this is hella scary. the president of the U.S is literally retweeting anti-Muslim propaganda. this is the shit dictators do when they want to ostracize a certain demographic. don’t tell me there’s nothing wrong and horrifying about this.
This is disgusting and exactly what Carl Schmitt describes as the “Sovereign Exception”.
Basically, the sovereign (The president), decides on who is the “exception” in society and to whom the rights of citizenship apply or do not apply.
The acceptance of this is one of the quickest ways for democracy to degenerate into tyranny. Instead of upholding our values for everyone, we allow the government/regime to decide and it is all fun and games until you find out they are coming for you next. That’s how tyrants stay in power, there always has to be an enemy.
This is even worse than it looks, believe it or not.
I don’t know anything about the middle tweet, but the other two were discussed on TRMS tonight. The top one was two Dutch minors, neither of whom are Muslim. They were both born in the Netherlands as Dutch citizens. The attacker was charged, sentenced, and has served time for what he did. The victim asked that the video NOT be shared because he did not want to relive it, but someone saved it, rebranded it as anti-Muslim propaganda, and shared it again as such, where it has now reached international attention.
But the third video is far, far worse.
I say this with no ambiguity or exaggeration: that video is explicitly unedited propaganda originally produced and distributed by Al Qaeda. The only change from its original distribution is that it has been captioned in English. Al Qaeda produced that video. It was then redistributed, unchanged (except for English language compatibility), by a far right English white nationalist political party called Britain First (presumably the BF in that twitter handle). From there it was retweeted by the sitting president of the United States.
A propaganda video produced and distributed by Al Qaeda has now been distributed, unedited and unchallenged, by and with the implicit endorsement of, the sitting president of the United States.
Donald Trump, in his capacity as the U.S. President, has publicly endorsed an Al Qaeda propaganda video in its original form as produced by a terrorist organization that is explicitly an enemy of the United States.
So this wasn’t just anti-Muslim propaganda being retweeted by the president. This was 100% literal terrorist propaganda produced by a terrorist organization being endorsed and distributed by the president of the United States, who is using it to fuel his anti-Muslim agenda. (Which isn’t even getting into his financial ties to sanctioned entities in Azerbaijan known to have had dealings with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, one of the world’s best known and most prolific sponsors of global terrorism.)
That’s where we are as a country right now.
