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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, and not a soul in the media or other most elsewhere cared until after the election. Indeed, CNN had his own brother interview him, even coaching him to maximize his appeal. The activist media is detestable.

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I think CNN liked the brother vs. brother angle purely for entertainment value. The only activism they practice is what drives traffic.

I don't doubt they make good money off of their activism, but let's not diminish the extent to which they are activist rather than journalist. These are the OG "mostly peaceful protest" folks[0], and this is only one of the more conspicuous on a long list of egregiously activist takes that they've produced in the last few years.

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cnn-fiery-but-mostly-peaceful...

I think activism implies service to an idealistic cause. I don't believe CNN has any idealistic causes, they're a capitalist firm servicing their market.

I don't mean this as a defense of CNN in any way. They're clearly giving their audience what they want to hear which drives revenue, making them more of an entertainment company than a news company. But the problem of for-profit news is bigger than CNN.

I'm not sure we can really separate activism from corporate greed in the context of the media. Typically you have a lot of rank and file journalists and editors who are activist and corporate leadership who have figured out how to monetize their employees ideological fervor. Moreover, as "activists" are rewarded financially for their commitment, they become greedy grifters rather than mere devotees of a toxic ideology (consider prominent activist-grifters such as Kendi or DiAngelo). Which is all to say that it seems not particularly worthwhile to try to distinguish between activists and grifters because it seems more like a spectrum than distinct categories and all positions on the spectrum are pretty equally toxic as far as I can tell (you're either propagating misinformation out of zeal or greed and one doesn't seem strictly better than the other).

If you are taking about Portland, it really was mostly peaceful protest. It probably would have been completely peaceful if trump hadn’t sent in his fascist anonymous SS shock troops (against the express wishes of both the city and state governments).

> fascist anonymous SS shock troops

Can you try again without going full Godwin's Law on your first post in the thread? How can we have any hope of productive conversation with rhetoric like this? (I'm far from a Trump supporter, but there's valid Trump criticism--and plenty of it--and then there's absurd hyperbole).

I'm not who you're responding to, but I'm not sure how else to reasonably characterize unmarked, unidentified armed and armored personnel snatching people off the streets into unmarked vehicles.

Is it more charitable to assume you genuinely can’t tell the difference between the US Marshals and SS troops or that you’re arguing in bad faith?

I don't believe those were US Marshalls, iirc they were volunteers from a collection of federal agencies that were the most loyal to Trump.

However, they way they acted, in refusing to identify themselves, the agency for which they worked, where they were taking their abductees, etc makes me inclined to liken them more to a notorious fascist unit than a legitimate law enforcement agency.

Per NPR (a solidly left-leaning source) they were US Marshals and they used unmarked vehicles to avoid the violent protesters who were allegedly targeting police. They didn't arrest anyone, but transported them to a safe location for questioning and immediately released them. Certainly not a good look but obviously this is nothing like SS troopers kidnapping people for death camps, torture, imprisonment, etc.

I am a vocal critic of Trump, but I don't understand the impulse to invoke absurd comparisons between the US and Nazi Germany. Trump gives us plenty of legitimate stuff to criticize on a regular basis, why discredit yourself like this?

“They didn’t arrest anyone.” Please. What is arrest other than losing freedom movement and then being moved to a location. It doesn’t make sense to me that you’re choosing to die on this hill. There is no excuse for using unmarked vehicles and police with no insignia. This is the US government, they’re doing it because they’re afraid of protestors? Sounds like BS. I’m tired of the government playing the victim during protests.

> It doesn’t make sense to me that you’re choosing to die on this hill

Friend, I’m not the one comparing US Marshals to SS Troopers, but please go on.

> What is arrest other than losing freedom movement and then being moved to a location.

Maybe the right phrasing would be "detained without the legal protections given to arrested people" -- not a step up...

What if there really were fascist shock-troopers and when people tried to express their outrage, anyone who wasn’t there says “whoa whoa, tone down the hyperbole”

There’s no real threat of fascism in America and people who use the term to characterize American politics are either ignorant or disingenuous or both.

I’d say Trump was definitely toeing the line. Taking all his actions as a whole 1) sending federal police to Portland and randomly kidnapping people 2) literally spewing lies every other word to the point you don’t know what’s real 3) wanting a military parade with tanks saluting him 4) inciting a mob to storm a democratically elected legislative assembly 5) expecting Supreme Court picks to be loyal to him specifically 6) undermining the integrity of an election which his own government and party often admitted was secure …

https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/896884949634232320

>> "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you."

If the Jack boot fits…

What's with the hysterical anti-media FUD? We know about Cuomo's nursing home shenanigans because the media you complain about were at the forefront of reporting about it, starting as far back as April 2020. (WSJ, Politico, WaPo, NYT, NBC News, Chicago Tribune, ABC, and CBS were just some of the national news organizations reporting on this.)

The public decided it didn't care.

Compare coverage on those outlets before and after the election. The media largely decides what the public does and doesn't care about. If they ran these stories as breathlessly as their ICE stories or their BLM stories the public would care.

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