The original goalpost was: “The US is exactly the same as Russia.” This being in the context of an article talking about Russian librarians being imprisoned and active extreme suppression of the free exchange of ideas being organized by the Russian government.
There are certainly issues going on with libraries. John Oliver recently did an episode going over a lot of it. But the difference there is that these are largely organized by either fringe politicians or politicians in heavily right-wing states. I don’t really see evidence of it at a Federal level, which is what would be the equivalent to what’s going on in Russia. Even where some of this stuff is happening, it doesn’t seem to yet be as extreme as the situation there.
Is it a similar and worrying pattern? Yes. Is it ‘exactly the same thing’? Definitely not.
The US is extremely different from state to state, which can make getting anything done on a wide scale really chaotic, but it also means that we get to try new things and strike out on our own as a state if there’s popular support. That’s how we got marriage equality for queer folks, it’s how we legalized marijuana in a lot of states, and it’s what makes us able to do things like pass laws that protect people from other states’ repressive laws. We can do things like provide a safe haven for people seeking abortions who live in states where it’s illegal. There are states in the US that will literally take in trans folks as refugees from states with repressive laws. On the other hand, we have Florida, where there’s actually a no travel advisory for trans people because they’ll arrest us for trying to use a bathroom or having our gender on our driver’s license.
And like, all this stuff you’re saying is absolutely true. It is a huge mess of near unchecked capitalistic greed in a lot of cases.
But at this point we’ve moved the goal posts. Because they now seem to be “the US also has serious humanitarian problems”. Which, that’s true. But it doesn’t mean the same thing as “the US is exactly the same as Russia.”