As much as some of the Parler content was definitely awful, I've seen much worse on dialup BBS's and during the Great Cognitive Corruption of Usenet that started in the 80's and greatly accelerated onwards from there.
I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down.
I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them.
Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be).
The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.
I keep seeing this sentiment pop up here on HN and I've come at it in other posts.
All of the Trump supporters I know are upper middle class suburbanites who have been fairly well off for quite a while. Not sure I have any empathy for the contempt at all. I just don't buy this sob story what-so-ever.
I feel even less bad for violent extremists that have zero goals or demands except to destabilize everything because they believe whatever they see on the internet. There is no ideology for them to defend; only their right to hate. They only want the ability to have whatever they believe to be true to be the case even when it is not the case.
Ironically, if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy we might have an actual movement on our hands. Unfortunately they've all been convinced that their superficial differences aren't superficial at all and that the other side is wrong; now it appears at any cost.
That's likely an artifact of the circles you run in. If you're on HN, then odds are really good you don't mill around in the lower socio-economic milieu many of the "foot soldiers" of radical movements draw upon, whichever part of the political spectrum we're discussing. Our very vocabulary distinguishes us as a separate "other"; when I speak with them, I have to consciously "tune into" their preferred vocabularies.
The financial bifurcation in the US and to a lesser extent in many other parts of the developed world is quite big, and I don't know how big it has to get before a competent demagogue gets traction in the US. The extremes in both the GOP and the DNC have just been handed a dangerous working template with Trump's history lesson. They just learned that extremism works, and it scales from local to national politics. It was not always so; one of the salient features of American politics in the past was just how consistently difficult it was to move the center any appreciable distance politically, the infamous "lumpentariat".
I believe this is because the US valuation landscape is fundamentally broken. This goes way beyond the economic or financial system. How we account for value over time is structured in very perverse incentive structures leading to the power law popping up in an all-over fashion when in the past it didn't use to dominate the landscape so much (it had localized instantiations but these were more local maxima than a general law more widely applicable). It's generating a "desperation deciles" that the means and averages of metrics sweep under statistical rugs.
I think these deciles are mattering now due to the law of large numbers. With "only" a 100M population base, such deciles are manageable, whether through coercion (unfavorable), assistance (nominal approach), or generationally long-term rehabilitative policy like public education (ideal). But I suspect there is something about near-billion- and billion-scale population governance our governing systems are not scaling to meet.
Also, a consistent theme I see in these kinds of discussions is similar to your "...if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy...". In my humble and limited experience, the ones in the developed world are short-term focused on survival, putting food on the table and a roof over their heads, then with what limited discretionary time and cognitive energy left over, trying to find some happiness in a pretty bleak outlook as globalism systemically blocks their avenues of escape.
There are some limited avenues left, but the arithmetic doesn't support lifting enough of the desperation deciles out of poverty or functional poverty to matter through transitioning them to plumbers, welders, fitters, rig work, etc. While there are currently screaming needs for many of those skills, it isn't in the tens of millions scale we're needing (law of large numbers).
Poor people don't riot if their poverty is perceptibly, contiguously improving over time. Rich people don't incite malign ideologies if there aren't poor people who will act as foot soldiers absorbing the brunt of adverse consequences of swearing fealty to such beliefs. When there is a chicken in every pot, people will riot over sports teams, but not politics. Actual getting-policies-and-legislation-established-and-practiced politics is dead-ass boring to the vast majority, so getting this many people to even pay attention to just the cartoonish depictions of politics we see in the US now is a major signal. I currently don't think it is a good signal. And I suspect it is a more complex signal than "get the wrongthink upper middle class suburbanites to shut up". But I'm just a layperson throwing some brush strokes out there and wanting to hear thoughts from folks like you. I hope I'm wrong-wrong-wrong since I'm operating from very limited data. I don't know what the hell the on-the-money forecasters are making of all this, but in a world this big, I gotta believe there is someone or some entity out there that has had access to sufficient data and has been consistently right for a couple decades plus, and some very wealthy people are paying very dearly for their ongoing analysis.
I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down.
I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them.
Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be).
The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.