ok listen. i've been reading up on the khmer rouge (it's a long story).

the khmer rouge killed 25% of Cambodia's population, over 1.5 million people, deliberately and in cold blood

and while trump does have plenty of COVID deaths on his useless appendix-like conscience, one, many of those would have still happened under ideal circumstances because IT'S A PLAGUE and two, that's really not the same as explicitly constructing a social machine for mass genocide

so what i'm saying here is, yeah, there is kind of a scale for these things, and while trump is a complete piece of shit, human cruelty gets a LOT WORSE THAN THIS and honestly, yeah, we gotta discuss the fact our "fascism" doesn't even include punishing people for speaking against the state means we are as usual BEING PRIVILEGED AS FUCK by treating this like it's equivalent to the Holocaust or Holodomor or Cultural Revolution

you've heard how i feel about trump: he is a terrible human being and should go die. and if it pleased his ego, you know, i'm not sure he wouldn''t order the deaths of millions. but the social support isn't there. the power isn't there. the complete and utter breakage of checks and balances isn't there

maybe it will be. if we don't turn the tide this year, yeah, i could in fact imagine a second trump administration turning that bad, if the right psychopath turns that sociopath's ear, and the conspiracy crowd's bloodlust grows severe enough. and it's not at all comforting to be able to say "oh gosh no, our government isn't fascist, it's just protofascist."

it's just... please please please be careful when you go tossing around terms like "dictator" and "totalitarian," because it really trivializes people's suffering under societies where the leadership was outright and actively murderous, instead of merely abusive, petty, bigoted, callous, and inept. it's the difference between Steve Buscemi in Fargo and... uh... Peter Stormare in Fargo, but it's an important difference if you've ever been brutalized by a regime that was, like, Idi Amin levels of crazy...