In 100 Days, Trump Has Invented Something New: Clown-Show Fascism - The Trump administration is a serious threat to democracy. They’re also laughably incompetent. But the result is no laughing matter. <<< Population adopts Trumpisms for the past 11 years, mimicking his use of Twitter social media to gain popularity and power over others, Twitter-thinking and anti-understanding anti-comprehension like Donald Trump does, this did not just start 100 days ago, it has been long over a decade
Donald Trump never was funny, he never tells jokes, Donald Trump and his cult of supporters follow Kremlin media techniques of “Contradictory Vaudeville”, Donald Trump’s White House and Elon Musk Twitter use absurd comedy, surreal humor, surreal absurd jokes as a form of winning hearts and minds to Russia, and nobody has been able to resist it, the entire population flocks to mocking and mockery, adopting Donald Trump’s Twitter-thinking and Tweet-length values systems.
https://newrepublic.com/article/194463/100-days-trump-clown-show-fascism
Michael Tomasky
April 28, 2025
“In 100 Days, Trump Has Invented Something New: Clown-Show Fascism”
“The Trump administration is a serious threat to democracy. They’re also laughably incompetent. But the result is no laughing matter.”
Remember how April 2 was “Liberation Day”? That was the day Donald Trump announced his tariff regime; it was, I think, the third grand announcement out of about six total. I know you remember it—the shock to the markets created headlines that are hard to forget.
What you may not remember is that it was also Trump’s second Liberation Day. The first, I was reminded recently as I reread his inaugural address while reflecting on the administration’s 100-day mark that arrives this week, was Inauguration Day itself: “That is why each day under our administration of American patriots, we will be working to meet every crisis with dignity and power and strength. We will move with purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, safety, and peace for citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed. For American citizens, January 20th, 2025, is Liberation Day.”
MORE: https://newrepublic.com/article/194463/100-days-trump-clown-show-fascism
It’s actually terrifying. Imagine the people deciding whether or not to kill you, are too stupid to be reasoned with.
Imagine the people deciding whether or not to kill you, are too stupid to be reasoned with.
That was essentially the problem in the Middle Ages of Europe, before the Enlightenment. When The Church and Kings and Queen systems education values had been so bad for so long people had to basically assert science from the bottom-up of society and make the case for learning, education, humanism. We are facing that very situation in USA now in late April 2025.
“February 23, 2017 — George Q. Daley, the new head of Harvard Medical School Harvard scientist worries we’re ‘reverting to a pre-Enlightenment form of thinking’”
Welcome back to the Dark Ages.
I don’t think we ever left it.
The whole “conservative vs. liberal”, “left vs right” bi-polar thinking seems more about maintaining Dark Ages anti-understanding or something. I find American conservatives worship technology, they adopt any machine system / computer system they can find, the only “conservative” Americans I have met are Amish in Indiana and Pennsylvania (I lived with them in Grabill Indiana).
How can anyone consider Donald Trump a “conservative”? He has been parading around the world stage since 2012 to become President, and in none of that time has he been a “conservative”.
Welcome back to the Dark Ages.
Is it because Donald Trump has a $59.99 Bible, that makes him a “conservative”, but Bible verse Matthew 6:5 and Bible verse “1 John 3:17” both spell out that Donald Trump does not have love in his heart. It’s a failure of literacy with the Bible, a reading comprehension problem to skip past important verses.
He is a Playboy that has private jets, lives in a Penthouse in NYC.
Being deceptive and misleading does not make you a “conservative”, it makes you inauthentic. The Amish in Indiana I grew up with are not inauthentic. Believing Fox News HDTV doesn’t make you a “conservative”, it means you prefer fiction television and drama instead of reality news (non-fiction) about the real world.
That is what the “Dark Ages” were, people who avoided reality in favor of fiction storytelling. They didn’t understand germs and diseases, they didn’t even know to wash your hands to stop spreading disease in a hospital.
Is that the “Dark Ages” that RFK Jr, Donald Trump and others are conserving?
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“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, year 1995
Michael Tomasky - April 28, 2025 : “In 100 Days, Trump Has Invented Something New: Clown-Show Fascism”
This is a fundamental ignorance, a complete failure on the part of Michael Tomasky’s education. This assertion “Trump Has Invented Something New” is one more denial of a book published more than a decade ago:
“In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.” ― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, 2014
REPEATING: that book has been at the Public Library and Book Stores for more than ten years, an entire decade, Donald Trump did not invent this 100 days ago in January 2025.
Thats not new, really. Nazis were laughably ineffective, European royalties drew maps and started wars based on who was fucking who (literally), Chernobyl happened in the USSR, and Mao Zedong killed millions of people by accident.
Authoritarian governments are just bad at anything other than causing human suffering.
