Although I gave up on posting to metafilter because I rarely had the intellectual fortitude to do anything other than eating my own hat … however there never seems to be a lack of contributors there that can help illuminate the contemporary cognitive dissonance better than anything I can squeak out:

It only makes sense when viewed in the wider context. You have the converging and related crises of climate catastrophe, energy scarcity, financial meltdown, and economic instability heading your way. The US Army Strategic Studies Institute warns that the US must prepare for a ”violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States”, provoked by ”loss of functioning political and legal order” and ”unforeseen economic collapse”.

Your state is being militarised in anticipation of widespread public disorder to ensure the continuity of your government. The US is repositioning troops on active duty on US soil; it has set aside the Posse Comitatus Act to allow those troops to enforce public order; commenced city-scale lock down training procedures; commissioned Halliburton to construct a continent-wide mass detention and secure prisoner transportation facility; handed the President powers to suspend the constitution (and habeas corpus) and invoke martial law at his discretion and without Congressional approval; and, through the TSA, rebased public tolerance of what are essentially methods of public surveillance and mass social control. It has achieved this by shifting entire categories of the legislature and executive into ‘deep state’ extra-legal mechanisms, beyond public scrutiny and accountability.
posted by falcon at 4:28 PM on January 2

For the full Godwin Effect see The Reichstag Fire Decree and The Enabling Act of 1933.

Oddly enough the original post somehow got deleted … and the slug for the remake of this post has somehow has a “-2″ added to the end of it even though there is no evidence of the original post.