - not that assholes deserve any better response than "fuck off, asshole."
I didn't claim it was, I also don't claim "maga" is bigotry. I'm saying both are something someone could take offense to.
What matters is the content and the admin/moderation team. Our instance has fantastic admins IMO, and I haven't had issues with mods either. I don't know what the mods/admins look like on maga.place since nobody seems to be interested in that, only the name of the instance and the posts in their conservative community.
I think it's just saying the quiet part out loud. That type of behavior happens all the time from the left side of the aisle as well.
Look at all the people calling anyone remotely conservative "fascist," do you think that comes from a careful review of the facts, or more from tribalism? I think it's the latter. Yes, there are fascists on the right, but that doesn't mean everyone on the right are fascists, just like there are communists on the left but not everyone on the left is communist.
Sure, and the same can be said for leftist content with high factual accuracy (e.g. Mother Jones). I read both, as well as "neutral" news (minimal overall bias) to get a good idea of the facts. Spin is fine, provided I'm aware of it and can find the opposite spin with similar factual reporting.
I'm not talking about honor, I'm talking about freedom of speech. I'll also defend the right for communist, tankie, and other far left content to exist on the same grounds. One of my favorite musical artists is Rage Against the Machine despite never agreeing with their political message, because I love that they can be so blatantly against our current system. I want more speech that I disagree with, not less, because challenging closely held ideas is how we make progress, because we're forced to elucidate why we hold them.
But we do. Nazism was a popular movement, and we need people to understand it or we're doomed to repeat that era of history. If we hide it, people will forget why it was so bad and it'll fester until it gains enough power to cause problems.
I recommend watching some of Peter Thiel's talks, because he makes interesting points, while doing the thing he warns of. It's incredibly interesting to see how blind he is to what he's doing. Basically, he says people are so obsessed with security that they'll give more power to the state, which will bring about the Anti-Christ (i.e. someone like Hitler), who sells "safety" in exchange for absolute control. And then you look at his company, Palantir, which provides the tools to the government to do that exact same thing, provide security in exchange for absolute control.
Being so scared of fascism that we won't allow publication of fascist works is a huge part of this obsession with security in exchange for freedom. I reject that.
I believe the safest society is one where people feel so uncomfortable that they take that responsibility on themselves instead of outsourcing it to someone in power. I believe we need to strip entities from centralized control and provide tools for individuals to make decisions for themselves. I avoid fascist content because I find the ideas bankrupt, not because it's unavailable to me. In the context of Lemmy, it's a decentralized system, so we should be trying to decentralize moderation as much as possible instead of relying on admins to defederate when something looks scary.
That's not why I left. I left because they removed choice by closing their API, which meant I was forced to use their clients. I stayed away because they cracked down on moderators who protested. I was never really happy with the way moderation worked, but I was able to vote with my subscription and move to subs whose moderation I liked, so it worked well while Reddit stayed out of it. The moment they asserted top down control is when I left.
This is also why I like sh.itjust.works. The admins have a very hands off approach and only step in when there's actual abuse, and leave the rest to the users. That's how platforms should work IMO.
I am just curious, what do you mean by cause harm?
The big names we defederated from in the past violated some or all of the rules above, such as hexbear and explodingheads.
@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
Apologies for pinging you, you made a lot of arguments for why we should give MAGA movement member the benefit of the doubt. Those argument don't align with reality in my opinion.
IMO, this is how we get echo chambers. I understand wanting a safe space, but that should be something community moderation should provide, not instance-level defederation.
To be clear, I disagree with the MAGA movement on pretty much everything. I used to consider myself Republican back when I thought Republicans actually want smaller, fiscally responsible government, and I didn't join the Dems because they never seemed to prioritize civil liberties (e.g. gay marriage became legal by court decision, not statute, much like Roe V Wade).
