We'll see.

They were tearing down statues and demanding public self-criticism a few years ago, but that was actually the other side.

Shutting down the universities and firing any professor who isn't politically correct is a couple of years in the future; Trump probably has to replace the accreditation system for the universities first. There isn't currently a mechanism for "sending down" suspected subversive thinkers except for deportation.

The Red Guards haven't been formed yet, though commuting the sentences of the ringleaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys is a start. (You may not be aware of this, but the Red Guards were over 10 million people.)

The news media are still independent, for all that matters.

So are almost all of the police, although Trump has said he wants to bring them under his command.

So I don't think we're likely to see that kind of widespread mass killing in the next two or three years. The organizational infrastructure for doing it the traditional way, using hand tools, can't be built overnight. Vance's ally Anduril might be able to automate the process with AI-powered surveillance drones, but they won't have enough production capacity for at least three years.

> The news media are still independent, for all that matters.

The media has bent the knee to Trump, a meteorologist was fired for critiquing Trump on her private Instagram, and an LATimes article's editors removed the article author's criticisms of Trump. You have to goto YouTube to find people openly critizing Trump.

I don't see the parallels. When are the academics going to be sent to the countryside and where are the self criticism sessions being held?

I think Third Republic France is a more apt comparison. Political fights about religion and content of education, check. Diverging media landscape aligned with party political identity and ideology, check. Major changes to civil service personnel after consequential elections (1879-1884), check.

This is perhaps more analogous to an immune reaction to a(n attempted) Cultural Revolution.

Not really. To an outsider this looks very much like the cultural revolution.

Or a counter-cultural revolution.

I think the Democrats are the ones that are into struggle sessions and re-education ...