I know accelerationism is wrong, but honestly, I feel like Americans deserve a taste of fascism and imperial misrule. The Democrats are way too competent in their evil—cold, calculated, and insidious. At least with Trump and the Republicans, the evil is blatant, in your face, and easier to hate. I want Trump to gut NATO from within. I want him to tariff the U.S. into the ground. I want him to drive the usbeconomy straight off a cliff. I’m at the point where I want this whole rotten system to collapse under its own internal contradictions. The world would be better off without the U.S. pulling the strings everywhere.
I mean it is to a degree, much more so than they’ve managed. They just need better information/narrative control and they’re currently pushing through some things which could be preludes to a more sweeping kind of control that to say nothing of the obvious fact the Tiktok ban over Palestine was obviously an information control thing. And there are people among them saying this, the Republicans especially the real interventionist ghouls but also some Democrats who after all pushed the whole narrative of Russian disinfo and bot farms stealing an election for Trump and all the consent for suppression that created among the populace.
It may be too late to put the genie back in the bottle but they can definitely suppress it by passing sweeping bans on Chinese apps, by building a US firewall, by banning Chinese media, by forcing Google/Apple to remove these things from their app stores globally to suppress them globally, by forcing ISPs to block access to such resources over the web and so on. The talk of this piracy blocking for instance would create the first real system in the US that could be easily with the flip of a switch repurposed to block anything labeled “disinformation” by the newly created department of American Patriotism (or whatever the Democrats would name it).
What might sabotage such plans is in-fighting of course. I don’t think the Republicans can necessarily resist abusing such a mechanism once created to not do some level of suppression of liberal Democrat thinking and causes, probably only a little, probably mainly fringe stuff the party officials themselves waffle on or condemn on a surface level but it’s enough to anger the populace and wake up some portion of them.
But information control is coming to the fore. All the proclamations of an open internet and freedom bringing prosperity dropped inf favor of fearful rhetoric of foreigners, or manipulation, of contamination, of theft of American money via piracy, etc, etc.
Yeah i get all of that, i’m not saying they aren’t going to do their best to try to control the information space. And they will succeed to a degree. But i find that the mistake that the imperial elites usually make, is that they don’t expect the people they’re trying to do stuff to, to actually react and not just take it lying down.
I mean the whole story around TikTok still hasn’t played out yet, we’ll have to wait and see how it ends, but i think that already the attempt to corral everyone back onto Meta platforms has somewhat blown up in their faces, particularly when it comes to young people.
Another example of this kind of hubris and inability to imagine their enemies as actors in their own right is how they were so convinced they would be able to bring Russia to its knees with sanctions. They seem to have convinced themselves that Russia wouldn’t fight back.
I think the same is true to some degree for the American people, as indoctrinated as they are - yes many of them will fall for one or another propaganda narrative, but i think even more, across the political spectrum even, will be very skeptical, and many will even be radicalized by such heavy handed attempts to control them. They may be un-educated or mis-educated but people as a whole - this is true for any country - aren’t stupid.
What i see is that a lot of them, across a pretty broad political spectrum, are just very disillusioned with the establishment. (I’m referring here to working class people, not the well-off upper middle classes.) They don’t trust the media anymore, they certainly don’t trust the government, and they despise people like Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, and even increasingly Musk himself, whose fan club of weirdo ass-kissers really seems to be shrinking these days.
I don’t know, i guess i’m just sort of an optimist about these things, and maybe that is rooted in what i observe in the spaces that i pay attention to (which admittedly are not necessarily representative of the whole population), or maybe that is a choice that we can consciously make, to not give in to despair and not let the ruling class intimidate us into defeatism.