@realcaseyrollins You’ll say it’s my bias as “left” (whatever that means), but I think the arrest and ordinary criminal trial of the fraction of people who participated in January 6 and left sufficient documentary evidence for conviction of specific crimes by a jury of their peers is quite distinct from summarily rounding up millions of people, then detaining and deporting them without trial. 1/

@realcaseyrollins Even if you concede some injustice (I don’t, in general, though don’t doubt there may be particular cases of overreach), just the scale makes a huge difference. There are on the order of 1000 Jan 6 indictees. Trump says he plans to detain and deport 10M+. To abuse the moral weather analogy, a breezy drizzle and a hurricane are kind of the same, but also different. /fin

@realcaseyrollins I think you are playing with words to console yourself. Life in Russia is pretty bad, if you are a military-aged male outside of certain elite ethnicities and geographies. You are likely to be sent to war in a way entirely unlike how Americans have been sent to war recently, into a “meat grinder”, a game of Russian roulette. Large groups of people are forcibly relocated or detained in very bad camps. 1/

@realcaseyrollins Israel/Palestine has gone from perpetrating a Jim-Crow-like apartheid to routinizing massacre and torture. 2/

@realcaseyrollins We in the United States put a glass wall around the period of the 1930s/1940s, we mythologized into the opposite of a fairy tale, but something equally distant from ourselves, our “normal lives”. Intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, who had just lived through it all, marveled at this in real time. 3/

@realcaseyrollins Nazis were a real political movement, like other political movements. They were not so special. Making them so — treating them as some extraordinary evil that came from out of space, incomparable to everything else — lobotomizes us. We’ve seen both in Russia and in Israel/Palestine wartime exigencies bring back what is not some weird occult work of Satan, but ways of being that derive from moral and logistical pressures. 4/

@realcaseyrollins “Fascism” is a very ordinary thing. It’s not extraordinary. It’s a primary color in politics, used to some degree by all political movements, but to importantly varying degrees. Ginning up an internal enemy as a source of movement coherence is its signature move. The Trumpists obviously do this. So does Biden (“MAGA Rpublicans”). But the degrees and frequency are quite different. 5/

@realcaseyrollins It’s policy choices, not ideological commitment or some deep inchoate evil, that would drive us to the kind of horrors we associate with fascism. People start doing terrible things when the “moral weather” is full of terrible things, terrible things must be done, better we do what we have to do to avoid being the victims of the terrors. 6/

@realcaseyrollins For example, choosing to round-up people unlawfully present, regardless of length of tenure, degree of connectedness to their communities, existence of citizen children, etc. would make for bad moral weather. Terrible things — from an ordinary moral perspective, watching what befalls som family you knew — start being done. Others in solidarity resist. The state responds eventually with violence against citizen “allies” preventing lawful deportations. 7/

@realcaseyrollins At this point, to much of the country, state violence is not legitimate. Some groups resist with violence of their own. Now the “moral weather” is terrible, and all kinds of things become possible. All of this is not so extraordinary in human affairs. It’s quite ordinary. More extraordinary is the long run we’ve had without such things. It’s an achievement we should be careful with. /fin