I left largely due to conversations and content online (mix of Reddit and YouTube), and that wouldn't be possible if popular social media sites cut out chunks of the conversion. In fact, I very much disagree with the aggressive stance YouTube took WRT COVID misinformation, not because I think misinformation is acceptable, but because it shut out anyone who was critical of the government's policies. I want to live in a society that values differences in opinion and is okay with that being uncomfortable.
There's a balance to be struck here, and I think that balance point is whether we can work with the admins of an instance to remove problematic content and users. I haven't seen anyone saying that's an issue, the arguments all revolve around the domain name and sometimes posts in communities that are obviously biased.
We defederate Hexbear not because they're tankies, but because their admins refused to take action against trolling. IMO, that should be the standard.
I see, so on-site behaviour.
Is there any situation where MAGA as a movement more broadly can be qualified as causing harm (I get the impression that you don't believe that's the case currently)?
Or is it more that we shouldn't treat a random MAGA supporter as intending to do harm?
I've lived in both russia and the US for multiple years. We left russia as soon our situation allowed us to. We were constantly harassed by police and had to deal with pretty harsh racism (even though our papers were in order and we all speak fluent russian and understand the interpersonal culture very well).
The US has become just like russia with security services harassing non-whites, beating people and jailing people even if their documents are in order (and even jailing and deporting citizens!). My mother is in shock that this is happening in the US (she hasn't lived there, but she has visited many times and has been to multiple cities) and it's becoming like russia.
In this context, why is it wrong to treat MAGA and its supporters as causing harm? Or do you disagree with the framing of the above paragraph?
Then there is the international context; promotion of corruption, promotion of far right parties (including criminals and open racists).
Why shouldn't that qualify as causing harm?
One could argue that the rank and file MAGA supporters don't know about this or didn't intend to cause harm. But my answer would be that alleged intent or lack of knowledge is not important. It's outcomes that count.
Mind you, this is not meant as a gotcha. I have friends of 15-20 years that I am still very close with from both sides of the US political aisle (i.e. one group supports Trump, albeit with exceptions on some issues).
I've had people on Lemmy call me a bad person for continuing to be close with the group that supports Trump. To which I replied that they are not bad people, they are not fascists or nazis or whatever (it would make no sense considering my mixed ethnic background) and they will come about.
So there is a measure of nuance to my perspective. I will add that MAGA is not the same thing as conservative in the broader context. The fact that most people who call themselves conservatives in the US are supporters of the MAGA movement speaks more about the US than conservatism in general.
Conduct should be the only measure we use for deciding whether to federate. And not even just conduct of their users, but conduct of their admins and mods. If their users are consistently causing problems, but their admins and mods are consistently banning them, then we should stay federated because we can work with them. The moment we can't work with them is when we defederate.
Maybe that's the case right now, IDK, I haven't seen evidence either way, just people disagreeing with what little content they have and the domain name they used. I'm against this petition because it and the comments seem to day we should defederate purely based on political ideology.
You'll need to expound on this a bit. What exactly does this say about America? All this shows, IMO, is that people are tribalistic (what country isn't?) and don't trust the establishment (who does?).
If you ask conservatives if they agree with the way Trump is going about things, they'll likely say no, buy he has the right objectives in mind. They don't like how ICE is acting, but they do want illegal immigrants to leave and only return through legal means. They don't like that Trump is unilaterally setting trade policy, but they do want to see manufacturing jobs return and for the US to have a dominant trade position. They don't want the government to be shut down, but they seem to believe that Republicans actually want to cut spending. All "MAGA" means in their eyes is ths slogan Trump uses to pursue policies that will make their lives better.
I personally disagree both with Trump's priorities and the way he goes about them, but that doesn't mean I think his supporters should be shut out of the conservation. I believe the opposite, in fact. I want to talk to Trump supporters to understand what they think and why, and to have the opportunity to show how that doesn't match what Trump says and does. I used to be registered Republican and left when it became clear that they never do what I want (smaller, fiscally responsible government) and prioritize what I don't want (e.g. anti-immigration). I didn't join the Democratic Party for the same reason, they prioritized big government spending initiatives instead of expanding personal freedoms; we still don't have legalized gay marriage, we're relying on a court decision just like Roe V Wade...