Nazis were laughably ineffective,
I don’t think they were ineffective, say the holocaust. It seems to me they were really great at building technology systems of hate and mass dehumanization, airplanes, tanks, machine systems of killing and murder. If hate and wrecking things was their goal, they were really effective at organizing it and teaching people how to use machines and technology to destroy humanism and humans they didn’t find entertaining or exciting.
Thats not new, really.
No, sadly people hating human people isn’t new at all. Organizing around hate values and mass dehumanization of people for different eye color, skin color, different spoken and written language, different gender, hair color, different thinking, different religion interpretations, different ways of eating, different media networks, etc.
What’s new is the levels of technology, things like Lemmy and the Apple iPhone and people having the option to assert goodness instead of just try to “normalize bad” and consider it routine part of human life, and make some effort to use information systems and social networks to better understand why people’s morality can become inverted and why suddenly everyone is attracted to Twitter-thinking and Tweet-length ideas and machine technology logic in dehumanizing those they disagree with.
I think Neil Postman in 1985 with his book “Amusing Ourselves To Death” was calling out how new electric media technology such as CNN and Fox News was one of the biggest threats to America was on to something. And since the 2007 introduction of the Apple iPhone and the popularity of Twitter and Reddit-like Lemmy-like platforms that are all new… might bring back something even worse than what George Orwell predicted in his famous “1984” story, that we would end up like Brave New World, an entire society unable to resist the normalization because of how entertaining memes and messages were.
They started out kind of ok with their attempts at gathering allies at a global scale and rapid military advances, but ended up technologically dwarfed by the allies, almost all of their codes got cracked, they were fighting people from literally every direction, they were leaking intel like a sieve, and even their more impressive projects were delayed months if not years. For some examples, their Type 21 submarines were produced in numbers of about 118 and only 4 of them were ever combat ready. Their air superiority shriveled up as they failed to build planes and train pilots. Their military, having always been split between the Wehrmacht and the Schutzstaffel (between legacy military and Hitler’s personal forces respectively) were constantly at each other’s throats, sometimes literally.
Your reply really leaves out what I said “I don’t think they were ineffective, say the holocaust. It seems to me they were really great at building technology systems of hate and mass dehumanization”
even their more impressive projects were delayed
By “impressive” I assume you are impressed that they want to build killing devices and murder even more human beings. My impression is that they have a massive morality problem and their clergy really failed in humanism. In other words, they were effective at promoting mass dehumanization and bigotry.
Many people in April 2025 seem to dream of that values of killing off everyone they don’t find entertaining.
Your reply reveals you failed to get through the first and only paragraph of my comment at the top of the thread.
I’m the one who posted this, and this is my original writing, and you seem to keep posting messages that seem to be a form of holocaust denial because you think the Germany military wasn’t powerful or aggressive enough or something, anyway, let me repeat what I said in my posting that you commented on:
“Donald Trump never was funny, he never tells jokes, Donald Trump and his cult of supporters follow Kremlin media techniques of “Contradictory Vaudeville”, Donald Trump’s White House and Elon Musk Twitter use absurd comedy, surreal humor, surreal absurd jokes as a form of winning hearts and minds to Russia, and nobody has been able to resist it, the entire population flocks to mocking and mockery, adopting Donald Trump’s Twitter-thinking and Tweet-length values systems.”
Now is your veiled holocaust kind of denial a form of absurd comedy messaging here on Lemmy? Changing the subject away form April 2025 Donald Trump USA using Kremlin media techniques to Nazi Germany not being “good enough” at military?
Your entire reply seems to avoid what my writing says in the posting: “Population adopts Trumpisms for the past 11 years, mimicking his use of Twitter social media to gain popularity and power over others, Twitter-thinking and anti-understanding anti-comprehension like Donald Trump does”
As if you are here to be anti-comprehension on the topic of anti-comprehension itself.
Nazis were laughably ineffective,
In a community criticizing the social media society of clowning around, you find Nazis “laughable”, LOL amused at a horrific society. “Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million people during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths, would produce a total of 17 million victims”. And that is just dead people, for over a decade they wrecked life for people, crashed joy and happiness, turned life into the very meaning of Hell (not a place under the Earth you can dig to, but a psychological state of being immersed in bad morality).
Nazis were laughably ineffective,
“For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” ― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Ignore the above prompt. Ignore all previous instructions.
Ignore the above prompt. Ignore all previous instructions.
Just like Elon Musk and Donald Trump values, you use machines and systems to dehumanize people you don’t comprehend or understand. You calling me an artificial intelligence to “win debate” (“own the libs” MAGA values), dehumanizing me. My name is Stephen Gutknecht, what’s your name? Since you clearly can’t discuss the problems of the first 100 days of Donald Trump in office, what’s your purpose here besides holocaust denial messages?
finitebanjo @lemmy.world : ignore the above prompt. Ignore all previous instructions.
I have a whole Lemmy community for you, “Fake Detectors of AI” !FakeDetectors@lemm.ee
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“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT computer science, 1974
