Donald Trump on Sunday proposed a new policy that many critics said is equivalent to legalizing “The Purge.”

Trump spoke at a rally in Pennsylvania, where he admitted that his attendees were “falling asleep” at one of his earlier rallies. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign noted that, as Trump was still speaking at the swing-state event over the weekend, rallygoers placed directly behind the former president started to funnel out of the building.

One comment Trump made drew condemnation on social media, as well as numerous comparisons to The Purge, a film series based on a dystopian world in which the government makes all crimes legal for a 12-hour period.

As reported by Sebastian Smith, AFP Washington desk chief, “Trump in Erie, PA, says in US ‘the police aren’t allowed to do their job.’ To stop crime, you need ‘one really violent day.’ He says: ‘One rough hour and I mean real rough, the word would get out and it would end immediately.’”


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  • exanime@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Everyone here thinking Trump is saying the quiet part out loud… but as the senile old man he is, I think he just saw the movie and is confusing whatever his handlers told him to say with that he fell as sleep watching on TV

    • androogee (they/she)@midwest.social
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      1 month ago

      Naw this is a case of the media tiptoing around him and preferring easily digested headlines.

      He’s clearly not describing The Purge in the actual quote. He doesn’t want to make crime legal.

      He’s describing Kristallnacht. He wants the cops to be able to punish anyone they want with as much violence as they want. He wants a massacre of anyone they declare a criminal, aka minorities and dissidents.

      It’s so much fucking scarier than the bullshit headlines and it’s so fucking frustrating.

      • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
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        1 month ago

        This is my take. I’ve never watched the purge.

        It sounds to me like he’s just saying the police need to be able to dispense “justice” with impunity, and in his mind that can be tempered be saying you’d only need to do it once.

        It’s just the latest in a long line of really concerning attitudes that the right seems happy to support.

        Honestly i feel like this current lurch to the right, as we try to manage climate change, AI, and wealth concentration, is the great filter. We have some big problems and the right is just so determined to double down with all our current shitty plans.

          • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            I don’t think you’re understanding what The Great Filter is.

            The Great Filter is the collective human behavior that will doom us to an unlivable world. This is stuff like anthropogenic climate change, overhunting/overfishing, and nuclear war. Stuff that keeps humanity from elevating itself beyond a Type-0 Civilization by destroying what we need to survive on our own planet.

            What Trump is suggesting is genocide and state violence. This has jack shit to do with the survival of humanity, and everything to do with the survival of living breathing human beings that will be murdered by fascists.

            This isn’t some inevitable natural law of the universe. If anything, that suggestion is egregiously offensive and harmful. There are things we can do right now to prevent it. This is direct human malice that will only affect the poorest and most marginalized people, and while leaving the fascists and their allies unharmed.

            Put down your sci-fi novels and pick up a history book before you make yourself complicit in what’s happening.

            • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
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              1 month ago

              You’ve misconstrued the comment you’re replying to because you either misunderstood or didn’t read my comment above it.

              I’m not saying Trump’s latest brain fart is “the great filter”.

              I’m saying the great filter is populations all over the world having a propensity to vote for people like Trump, who actively plan to make all the problem’s we’re facing much worse to further their own ends.

              I’ve never been an alarmist, but I will say that as a species we don’t seem to be on a trajectory towards prosperity, and global leaders don’t seem to have a plan to correct that trajectory.

          • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            but…we are the great filter.

            always have been. go ask the 700+ species that humans have forced to extinction.

            don’t worry though, humans won’t be hunted to extinction. we’ll starve or die from exposure way before that happens.

      • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        He’s more and more openly using fascist rhetoric right out of Hitler’s playbook too. That the only book we know he owns is one with Hitler’s speeches is just conincidence I’m sure. (Not that he can read, but maybe the Saw puppet reads it to him now before going down on his mushroom.)

        • SassyRamen@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Currently the leader of the far right in Austria is going by the same title Hitler did, before he came into power.

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      Him, the evening before: “Oh yes, you’re a bigly big mac aren’t you, let’s just curl up on the couch and watch my stories…”

    • TomAwsm@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        Except when someone is a proven fascist with a long history of proposing the violent oppression of women, non-whites and minorities, and affiliated with a large political party that shares this aim. Then it’s probably malice.