No, the difference is we still have the freedom to criticize the government and we actually have free and fair elections. So whatever you don't like about the US can change. The downside is it probably won't because you need to break through the tribalism to get people to agree on anything.
Russia became the way it is because of authoritarianism (Putin wanted control), the US became the way it is due to fear. The first can't be solved with conversation, the latter can.
How can we solve the problems in our democracies if we shut down conservation between tribes?
Thank for taking the time to reply. I too am interested in understanding perspective on this issue because I have American friends in both political camps (centre-right and far-right).
I see your logic and I think your arguments have weight and are done in good faith. That being said the gulf in our perspectives and experiences is simply too far apart, where it may almost seem like we are talking about different things (and we are from different sides of the planet).
I don't see why I or other any SJW member should be subject to bad faith, corporate spam. I am not interested in "demagogue destroys [political opponent]", "[political opponent] is a member of Al-Qaeda] or "[US Oligarch says some a propaganda]". All found in the first two pages of maga.place. What is this point of this?
I do not believe in "safe spaces" or "echo chambers". The latter in particular is a loaded, polemical term that means nothing. You can very much be open to new experiences and perspective without wanting malicious goons shitting up a forum that you use. There is a beautiful irony that US conservatives claim to oppose echo chambers when they are the biggest enablers of this concept. Is it unreasonable to claims that almost all US conservatives oppose real regulation of social media (other than to dictate and force their own interpretation of moderation policies on others) to address harmful engagement algorithms?
Just recently Facebook was found to have earned $16.5 B in 2024 from commissions on fraud and scams. Am I acting in bad faith by stating that most conservatives in the US would oppose true action (not words) against FB's leadership and those who implemented this policy? Real action; prison, asset seizure, breakup of criminal organizations.
I don't believe in American polemics about "big government spending". First of all, fiscal policy is a pretty complicated thing, "I want lower taxes no matter what" is not a serious policy proposal (and that is the sole prerogative of US conservatism). Legitimate reform approaches (even more technocratic proposals) are rejected outright by US conservatives. Secondly, there is the moral imperative. US is a very a rich country and is more than capable of providing healthcare for all, not to mention there are economic reasons why such a system allows for more efficiency (purchasing economies, remove of massive insurance company and healthcare administration bureaucracy). My friend works in healthcare in the US, from my discussions with him it seems clear (to me), that the current US healthcare system is simply a local scheme for corruption and criminality. Third, from the research I did, US conservatives are more than happy to be the beneficiaries of government spending (e.g. farming, certain conservative states/regions de facto existing on government initiatives).
For me, it's not good enough to say "I don't like what ICE is doing, but I will tolerate their actions because I want to remove illegal immigrants". Security services beating people up, arbitrarily arresting people and deporting citizens is unacceptable. Excuses don't count. When you ignore such things, you get russia.
Russia became the way it is because the people were willing to tolerate putin because they thought he was doing the right thing. I lived in russia in the 90s, you could criticize the government and there was some hilarious satirical shows (sometimes very high quality subtle satire). There partially free elections. They lost it all that because they thought putin was doing the right thing.
I also disagree that the US has fully free elections. There are parts of the country where people aren't allowed to vote (and US conservatives largely support this). The approach to districting is also clearly malicious and strongly suggests US conservatives oppose real democracy (districting is just one example, there are many others).
When I mentioned the distinction between the conservative movement in general (on a global scale) and US conservatives I was referring to the above points. You can be a conservative in other countries and not support security services setting up check points for non-whites, beating up people and deporting your own citizens.
It is also the height of arrogance to think it is impossible for a political movement to be fundamentally flawed and lacking in any real positives. There are more than enough political movements in world history (both left and right) that have been completely discredited. To believe this is impossible in the US is how you get putin and your country turning into russia.
