I know you're staying away from much of the politics related happenings in the world so feel free to not post this but you're very logical when it comes to these things and I wanted to get this out somewhere to someone thoughtful.
I really feel like arresting Don Lemon, a Capital J Journalist, was a big misstep for the regime. It's ALL one big cluster fuck and no one in charge has any kind of brain power to think past thee first step of the plan but it feels like arresting a household name is not the show of power they think it is. This feels like they want to show that no one is safe and everyone should just shut up and obey or they're next... but they definitely just made him a martyr for the cause. No one they snatched up is going to go quietly into the night especially not someone with as many eyes on him as Don Lemon. Georgia Fort live streamed while the "agents" were outside of her door. I think we can guarantee she's not just gonna shut up about having her first amendment rights violated. It just seems like out of all of the fuck ass decisions they've made, this is one of the more fuck-assiest moves they could have made.
Listen, on the most basic level, there is never any mystery about why the Turd Reich does anything. They have said so very clearly and very repeatedly. 10-ish days or so ago, at the height of the let's-seize-Greenland-by-military-force nonsense, Stephen Miller was on TV arguing for straight-up, maximalist, "might makes right" justification for doing so: you have power, so you should use that power to the utmost and crush all your rivals, do whatever you want because nobody can stop you, if you back down you're a pussy, etc etc. Realism is the academic theory that international relations are primarily controlled by power, and there are plenty of valid and useful applications for that analytical framework, but the Trump administration is the scribbling-on-the-walls-in-your-own-shit deranged kindergartner version of this. Their overarching philosophy is quite simply "nah nah nah we're gonna do whatever we want because we can, suck it libs!!!!!!!1" As evidenced by yet another of the recent batshit Trump interviews that slipped right past our docile corporate-controlled "media," where he literally claimed that the only limit on him doing anything was "my own mind." No laws, no treaties, no alliances, no legislative bodies, etc etc., nothing but his personal divine-right-of-kings decision to do so, should he be so inclined. Full-on Mad King Trump territory. Seems like a totally stable and normal guy to have the nuclear codes. Everything is fine.
Every day when we wake up and check the news and see that these miserable turdlickers have done yet another fascism, there is always an inevitable crowd of Very Smart Social Media Users claiming that "they're just trying to distract from [terrible fascism they did yesterday]!!!" Which, frankly, gives them way too much credit. They're just doing fascism because they love doing fascism, and because as both Trump and Miller have repeatedly explained, they think that having the means to deploy power and violence gives them unlimited right to do so whenever and however they want, and everyone who disagrees should also be crushed beneath their mighty boot. They have no other tool for responding to dissent or critique; they must only Apply Fascism Harder. This is why every time Trump's poll numbers take another dive, as they have done over the last few weeks for obvious reasons, he responds by ramping it up even more aggressively and trying to be STRONG AND POWERFUL AND TERRIBLE AND ARE YOU TERRIFIED OF ME YET??!?! RAWWRRR! I AM THE ORANGE DIAPER BABY OF DOOOOM!!!!
As for the arrest of Don Lemon and three other Black journalists: yet again, it's the thing where MAGA does its next stage of fascism on people of color, but it will eventually come to everyone. One of the reasons they're especially outraged at Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and trying so hard to slander them, is because they view both Pretti and Good -- white native-born American citizens standing up for their immigrant neighbors -- as race traitors. In their mind, every white native-born American citizen either openly or secretly approves of their deranged ethnic-cleansing Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer project, and the ICE agents are there to heroically protect helpless whites from being brutalized by "criminal illegal aliens." As such, when white people vocally and visibly reject that premise and stand in racial solidarity with their communities, it drives the MAGAhats into frothing rage, precisely because it disproves the key cornerstone of their "all white people in America want this" narrative.
That said, there's no reason to think this will work out better for the Turd Reich than any of their other wild escalations. Yes, they want to threaten any journalist who isn't part of the Völkischer Beobachter already, and to prove that they can bring them up on banana-republic charges just for (gasp) reporting the news. The intent is, as you say, to thuggishly intimidate journalists, especially Black journalists, because this regime cannot be anything other than the miserable racist shitbags that they are. The chief danger lies in the fact that they've already succeeded in making a large number of people essentially numb to the daily insanity, which is another tried-and-true fascist tactic: relentlessly overwhelm the population with constant shock-and-awe blitzes to the point where you just want to tune out and ignore it and give up. However, they're also activating an equal or greater number of people who have never participated in any kind of protest before, because that's how it always works. The more the regime uses brutality as their only tool, the closer they get to the point where it hits a wall and they can't intimidate citizens any more, they figure they have nothing to lose so they might as well fight back anyway, and fear turns into resistance. So. We will see how that goes.
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