The trouble is: the American fascists appear to be playing that very same game with Ukraine and the rest of Europe…

Didn’t know the guy. Looked him up. Found this:

In 2017, numerous women in Hollywood came forward with allegations of rape and sexual assault by Ratner.[3] This resulted in his business deals and prospective film projects getting canceled or scrapped, with Warner Bros. Pictures and talent agencies distancing themselves from him, and with Ratner subsequently immigrating to Israel.

And this:

The director of the new documentary on US First Lady Melania Trump has appeared embracing a young woman in images released by the US Department of Justice on Friday.
Brett Ratner, who also directed the Rush Hour films and X-Men: The Last Stand, can be seen sitting on a sofa beside the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and two women whose identities have been obscured.

You really can’t make this shit up!

That single seat is an FBI agent ordered by Kash Patel to watch the movie while on duty so that theatres won’t appear entirely empty. And before you ask: yes, the man has got a weapon, and, yes, he’s considering making one last use of it.

They’re not lies - they’re “alternative facts”.

In that same vein,

• illegal wars of aggression are “special milliary operations”
• people the U.S. does not want to grant POW status are “irregular combatants” (a term used for people locked up for decades in Guantanamo Gulag)
• extrajudicial killings (e.g. via drone strikes) are “liquidations” or targets being “neutralised”.
• torture is “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

I wish I were making this shit up, but most of this vocabulary is from the Bush era. That goes to ahow: while there are certain differences in both quality and quantity, blatant lies to the public have always been a hallmark of (U.S.) governments.

Renting out his wife to other men. Just like the old Jeffrey days.

Yeah, I guess https://keepandroidopen.org/ exists just because, uh… well…

Fuck you, Google. Fuck you very much.

You have your cake. Now eat it.

Why though? Israel is currently governed by genocidal far-right extremists. They probably know what they’re talking about.

Shitty journalistic work. In order to gauge whether Germany’s opposition to the current plan has any merit, one would need to know the causes of the 27% budget increase… which this news piece does not deliver.

Quick, beaurocRats! Cough up a new excuse to send your citizens’ data over to Daddy!

You’re not wrong, but you’re giving right-wing populists too much credit. Their polling numbers are not just a product of their own efforts, but equally so the result of

• outside interference: Russia is probably one of the most prominent actors in this sector, linked to both interference in U.S. elections (on behalf of Trump), in the Brexit referendum (on behalf of the Leave campaign), in the latest Romanian election, and so many more. But technofascists like Thiel and Musk are equally getting involved, endorsing, hosting and probably bankrolling candidates they see as conducive to giving even more power to oligarchs. Cf. Musk hosting and endorsing Alice Weidel (AfD GER) and Tommy Robinson recently at the London rallye, and Thiel essentially funding JD Vance’s entire political career.
• the abandonment of the working and middle class by the political elites: hear me out, I’m not just parrotting a right-wing talking point here. If you look at the development of both income and wealth inequality in the last few decades, you’ll see that there is some truth to it. Governments from left to right have had a much more open ear to the interests of corporations and billionaires - after all, that’s where all that sweet, sweet campaign money comes from, as well as the career for their lives after politics. Meanwhile, ordinary people have been struggling from crisis to crisis: from dotcom bubble to subprime meltdown, from the Euro crisis into a global pandemic, and from there into two severe energy shocks ('22 and '26). And it turns out that bailing out banks while dishing out austerity, shutting down the country and remaining mostly inactive in the face of rising inequality and inflation isn’t exactly the way to win the trust of the public. That said, the far right posing as an “alternative” to failed mainstream politics is a joke, obviously: as laid out above, they are mostly bankrolled by the very elites that are responsible for people’s struggles. They are here to shift the blame onto marginalised groups and give even the lower classes somebody to look down and vent their anger on. If you look at their agenda, their plan is to open the floodgates even more to the money elites, slash taxes and regulations and funnel government spending towards oligarch-owned monopolies. (The rampant corruption under Trump II bears ample testimony to that.)

So, yes, the far right has been busy in the recent past. But they wouldn’t have come this far if it weren’t for fascists with money supporting them and mainstream politics failing people left and right.