I don't understand this. The warning signs of the current administration's fascist-adjacent policies have been here for four years. Please do not pretend that it's now that Americans cannot heed those signs due to protests, especially when the protests are partially in response to the current administration.

Destroying businesses and disrupting the lives of innocent people is not how you convince them to go along with whatever you want. Is that how they will proceed from now on whenever they need something from the people? What a bunch of garbage.

The vast majority of people in those cities would've already supported them. And they bite that hand. Often hands just as brown/black as theirs...they don't care, because what they seek is power, not justice.

More that many Americans will now see fascism as providing a certain method of protection. Plenty of authoritarians are popularly elected based on some threat.

I find this to be a much more compelling commentary and concern than the one I replied to. If what you mention does happen, it will be legitimately frightening.

At least when authoritarianism hit my home country (Venezuela), we could leave.

If we go back to the Kent State shooting, Gallup found that 58% blamed the students and 11% blamed the National Guard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings#Aftermath...

I don't see it as a crazy idea that shooting some protestors would be popular.

I've told friends that I have a sinking feeling a Tiananmen Square-like event might happen soon in the US. I predict that there will be people online arguing the semantics of what constitutes a "massacre" or a "tragedy."

I hope we never get to that.

Did you see the videos of police SUVs driving through the people? The tank in Tiananmen Square actually stopped.

That was just one tank though. You can't really compare what happened in Tiananmen Square to what's happened in the US.

Well, yeah. Fascism tends to be popular, even though it’s really bad and needs to be resisted.

The looters and violent people at these events are distinct groups from the protesters.

There are many groups, but the most effective one is a right wing movement that is trying to start a second civil war by touching off race riots. Apparently international anarchists, and foreign governments’ misinformation campaigns are also making strong showings. Trump claims Antifa is too (though he has not provided any evidence to back that up).

Some of the right wingers have been caught with bombs, etc. Some have been firing weapons into crowds in an attempt to get police to shoot innocent people (and at least one person in Louisville was killed this way)

All of the major US news (except fox) networks are covering this continuously and showing pictures of the perpetrators, etc.

If you don’t believe their reporters, they also usually live stream the protests from the ground and the sky, so you can see for yourself. They covered a half dozen cities tonight.