SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Huh? MSNBC Warns ‘Gestapo Raids’ Are Turning U.S. Into ‘East Germany.’

Getting back to the original question, [MSNBC’s Anand Giridharadas] continued, “Now, I have every quibble with every actual thing he wanted to do to advocate for them. But he won for a reason. He won because he was able to see that. When you start having Gestapo raids in America and we start becoming a country where, as in East Germany, a knock on the door is the thing people are thinking about instead of the brilliant idea they want to go create. Then we are moving very, very far from his, the president worrying about what regular people need, right?”

First of all, the Gestapo was the Nazi secret police while the East German communists had the Stasi. Second of all, if enforcing the law is Gestapo or Stasi-like behavior, what does that make non-immigration police activity? Meanwhile, those who are in the country legally should have nothing to worry about.

I would like to hear someone at MSNBC tell me very clearly and in detail what was wrong with East Germany. Because every few years, a leftist Website who thinks the Stasi were the good guys in The Lives of Others runs a column like this 2022 piece in Jacobin: Why the East Germans Lost. (Emphasis mine.)

The Wall was ugly, menacing, and, for many citizens, no doubt heartbreaking. But the economic and geopolitical stability it ensured also gave the GDR the chance to build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders. Workers were guaranteed employment, housing, and all-day childcare, while basic foodstuffs and other goods were heavily subsidized. Though wages were only half of what they were in the West, adjusted for prices in relation to earnings, GDR workers’ actual purchasing power was more or less the same. This fact, combined with the chronic lack of certain consumer goods, taught citizens to rely on each other and help each other out in times of need — a reality that still resonates today in polls showing that Easterners are considerably more sensitive to social inequality and the importance of solidarity.

The Lives Of Others was not intended as a how-to guide for good government, and yet Democrats and in particular the Biden administration never got that memo, as these headlines from the start of Obama’s third term the Biden administration illustrate:

● Elizabeth Warren proposes bill that would triple the IRS budget in order to ‘crack down’ on ‘wealthy tax cheats.’
● Biden Wants To Spy on American Bank Accounts.
● Biden Purges Non-Partisan US Commission On Fine Arts In Unprecedented Move Against Popular Classical Architecture.
● Secretary Of State Hails Cuban Independence Day As A Celebration Of ‘Diversity.’

And as Silicon Valley’s Mark Andreessen told Ross Douthat of the New York Times this weekend:

So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.

So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.

We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.

We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”

We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”

* * * * * * * * *

The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.

Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.

And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”

When Newsweek claimed that “We Are All Socialists Now” at the start of Obama’s first term in 2009, evidently they were using East Germany as their model – isn’t that what the denizens of MSNBC have long wanted as well?