I'm seeing this as a trickle now but it looks like it's going to be a flood soon. Here's the narrative. I'm reading this a lot on Facebook, usually in response to whenever someone brings up that they're not voting for Joe Biden. The narrative says: "You better vote for Joe Biden in November otherwise Donald Trump will become a dictator."

So yeah this narrative is real and live. Let's start with what Bernie Sanders is supposed to have said to the Associated Press.

AP Interview: Sanders says opposing Biden is ‘irresponsible’

Here's where the article quotes Bernie Sanders

“Do we be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden and doing everything we can to move Joe and his campaign in a more progressive direction? Or do we choose to sit it out and allow the most dangerous president in modern American history to get reelected?”

Now, sure, they could have quoted Bernie Sanders selectively, but here's the issue I've got with the AP's take on Bernie Sanders: If we're going to be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden, the first question we ought to be asking is, "can we move to a swing state once the quarantine period is over?" It doesn't do Joe Biden a lot of good if we're going to support him in safe states. Joe can win his safe states all by himself. It's the swing states that Biden needs to win if he is to be elected President; that's the hard part. If we're going to be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden, Joe needs us to flip states for him, not to pad totals in states he's already more-or-less won.

But of course nobody is proposing such a thing. If the situation was really so desperate that we all need to elect Joe Biden, to not (and here we need to imagine horrible things) "allow the most dangerous president in modern American history to get reelected", this issue would come up.

But here's the point of the "omigod Trump's gonna be a DICTATOR" narrative. WE, the former Bernie supporters, are being made into the designated agency of the Presidential election. Donald Trump is doing horrible things -- and it is up to US to get Joe Biden into the White House, to prevent the imagined evils of a second Donald Trump term.

Can you all see what an idle fantasy this is?

First off, Joe Biden's campaign hasn't even told us he wants us. This is why we say that it's up to the candidates to appeal to us -- we're not going to have any real relationship unless there's something coming from their side. Second, the point I made above. Third, it's really up to Joe Biden, and not us, to present Joe Biden as an election winner. Fourth, are we even motivated to do such a thing? Lastly, Joe Biden presumably has the Democratic Party and all sorts of other resources at his disposal. He's been in politics for fifty years, and he's got plenty pf political capital. He can use his political capital to win the election, if that's what he wants to do.

So anyway they've got this narrative, Trump's a fascist and a second Trump term would be the end of democracy. It's being weaponized against us. The narrative might be true, but you don't see the mainstream Democrat elites panicking over it. Heck, Trump is about to kill off the Post Office, but you don't see the Dems panicking about that. You ask one of them and they'll tell you, in a bland voice, "the Republicans have been trying to privatize the Post Office for a long time now." Yawn. No, not yawn. What happens when the sh*t gets real? Do all the Dems in Congress finally wake up?

And you also don't see the Dems resisting in situations where they obviously could -- but instead back in January you read headlines such as this one: Democrats just handed Trump more domestic surveillance powers. They should know better. They could also balk at passing Trump's defense budgets, but they haven't done that either. They don't seem terribly worried about any of the stuff described in this article either. And there's more they could do -- they could investigate Trump's personnel actions.

To be honest, the Democrats in power don't seem terribly afraid of a second Trump term. It's these offhand whispers that you read on Facebook and elsewhere from Biden supporters: "Omigod if Trump won we might not have a democracy anymore!" The people suggesting that stuff are afraid. As I suggested above, such utterances are weaponized to deter us from saying we won't vote for Joe Biden.

Here's a little historical aside. You know, a bit more than a month after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January of 1933, there were elections in Germany. Here's the researched narrative you can read on Wikipedia:

Federal elections were held in Germany on 5 March 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January and just six days after the Reichstag fire. Nazi stormtroopers had unleashed a widespread campaign of violence against the Communist Party (KPD), left-wingers,[1]:317 trade unionists, the Social Democratic Party of Germany,[1] and the Centre Party.[1]:322 They were the last multi-party elections in a unified Germany until 1990.

After this election we are told:

Two weeks after the election, Hitler was able to pass an Enabling Act on 23 March with the support of all non-socialist parties, which effectively gave Hitler dictatorial powers. Within months, the Nazis banned all other parties and turned the Reichstag into a rubberstamp legislature comprising only Nazis and pro-Nazi guests.

If the Trump-as-dictator narrative is true, we can expect to see a similar pattern here in the US to that of Germany in early 1933. Disaster reigns in America, there's an election, and Donald Trump is granted dictatorial powers afterward. If this were to happen, would we be able to do anything about it?

In the alternative press, you can read from the keyboard of Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wassernan, and Joel Segal, basically from the Columbus (Ohio) Free Press, this gem of a headline:

Trump’s “Perfect Plan” to Become Dictator in November Runs Through 12-18 Swing State Legislatures

The GOP plan, apparently, is about removing people from voter rolls, destroying the USPS, reducing the number of polling stations available, and rigging elections. All of these activities are in fact occurring in this election cycle. The authors also warn:

As with Al Gore in Florida 2000, John Kerry in Ohio 2004 and Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin-Michigan-Pennsylvania 2018, we can expect the Democratic Party to say and do little that’s effective about any of this.

Could it be more blatant? Are the Dems trying to prevent Trump-as-dictator? No, they're not. So we're supposed to do it. The authors ask at the end:

If Biden is the 2020 nominee, it’s likely he’ll win a legitimate popular majority, watch the Electoral vote stolen in the states with GOP legislatures, do and say nothing about it, give everyone a big smile and quietly concede. Trump will then be dictator…for life.

So what are you going to do about it?

So what are we going to do about it? There's nothing we can do about it. It's not as if the Dems we elected to Congress put up any meaningful resistance to all of these Republican tactics.

So this is what we tell them when they try to weaponize all of their fears about Trump against us: "you're attributing powers to us we don't have." As for them asking us if we'll be voting for Biden, we tell them that we have secret-ballot elections in America for a reason.