American people at the local, state, and federal levels, and we hold free elections in which the people decide what they want
Sorry Bernie, you’re out of touch. We don’t have elections anymore, we have gerrymandering, and tampering, and intimidation.
“Cmon guys, talk it out! Now is not the time to enact political violence against Nazis who are continually stripping you of your rights and freedoms! Actually the fact you haven’t talked to them enough and changed their minds means you’re weak!”
🤨 OK Bernie.
Well, yeah, if you reframe what he actually said into something totally different, obviously it’s not going to make a lot of sense.
American people at the local, state, and federal levels, and we hold free elections in which the people decide what they want
Do you think elections are what the people decide? I love Bernie, but he is out of touch now.
Bernie is defusing a highly explosive situation and doing that very well. Good work, I say.
A centrist would agree with him. Bernie has accomplished nothing to stop fascism. More cheap talk, no successes.
Maybe he’s accomplished nothing to stop fascism with this specific quote, but to suggest that he hasn’t for his entire career is a little silly.
I love Bernie. But, we have fascism. So the efforts of anyone fighting fascism this far have failed.
Yeah, we have it now and not at any point in the last 50+ years, in part due to him.
Hey, you’re right. We do need to urgently work to improve the systems of media and education so that people have some idea of what the fuck is even happening, so that they won’t elect open fascists to power and think that they’re doing a good thing. We have some urgent problems now that can’t really wait for that, of course, since that whole vital apparatus has been deliberately destroyed by the rich people over the course of about the last 50 years. But yes, the elections aren’t the only piece. If we could have a Mamdani level event in even one out of every ten elections that happens, that would be fuckin’ fantastic, instead of just letting one open socialist get within a hair’s breadth of the literal US presidency in 2016 and then giving up because the rich people cheated him out of power. It almost fuckin’ worked. Also, gerrymandering, mail in voting, open fraud enabled by Trump and his allies, et cetera. There are a ton of problems that we will never in a million years vote our way out of.
I’m glad you said that. It would have been absolutely nuts if you were agreeing with my parent comment which more or less to me could be interpreted as “Let’s bring political assassination by random nuts into the mainstream of the US political spectrum as a way of making change, that’ll help and the left will definitely win that game in the end.”
But none of that “working on” stuff is or will ever happen. It’s 2025, we should not be backsliding into fascism. Clearly the methods the people are using are failing.
I will be donating to Tyler’s fund just like I did for Luigi—and anyone else who has the stones to stand up against fascists and their cronies.
You should donate (and volunteer) for the people organizing against ICE, or legal defense for people in their crosshairs. That can develop into an actual resistance as things get worse and steadily worse (which they probably will). Donating to encourage random assassination will instead make things exponentially worse, it will basically hand it over to the Charlie Kirks of the world.
I disagree. While I certainly empathize with the people who are being targeted by ice, the immigration topic is not going to be something that sways politics away from fascism. Too many people on the left don’t want illegal immigration. I don’t want illegal immigration. But, I really am disgusted with how it’s being handled now (and in the past too).
The people need to go on the offensive instead of just constantly defending ourselves (in court or otherwise). Now, I don’t mean we should all go shoot people—but those politicians and “influencers” promoting hate and fascism need to feel deep down that they are truly unsafe.
Action can have many forms. But action is not asking them to stop while standing on a street corner holding a sign. We need to make them stop—with escalating intensity that stops when they stop.
1 (please stop) — 10 (death)
“Pick a number that works for you!”
(*Not you, them)
Too many people on the left don’t want illegal immigration. I don’t want illegal immigration. But, I really am disgusted with how it’s being handled now (and in the past too).
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
I personally don’t care about “illegal immigration.” I’ve had good friends who came here “illegally,” and ones who’ve experienced some extremely severe consequences because of it. Fuck that. But even regardless of all that, what ICE is currently doing has absolutely 0 to do with enforcing immigration law. They’re actually breaking immigration law left and right and violating a bunch of different court orders. If you care about “legal vs illegal,” which again in this case I couldn’t possibly give less of a fuck about, you should be extremely upset against ICE right now, and agitating to stop them.
Now, I don’t mean we should all go shoot people
Good, glad we agree on that part.
but those politicians and “influencers” promoting hate and fascism need to feel deep down that they are truly unsafe.
I don’t necessarily disagree. But, there is a way to do that that can escalate into a real revolution of the people that will still maintain a working country. There is also a way to do it that can escalate into AOC and Bernie being the first up on the assassination list, along with Hasanabi, Paul Pelosi, the local mayor if he tries to put in bike lanes, fuckin’ whatever.
This particular way of “fighting” for improvement is guaranteed to make things worse.
We need to make them stop—with escalating intensity that stops when they stop.
This part, I completely agree with. Is your impression that shooting Charlie Kirk will make them stop? I think it will make them accelerate. There is no number of Charlie Kirks that you can shoot that will ever make them stop.
They have a lot more money for security than Elizabeth Warren does. There is one side and one side only that will be disproportionately impacted by this.
lol no.
Words have repercussions, always have and always will.
