this is what makes me think some pseudo-neo manifest is happening

The Fourth Reich

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Reich

https://bradwillis.substack.com/p/the-fourth-reich

They've tried building concentration camps. They're muzzling the press, they're thinking of banning the opposition, they oppose "them", and are going to great lengths to harm them. They're muzzling scientists and doctors, leading to population exodus. I'm sure there's other things I'm missing.

But this is a reasonable approximation to where things stood in, say, 1937. Granted, they've not gone after neighbouring countries (yet?) but they've had their vom Raths, Horst Wessel's, ... And we'll see if the Reichstag burns over the next year. If they screw up the mid-term elections or talk about an enabling act or let trump run a 3rd term, will that be good enough for ya?

And they talk about racial purity and limit women's roles and future. I'm sure there's a lebensraum in there somewhere. If you think using the term "Nazi" Godwin's the discussion, ok, just use Fascist. You have more countries to compare to with that term: Italy, Spain, Portugal, ...

Their media organ Fox News, on air, called for straight up execution of undesirables. And then did the weakest milk toast walk back. Fox felt comfortable enough with the situation that their host said this on air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8

-Right wing media personalities advocating for euthanizing the homeless and receiving little pushback. Germany also executed ‘undesirables’ during the holocaust along with 6 million Jews.

-The government attempting to control speech by removing broadcast licenses from networks that don’t comply. Joseph Goebbels blacklisted actors that were not fully onboard with the Nazi regime [0]

Those are just the examples I can think of from the past week. All of the anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-intellectualism over the past 6 months as well.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/archives/goebbels-ends-ca...

To play devil's advocate, ABC doesn't have a right to execute a corporate merger and this is what was threatened by the FCC. I don't know what the courts would think of this kind of argument and unfortunately we will probably not find out.

Regardless of that, it certainly seems like some kind of corruption.

This is extremely out of touch.

Don’t you remember post 9/11 war mongering? Jingoistic country songs?

Was the Supreme Court not almost fully captured in the early 2020s?

Was the majority of news media on television and radio not extremely right leaning?

> because they were being banned for their hot takes on black people and the Holocaust

This was the sales pitch, but it wasn't reality. People were being banned for much less severe speech than this kind of stuff and the window was slowly creeping towards less and less severe disagreements with the dominant narrative. I think bans for COVID stuff were particularly galling for many people[1].

There's a fair argument that the COVID situation was dire and required drastic action, but this can't be papered over in retrospect by saying that only holocaust deniers and racists were being banned.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/2/twitter-to-permanent...