2026-01-27 12:04 UTC
i'm not just hurling insults around; when I say this model is functional, I mean that you can make sense of Republican behavior as emergent from the interplay between these tendencies. the bigots and thugs have always been there, but the reason they're ascendant now is that long-term economic trends have made it necessary for plutocrats to cynically whip up anti-immigrant/anti-LGBTQ sentiment to distract people.
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@keunwoo@indieweb.social 2026-01-27 12:18
the other categories are reasonably self-explanatory, but I should clarify that by "thugs" I mean authoritarians and their followers. thuggery and bigotry are natural companions: the bigot provides the target against whom the thug's violence can be deployed, and the thug provides the means by which the bigot's subjugation of the other can be operationalized. but the thuggish impulse precedes the target, and is distinct from it.