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Since when has America been about a free and democratic society?
Or are we just taking platitudes as fact now?
It’s certainly better than some statements I have seen, but it ignores the commonplace violence inflicted on non-elites every day.
Whenever the US makes a mistake of any kind, Sanders is there pointing to morality like a compass.
Bernie has been on the right side of history for half a century. And while he’s technically right here as well, it assumes both sides play using the same rules. We all know one side only likes rules that don’t apply to them.
Yea, I agree with you… But sadly the likely way out of that line of escalatory path is a civil war.
Any other take deepens the divide, we can’t let that happen. Trump and the billionaires want civil war, so they can throw out our government and install a dictatorship.
Love Bernie, but this is one more example of the Dems offering MAGA an excuse to continue to misbehave.
He speaks as if BOTH sides have responsibility for political violence when it is almost entirely the Right. When he talks like this, all MAGAs hear is him admitting that the Left is committing political violence, which gives them an excuse to retaliate against the Left for imaginary political violence committed by the Left, or even actual political violence committed by the Right.
Because if there’s one thing the extreme right has been needing it’s an excuse from Bernie Sanders to act they way they do.
There’s no version of a message from Bernie that would sway the extreme right. His message managed to get right wingers to endorse and share a message that cited the following events as unacceptable:
- January 6th. If you had told me that right wingers would be sharing a message from Bernie Sanders denouncing January 6th as unacceptable, I would have thought you insane.
- Paul Pelosi
- Governer Whitmer
- Melissa Hortman
- Josh Shapiro
Even among the incidents where a right wing figure was the target, most were committed by a right wing perpetrator or apolitical motives, with only one or two of them credibly left-wing in origin.
So you have an audience of conserveritives that are not “ride or die” with MAGA but might have considered the Nick Fuentes types a bunch of useful idiots that can advance their perspective and be a risk only toward the people they don’t like anyway. I think this is just the event and message for those folks to realize just how dangerous these extremists are to them that they try to weaponize on their behalf. Maybe it can’t work, but a message from Bernie Sanders coming out hard against the right wouldn’t have done anything vaguely productive.
Great take.
Left of center to far left have become too hobbled by perfect ideology. Towards the center, they refuse to entertain more progressive ideas (fairness this has been going on far longer). The more progressive factions, refuse to compromise.
About 60% of this comments section is a big Lemmy Reading Comprehension tragedy
I too like to observe and post a comment that does not contribute anything of value to the conversation.
I watched this yesterday, and I agree that it was a very good speech.
Were the British soldiers killed in the Revolutionary War, or the Rebels Killed in the Civil War, or the Nazis killed in WW2 victims of political violence?
Sometimes a political spectrum becomes stretched so wide that there can be no middle ground. No amount of “spirited debate” is going to reach a compromise about who is due their life and freedom. The wolf and the sheep are never going to agree on what is for dinner.
Charlie Kirk absolutely leaves a legacy of misery and death. He shares blame for Jan 6, mass shootings, and numerous hate crimes. He may have never pulled a trigger himself, but the right wing terrorism he encouraged leaves the blood on his hands just the same.
Well said.
its not a democracy and you can’t debate these guys. next.
No! You’re the puppet. Wrong! Our president’s debate prowess.
“A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views,”
Except that’s not what America is today…
There’s nothing wrong with working towards a better America, it’s what we should all be doing…
But a war has never been won with hugs. And whether we want to be in it or not, we’re in a war against fascism.
I’ve been saying it a lot lately, but it bares repeating:
Work for the world you want to live in, prepare for the world you already live in
Why include ‘humiliated’ as something people should be protected from for expressing their political views? Fascists should absolutely be humiliated when they spew their vile in public. The first amendment is supposed to protect you from state censorship, not social pressure or ostracization.
I’m not Bernie Sanders…
Question wasn’t directed at you, I was just putting it out there.
Question wasn’t directed at you
I mean, it literally was…
That’s how replies work.
But Id be really surprised if explaining helps.
We use social media a bit differently, there’s no need to be rude. Replies on a public forum are a one-to-many communication. I replied to your comment to establish the context, but the question was directed to no one in particular. It was intended to foster discussion.
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Basically all us do not shoot people we disagree with. 300,000,000 million citizens and a glut of weaponry, doesn’t he get what Charlie Kirk meant by this is the price we pay? You will never plug all the holes, and we massively increase the chance a gun slips through along with the killer, and this is what will happen for as long as our culture and laws stay the same.
Take all the people Charlie Kirk has debated. Consider the surface area. All the people who must have had guns. And yet essentially every single person didn’t kill him.
There were more people debating him peacefully that day than trying to assassinate him. He was having his ideas dismantled by simple logic, as always, and ignoring it, as always. He just happened to be shot that day. They act like life is a simulation that’s meant to bend the rules for them rather than subjecting them to the same roll of the die as everyone else.
Yeah there’s a ton of main character syndrome from the lot of them. None of them feared gun violence. The women seemed to never care that their side was pushing for the Christian version of Iran and that they personally would suffer in that situation.
