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Comment by sdwa | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with this at all and I am tired of seeing "sensible" people here explain how it's important to reach out to fascists and make them feel loved. You're only advocating further normalisation of fascism, and depriving them of the consequences of their actions—consequences that have always been a part of civil society. What's more, that you seem to be more preoccupied with not upsetting these fascists rather than that just a few days ago these very same fascists either attempted a coup or supported a coup does indeed speak of your self-professed naivety (at best). These fascists are a cancer on the body politic and the solution is not to listen to many of the posters here who think that somehow magically the best course of action is simply to do nothing at all, lest we upset the poor lickle fascists.

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Just categorizing everyone protesting as "fascists" is ignorant. These people think the election was rigged, and they don't trust institutions. They think that our democracy is at risk, and your solution is to push them, deplatform them, and remove all hope of legal political influence?

Reacting to this anxiety with force is going to cause a war if it continues.

OK, most charitably, some of the people protesting unwittingly supported and took part in a fascist coup. Sucks for them I suppose, it's of course an easy mistake to make.

People have sat by and watched for 4 years and did nothing whilst Trump worked to erode institutions, culminating in the American people democratically voting in a free and fair election to oust President Trump. The reaction to that was an attempted fascist coup. Clearly doing nothing has failed catastrophically. Perhaps there are more optimal solutions to this attack on democracy, but the posters here clutching their pearls over what is a relatively light response to an attempted coup should spare the rest of us the faux outrage.

> remove all hope of legal political influence

no one has suggested this and none of the actions of the past few days can be categorized as this

Trump’s campaign (for an election that has ended) is not the only campaign in the country

What else do you call people supporting fascists?

> These people think the election was rigged, and they don't trust institutions.

The don't come up with these conclusions themselves. Only one very influential "leader", with a Twitter following of 88M, has been claiming elections are a fraud in America:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-longstanding-history-c...

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37673797

Appeasing his followers has been tried for the past ~5ish years. That led to Jan 6. Further appeasement will lead to worse outcomes unless trump is politically and legally, and _socially_ contained.

I disagree and feel that's a very simplistic explanation. If anything the past four years of democrat reaction to Trump has directly contributed to the situation we're in. The failure to acknowledge this simple fact is startling.

If you were a Trump supporter who was just called a fascist, racist, bigot, white supremacist, uncle tom, unintelligent rube during the past four years, and you watched as the media, hollywood, elites, and democrat party tried everything possible to undermine your legally elected President, including unmasking of family/friends/campaign, bogus 2+ year Russia investigation peddled as fact by the pundits 24/7 7 days a week, impeachment #1, daily conspiracies of all variety, and I could go on; would you trust the outcome of the election?

There were hundreds of sworn affidavits including by democrats and independents, factual things worth investigating if not to simply bring closure to the numerous issues, and the democrats instead not only slammed the door shut, they opened have and continue to deride conservatives & Trump supporters.

How on Earth is it not clear why people don't trust the election results or even more so how we ended up with 50,000+ people in DC and a small subset ending up inside the Capitol building?

To top all of that off, for over 3 months this past summer in multiple cities across the nation, blm/antifa threw very often violent protests that were watered down by the media as "mostly peaceful", despite millions of humans seeing with their own eyes what was happening. People were shot and killed in multiple places, multiple police officers were injured and killed. They tried to storm the White House & Portland Federal building.

How can you still claim it's all due to just one person? I find it to be total nonsense.

I'm sure I'll be downvoted for saying the above, but failure to at least recognize what I'm saying is a colossal mistake. This is what the other side is feeling.

There is clearly a large disenfranchised segment of the population. They have all kinds of reasons with varying degrees of veracity. Lots of people are trying to ignore it, sweep it under the rug, etc. But the real problem here is that a lot of corps+people are trying to "fix" it by stamping it out. Nearly half of the U.S. voted for trump - so I don't think stamping it out is going to work - but it might lead to worse things.

Do they really think the election was rigged or is that just what they say to signal each other and 'trigger' the libs? These aren't starry-eyed idealists whose naïve beliefs about politics have suddenly been crushed, they voted for for the rudest blowhard on Twitter after having him as President for the last 4 years.

They know he pushes hardline policies, they know he's super-antagonistic, they know he's been impeached for corruption, they know that half of what he says makes no sense. They may not like or approve of Biden (I don't either tbh) but Trump voters absolutely know who he is. Poll after poll has established that a plurality of them them don't really give a shit about democracy and that loyalty to Trump is their top concern.

I think what you're worried about is that if they get shut down they will become more aggressive, and I agree that's highly likely. But the approach of appeasing these people and soothing their ruffled feathers has been tried for years and they have just become more and more aggressive over that time. You have a draw a line somewhere, and their attempt to overrun Congress and halt the confirmation of an election seems like a good place to do it.

The people you refuse to reach out to by and large are not made up of fascists. And so we will get what always happens when this kind of mindset takes root en masse.

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