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Ron DeSantis Proposes Unprovoked War on Mexico
(prospect.org)
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Psychopathic, how can a politician like this have any popular support
It's DeSantis, so he basically doesn't.
Same as any strongman leader. Talking tough reliably gets votes from a certain type of voter, even if what is proposed is utterly insane.
Because some people are also psychopaths or who prefer authoritarian leadership.
If your analysis stops at "some people [enough to sway some elections] are just born wrong and are bad people," it isn't a very good analysis.
The problem isn't that people are "psychpaths", it is that they live in an environment where they are told that Hispanic people are a threat, that caravans are "invading" the US to pillage it, and that an invasion like meatball Ron here is proposing would effectively be a counteroffensive.
It's worth looking at how that environment is produced too. There's a need for cheap labor in agriculture, laundry, hospitality and textile industries that dovetails well with the US's history of anti-mexican racism (grounded in the need to dehumanizing indigenous people to steal their land as well as the US-Mexico war).
By controlling people's movement through the border regime, we can make them willing to take sub-minimum wage jobs, while also keeping Mexico poor through lopsided trade agreements like NAFTA and low level insurgency achieved by escalating the drug war and flooding the country with weapons.
In this context of US oppression of Mexicans, it becomes necessary to dehumanize them to justify the violence. This is where fox news comes in. Hell, even CNN plays a role by creating categories of migrants some good and some bad, and playing them against each other while justifying border control (think about the rhetoric about dreamers vs drug smugglers).
To change this environment, we either need to undercut this propaganda by organizing white and brown workers together, or either take back control of media from big business or make our own media with similar reach.
Absolutely, I was just trying to be brief because of it being on lemmy.ml, where an anticapitalist text dump might understandably be seen as a derailment. Still, I should have included more of the "why," so thanks for your contribution.
This isn't even an anticapitalist text dump on my part, just basic US history and sociology. If you're drawing anti capitalist conclusions from it, that's on you.
lemmy.ml is nominally leftist, so an anticapitalist text dump is in-bounds, I believe
Oh it's more complicated than that, but getting in to the psychology of fascism involves a lot of typing and there are more articulate authors who have already explained it at length.
They already hated
brown people long before that.
These people don't have to be told a damn thing. They suspect the worst of the best, the best of the worst, and when it comes to 'others' they have nothing but scorn, even if it's completely baseless. It seems to be a kind of narcissism.
"Good people can't be good because I look bad by comparison. Bad people are good because I look good by comparison. Other people don't look like me at all and so we must assume the absolute worst..."
To be fair though, I don't know how we can sustain illegal immigration of low income workers.
The people who support him don't know he said this.. They literally don't know shit about these people and only watch Fox news which wont air this
Yeah, no, they know, whats why they like him
Do you think its some sort of fluke so many fash adjacent politicians are popping up more and more?
I'm reminded of their support for that random Democrat from Hawaii. Turns out she was anti gay and pro intervention.
Tulsi Gabbard is actually a member of a fringe cult that schismed of off the Hare Krishnas, she and her weird cultist dad have switched parties a few times to try to maneuver themselves into positions of political power to advance the cults material interests and ideology. They're super anti-LGBT and anti-Muslim.
She's also an intelligence officer in the US military.
An incredibly untrustworthy person.
the ratchet continues on and on and on
Dunno why you're getting downvoted, you're 100% correct.
Most people aren't on social media talking politics or thinking about any of this outside what they might overhear at church, from family/friends, on TV, shared on Facebook.
Yah the people I know haven't even read a single thing about the "don't say gay" bill nor have they even read 1 thing about the Trump documents. They call it a political hit job and I ask them about the specifics of the documents that were IN HIS BATHROOM and they legit hadn't heard any of it lol. It's because the media they consume actively avoid its.
I'd argue that MOST of these whackos are so disconnected from reality because all they listen to is pod casts and watch fox news. They don't read articles written by actual journalists with sources.