and came upon this passage:

Soon after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump claimed that “the radicals on the left are the problem” with political violence.[335] Opinion editors,[374] as well as both far-right commentators[375] and Trump critics,[376] have compared Charlie Kirk’s killing to the Reichstag fire—the 1933 arson of the German parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and prosecute political opposition[376]—some calling Kirk’s killing Trump’s “Reichstag fire moment”.[374] How Democracies Die author, professor Steven Levitsky, said that exploiting Charlie Kirk’s killing to justify unleashing attacks on critics is “page one of the authoritarian playbook”.[377]

Trump’s “enemy from within” remarks and threats to use the National Guard and military against “radical left lunatics” during the 2024 campaign and the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination (especially the remarks of Stephen Miller) prompted historians Wendy Goldman and Timothy Snyder to compare these events to the Great Purge in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.[378] At that time, an assassination prompted Joseph Stalin to proclaim vast non-existent conspiracies; to redefine dissent as terrorism and treason; to encourage people to inform on dissenters; and to engage in a campaign of prosecution, imprisonment, and execution of hundreds of thousands of political opponents

- from the article on Trumpism

I’m so glad I no longer watch cable news and thank God amateur blogs are as much a thing these days as amateur record criticism, because this is the kind of bedwetting faux-intellectual trash Keith Olbermann abd Air America were trafficking in – and which I ate up – in the Bush years. I feel so bad for younger Gen Z, they’re right at the age where they’re most susceptible to stuff like this.

I follow Robert Reich and the Bulwark on Substack, but I’m not a paying subscriber to the latter anymore since every dollar counts right now and it’s left me, to becoming more of a left-wing rag that wants to be liked by the ledt-leaning journalistic ecosystem rather than the Charlie Sykes-led bastion of never-Trump conservatism. No hard feelings at all, Tim Miller is a star, they’ve had a few scoops, I like their media critic Will Sommer. It’s just different now.

“Lay me down some rails, boys
and don’t put me in jail, boys
and if I make a little noise
just leqve me alone.

I’ve been known to party some
but I ain’t never hurt no one
or been ashamed of what I done,
especially when I’m stoned.”“

There’s a giant n-bomb in that song.