The NRA is radical, inciting. Donald Trump is radical, inciting, and fascist.
No arguments here. I will point out, though, that our choice at the ballot box in 2016 was “Fascist or Fascist” if you go by this criteria:
Hillary Checks as many of these boxes as Trump does. Which is not an excuse for Trump, just an indication of where things are at, objectively speaking.
It wouldn’t have taken a huge sociological study to figure out that if you want to overthrow (or more likely destabilize)the US, but cannot from the outside, the best way to do that would be to radicalize the internal right, make sure they are armed to the teeth, make them hate democracy (aka ‘the government’), install an authoritarian fascist inside, who will incite more hate, nearly begging them to violence [“There will be an uprising if I am impeached!”], and keep feeding them hate and fear and hate and fear and hate and fear … until they snap.
Well, taking a wider lens, if I were a super evil genius, I’d add two other pieces to that puzzle.
I’d do all the stuff you mention, for sure. But I’d also fuel the left into abject ridiculousness. Get them to buy into the idea that there is no objective reality, use that as a platform to spout Scissor Statements about how “gender is socially constructed” and such, and give the right something to fear in earnest. Then I’d fuel both sides of the thing, as Putin did by backing Black Lives Matter, for instance.
Then I’d build a new framework for communication that amplifies the anxiety and anger, as you rightfully pointed out in your other comment. I outlined that recently here:
But Putin didn’t build that framework. We did, to share cat photos.
The USA has been using information science to destroy foreign regimes from the inside for a very long time. One of the more famous examples was the 1954 Guatemalan coup. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Russia would be making a similar play.
But I think the total impact of Putin’s meddling is probably tremendously overblown. In terms of its overall traffic, it was de minimis.
What’s really going on here, is that we have built an engine to destabilize ourselves, and we’re doing it willfully, for the dopamine hit. (See: Scissor above)