I have no issues with conservative perspectives, you need a balance to keep both sides honest, but that doesn't mean I must believe an American political movement cannot be rotten to the core by the virtue of being American. And that's why I think it is legitimate to preemptively ban oligarch propaganda and borderline degenerate spam "demagogue destroys [political opponent]" from what I consider to be a fundamentally malicious movement.
Apologies for the rather negative tone, but this is my perspective.
Then don't sub to their communities, or even block the whole instance.
I think it's pretty clearly defined. Here's the Wikipedia definition, which fits my understanding perfectly:
It's the equivalent of what Trump does by surrounding himself with yes-men and eliminating dissent. It's what happens on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml when moderation decisions are made to ban people critical of China or Russia, or sympathetic to western liberalism.
I personally am proactive about avoiding echo chambers. I consider myself libertarian, I live in a conservative area, and I spend a lot of time on liberal Lemmy, all so I get exposure to a diverse set of ideas. I watch and listen to liberal, conservative, and libertarian media I consider high quality, so I don't silo myself into one way of looking at things.
I want social media to reflect my ideals, which means every idea is subject to challenge by providing good information and reasoned arguments. So, when there's a suggestion that an instance be defederated, I default to "no" and must be convinced of ill intent before changing that to a "yes". Differing ideals does not automatically mean they have ill intent, even if vocal people in the media with those ideals have ill intent.
Projection is a well known trait of narcissists, and has very little to do with political bias (source, conclusion: "Overall, we find those on the left and right are equally narcissistic. However, liberals and conservatives differ in which dimensions drive their narcissism").
No, that's an opinion.
However, I think both liberals and conservatives in power oppose "real action" (arrests and whatnot) because they want power. In essence, they get more political capital by slapping companies like Meta on the wrist instead of actually holding them accountable.
If a side opposes one group more than the other side, that's because they think it'll harm the other side more than their side. It's rarely about doing the right thing, it's about doing the thing that makes them look good and their opponents look bad.
Hence why we have protests, lawsuits, and media coverage. In Russia, you won't get far doing any of those things. People know what's going on with ICE because of those freedoms, we don't really know what's going on in Russia or with the Uyghurs in China because they don't have the same freedoms.
The day the opposition to ICE stops is when we've become similar to Russia.
Trump has negative political support (approval is below 50%), he isn't like Putin.
That's just not true, do you have a source?
To vote, you need to be a citizen and register to vote before the deadline. The deadlines are clearly posted, and the process is very easy (just fill out a form and either mail it or drop it off). You only need to register once, and you're good for life, though you'll need to update registration if you move (at least for mail voting or between states, not sure about within states for in-person voting, I've never voted in person). The stages I have lived in all do registration online as well, so it's trivial to do on a work break or something. There are even non-profits who go around to help people sign up.
There are problems, such as not every state allows mail voting (which helps for busy people, e.g. those who work multiple jobs) and no day off to vote, but the voting registration process is simple and accessible.
Gerrymandering isn't unique to conservative, liberals do it too. It's a problem nationwide, not just in red states. Both parties like the status quo, otherwise we'd see legislative action.
And you can be a liberal in the US or elsewhere and support it. The TSA was expanded under Obama, and Obama could have ended it entirely and returned security to airports and airlines. But he didn't. Why? Both parties like having more power.
I 100% agree. The book It Can't Happen Here is about exactly that, fascism happening in the US.
The closest we got was actually a Democrat: FDR. He famously broke the pattern of serving two terms and won four terms, and is the reason we have the 22nd amendment limiting presidents to 2 terms. He also incarcerated ~120k people in the Japanese internment camps, about 2/3 of which were US citizens. That's far worse than the handful of US citizens ICE has wrongly arrested (most of which were quickly releases).
I'm not saying this to imply Trump is less bad (IMO, he's worse in many ways), but to demonstrate that we've been close to fascism before from the opposite direction, so it could totally happen here.
Thanks for the honest perspective.
I too agree that propaganda should be eliminated, but that should go through the community/instance it's on. So the proper process is:
AFAIK, we skipped all of those steps and went straight to 4.