No, that’s what they’re doing. If you’ve ever heard it said of conservatives, “every accusation is a confession,” this is a pretty prime example. It’s a lot easier to convince people to do some gnarly shit if you can pretend that the same gnarly shit is already being done to them.
Like, running a successful grift isn’t about convincing your mark that your dubious proposition is above board. They can pretty much always tell something shady is going on. To con someone successfully you convince them that, yes, something shady is going on, but that shady thing is actually working in their favor. You have to convince them that shadiness is the trick that’s going to let them get one over on everyone else.
Nobody wants to live under a dictatorship. Literally nobody. But if you can trick them into believing they’re already living in one, well then installing your own suddenly gets a lot easier. “Look, you’re already getting grifted. But if you put us in power and let us run our grift, our grift is going to benefit you this time. We promise.”
It won’t, though. It never does.
It might finally give conservatives clear permission to go out and hurt the people they don’t like, though. And that might be enough for a lot of them.
My main takeaway from this article is that “Austrian Economist” is apparently the new euphemism fascists are using to try and trick people into thinking they’re doing something other than fascism.
The Arvada one is at 77th and Wadsworth in the same strip mall as the Vitamin Cottage. There’s a closer one to downtown that’s just north of Colfax on Reed Street in Lakewood. It’s just a little bit west of Casa Bonita.
I wish advertisers would realize that forcing me to watch their ad against my will makes me actively hostile against their brand and/or product. If I remember their brand name from an intrusive ad I will not only not buy their products, I will go out of my way to give my money to their competitors.
It’s so crazy to me that they throw this word around and they haven’t come up with a shared definition.
That’s actually kind of the point. It’s like how they use the words “communism” and “socialism.” It’s a word they’ve made wholly synonymous with “unquestionably bad,” and it’s defined by what it isn’t rather than what it is so it can be whatever they point at when they say it. Keeping the meaning vague and amorphous is a way to self-police their own thoughts, and short circuit any meaningful discussion or debate before it even starts. It creates a boundaryless field of discomfort they only experience as a gut feeling. As soon as a conversation starts to stray into the territory of acknowledging that people who are different than them might nevertheless be full human beings they get that bad feeling in their gut and say, “I don’t know… That sounds kinda woke.” And everyone knows that anything “woke” is unquestionably bad. Ta-dah!: uncomfortable thought successfully avoided. Thought that may have led to a change of the status quo successfully avoided.
Even when we’re talking about the thought influencers on the Right who are consciously aware of the above, they can’t be seen to define it publicly because that would mean they would have to be honest about the seed of hatefulness they’re dancing around when they use euphemisms like this. When someone asks them how they define “woke,” they can’t answer, “You know… N*gger stuff.” That would instantly discredit them in the eyes of just about everybody, and they wouldn’t be able to pretend to be a serious person making a serious point anymore.
Also, by pinning its meaning down with a definition it would lose much of its power as a propaganda tool. It would lose its universality. It would mean something specific rather than whatever that thing is that you don’t like.
I’ve noticed a lot of conservatives don’t have the same full-throated support for Trump this time that they did in 2016. For instance, he lost a ton of gun owner support when he started talking about “taking the guns first, and letting the courts sort it out later,” and then going on to sign the bump-stock ban. I’ve seen some of those people go from rabid Trump fan-boys to kind of sneering whenever they hear his name. I suspect a lot of them are going to end up falling in line come November, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there were a fair few people casting protest votes as well.