Twitter, a thread: I hate how the rabid insincerity of politicians has made some people deny that spoken claims have clear implications.
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The endgame: to so divorce the rise of fascism from "actual" fascism that by the time their conditions for naming it are met, it's too late.
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By espousing a narrow, rigid view of "really counts" as fascism (hint: not them!), they aim to obfuscate the fact that it can be PREVENTED.
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The whole point of identifying "language, threats and behaviours that demonstrably lead to fascism" is to fight back against its emergence.
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That being so, I can't help feeling that many folk are trained to accept this conflation by a political culture reliant on the same trick.
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The rise of the internet & social media has changed many things, but in this context, the most important is allowing realtime fact-checking.
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Not so long ago, a politician who lied or contradicted themselves in an interview couldn't be reality fact-checked by the general public.
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The average person simply wouldn't have access to a record of the politician's claims & data or a ready way to search them if they did.
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But now, you can literally just type "when did so-and-so say the thing" into Google and get multiple sources to prove the lie.
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In an ideal world, this would've caused political culture to shift towards honesty. Instead, they've doubled down on lying as a norm.
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For all of history, we've known that power corrupts & that politics requires a degree of both deceit & ugly pragmatism. Politicians lie.
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Which means that, in order to accept our political systems as necessary evils, we also have to accept a base degree of political deception.
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That acceptance has, I suspect, been enabled in large part by the general invisibility of certain ugly things. Out of sight, out of mind.
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But now that there's so much more information out in the open, political honesty hasn't increased to keep pace with it. Not even close.
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Instead, that base degree of acceptance of lies has been exploited to create an ever-more generous yardstick for what politicians "mean".
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This dissonance is used to claim in turn that the clear implications of particular bills, even backed by speech, are up for interpretation.
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Thus: a law to ban abortion after 6 weeks & a rep's view that women would should be forced to give birth to grow the workforce are detached.
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A link for the first claim: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/six-week-abortion-ban … A link for the second: https://thinkprogress.org/abortion-restrictions-labor-force-fd5a0d7689cb/ …
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There's a DIRECT CORRELATION between these points, which hew to the same ideology & contain the same threat. Oh, unless speech ISN'T an act.
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In THAT case, feminists are "reaching" to view Allen's words as relevant to his plans for future policy. He's only saying WORDS, you guys!
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Why, and those words could clearly mean lots of things! Shame on liberals for focusing on their AGENDA instead of the economic growth angle!
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Because really, the REAL point is population decline and the strain it places on the economy! It's only relevant to abortion in PASSING.
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And once restrictive abortion laws come into place - an ACT - & women suffer from them, their testimony will be dismissed as "just speech".
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Which is what happens when you restrict your definition of "a political action" to mean only "a visible thing occurring NOW IN THE MOMENT."
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Once it's no longer happening RIGHT NOW the testimony is downgraded to "only" speech, just as the threat to enact it was "only" speech, too.
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This forced disconnect between words & actions also lets politicians to railroad direct q's abt consequences with the esoterics of "belief".
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For eg: a politician is presented with factual research disproving their claims & replies by saying they believe otherwise because [lies].
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I see this SO OFTEN & it makes me want to break things. Because it doesn't just stonewall the interviewer - it ERASES VOTER FAITH IN FACTS.
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Because if a POLITICIAN can just choose to handwave decades of astute scientific research because Belief, then why can't an antivaxer?
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If politicians don't have to care about or be held accountable by academic or legal data, then why shouldn't confirmation bias rule all?
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