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@hex@kolektiva.social
2026-02-28 10:20:01

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

Call on your representatives to block any DHS appropriations bill
or Continuing Resolution (CR)
that maintains funding for ICE.
This lawless and violent agency must be defunded and dissolved for good.
5calls.org/issue/dhs-budget-ic

@memeorandum@universeodon.com
2026-01-28 00:01:24

Confidence in ICE is falling and half of Americans support cutting its funding (Taylor Orth/YouGov)
today.yougov.com/politics/arti
memeorandum.com/260127/p140#a2

@tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2026-01-27 12:44:00
Content warning: ICE, racism, police brutality

An extremely simple syllogism, for which the evidence is ample and has been easily available for over a decade:
ICE : white people in Minneapolis ::
regular police : Black people everywhere in America
If you're saying "Abolish ICE" right now (as you should be) but you're hesitant to say "Abolish the police" then you're okay with the brutality as long as it's reinforcing the racial hierarchy, and that's not a good look.
I understand that "Abolish the police" is a scary thing to think about if *your* experience has been that they keep you safe, but recognize how much of that is myth vs reality, e.g. have you ever personally had a positive interaction with police, or do those all happen in stories? Also, even if they do keep you safe, is it worth it if the cost is brutality to the marginalized? (No, it's not.)
At minimum we can see the following behaviors on both sides of the syllogism:
- retaliation for legally "protected" defiance or even just observation
- random killings, with mostly-nonexistent repercussions for the officers involved
- regular widespread harassment & surveillance
-more that I don't have time to list right now. Feel free to reply with your own examples.
#AbolishICE #AbolishThePolice

@Techmeme@techhub.social
2026-01-27 20:56:10

Privacy-focused MVNO Cape, which has raised $61M from a16z and others, launches across the US following a March 2025 beta, offering a $99 monthly plan (Steven Melendez/Fast Company)
fastcompany.com/91481000/this-

@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot
2026-01-28 09:11:49

"When you focus on growth in GDP as your primary goal without any concern for whether what creates that growth is of real value rather than simply being capable of being counted, whilst being indifferent to the distribution of the gains, those already vulnerable are bound to suffer as a consequence... The policy failure this chart exposes is not an accident; it will be achieved by #Labour by d…

@qurlyjoe@mstdn.social
2026-01-27 18:49:25

View public domain films for free. No ads, no login, no algorithms, just movies. Maintained by wikimedia folks.
boingboing.net/2026/01/27/wiki

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2026-03-26 15:27:03

You know how you’re in the middle of a process and you refresh a web page and it loses state?
So that sucks.
With Kitten¹ – when using the new state-maintaining/class-based and event model-based component model – it’s easy to have flowing interfaces that animate between states, etc., that don’t lose state if you refresh the page (or open another tab).
What you can’t do on the Web, however, is restore the state of any cross-origin iframes. (As you have no visibility into th…

Screenshot of the restored state of the Stripe component’s success state using a mock HTML/CSS snapshot of the state with some dynamic areas included. The screen is full of horizontal and vertical guides aligned to areas of the success message to ensure that the mock is pixel perfect.

Calling ICE or DHS a “law enforcement” organization is a joke.
They made no attempt to follow the law while there.
They were given permission to break the law, not follow it.
That has been their training,
and they have been following their training.
So if we pass new law why do we think they will follow it?

Defund ICE (UPDATED 1/22) -
PASSED HOUSE,
SENATE VOTE THIS WEEK
It doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat…
If after seeing the carnage in Minnesota you vote to give ICE more money…
You’ve betrayed your constituents.
5calls.org/issue/dhs-budget-ic