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The four pillars of fascism that Finchelstein identifies in his book are xenophobia, propaganda [DISINFO] , political violence, and dictatorship.

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We crushed fascists before — and it's time to do it again

Benito Mussolini in 1942 (Creative Commons)

Thom Hartmann March 05, 2025

Last night, we were treated to a litany of grievance, political bulls---, and lies. Of particular note was Trump’s declaration of war against the government of the United States, particularly Social Security, which I’ll discuss at more length tomorrow.

But the larger issue, given the GOP’s adoption of neofascism, is how far Trump and his Republican enablers have dragged America from the form of government on which America was founded.

On my radio program last Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders said that the older he gets the more he “appreciates the genius of the Founders,” who wrote into the Constitution the separation of powers that have held our country together for almost 250 years and guaranteed that no king has ever emerged in our America.

Until now.

Republicans are going out of their way to overlook Federalist 47, published by James Madison on February 1, 1788. Titled, ”The Particular Structure of the New Government and the Distribution of Power Among Its Different Parts,” Madison wrote about how important it was that the different branches of government serve as checks and balances on each other:

“No political truth is of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty,” wrote Madison of his concern that any one particular group might dominate all three branches of government.

He added, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

A paragraph later, Madison quotes the Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu, inserting his own capital letters for emphasis:

“‘When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or body,’ says he [Montesquieu], ‘there can be no liberty, because apprehensions may arise lest THE SAME monarch or senate should ENACT tyrannical laws to EXECUTE them in a tyrannical manner.’”

In Federalist 48, Madison quotes from Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia”:

“All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body,” wrote Jefferson in this commentary quoted by his protégé, Madison, in Federalist 48. “The concentrating of these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government.

“It will be no alleviation, that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.”

Jefferson added in his Notes:

“An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one ... in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.

“For this reason, that Convention which passed the ordinance of government [the Constitution], laid its foundation on this basis, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments should be separate and distinct, so that no person should exercise the powers of more than one of them at the same time.’’

Which makes perfect sense, unless, of course, you are a Republican sponsored by the richest men in the world whose thirst for wealth and power seems to have no limits.

We’ve danced around the edge of this before, although the last time we actually defeated the American fascists.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “[W]rite a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions — perhaps prescient of a rightwing billionaire buying and twisting fascistic the world’s largest social media site — was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. …

“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word “fascist” — the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is:

“A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled “The Doctrine of Fascism” he wrote, “If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.” But not the government of, by, and for We The People America’s Founders envisioned: instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the richest and most powerful men in the nation and the corporations they own.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the “Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni” — the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Donald Trump and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:

“If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.”

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace’s view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels and billionaires.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous,” he added in the next paragraph, “until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information...”

Noting that, “Fascism is a worldwide disease,” Wallace further suggest that fascism’s “greatest threat to the United States will come after the war” and will manifest “within the United States itself.”

In Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talkshow host. The politician — Buzz Windrip — runs his campaign on “family values,” the flag, and “patriotism.” Windrip and the talkshow host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American.

When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new “patriotic” laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.

As Lewis noted in his novel:

“[T]he President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: ‘There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don’t belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!’ The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy.” And, President “Windrip’s partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the ‘Corpos,’ which nickname was generally used.”

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book “It Can’t Happen Here.” And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler.

These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace’s thinking when he wrote:

“Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.

“American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after ‘the present unpleasantness’ ceases.”

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic, but to achieve complete domination of an economy they must first seize complete political control of the nation. Fascism/corporatism is really an attempt to create a modern version of feudalism by merging billionaire and corporate interests with those of the state.

And feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy; it can be roughly defined as “rule by the rich.”

Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who noted in his book What’s The Matter With Kansas that, “You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America — ‘going out of business’ signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.”

The businesses “going out of business” are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally-owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business “are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage.” He added:

“Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”

But American fascists who would want CEOs like Trump and Vance as President and Vice President don’t generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and Jews, they point to a “them” to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.

In a comment prescient of Donald Trump’s recent suggestion that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of America” or Vance’s lie about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, Wallace continued:

“The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.

“It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination...”

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation’s largest corporations — who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media — they could promote their lies with ease.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.”

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.

“Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Finally, Wallace said, speaking as if directly to Musk’s claim that he’s merely increasing the “efficiency” of the federal government by gutting it:

“The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit.

“We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.”

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of “Trust Buster” Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace’s President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party’s renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:

“[O]ut of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man....”

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

But, he thundered in that speech:

“Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

Today, we again stand at the crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself “MAGA.” The Trump administration’s behavior today eerily parallels the warning of 1936 when Roosevelt said:

“In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.”

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace’s warnings have come full circle. Which is why it’s so critical that we all stand up and speak out to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.

NOW READ: Russia could win a war against America without ever firing a shot — here's how

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Under siege: How fascism quietly seizes control

'Knock-down, drag-out fight': GOP senators sharply divided over VanceThom HartmannNovember 19, 2024

President Biden told the nation, “American democracy is under attack … [by the] former president of the United States…”

I wrote about this years ago when Trump was trying to overthrow our government, and it’s time to talk again about what an American authoritarian government would look like. Because over the next two months we may — depending on how Americans react to the changes in our form of government Trump has planned — very rapidly slide into a form of fascism much like the old Confederacy in the 1840-1860 era.

Like the old Confederacy, it could feature political violence and threats of violence, rigged elections, and single-party rule combined with a corrupt oligarchy that finances the politicians.

And, like the old Confederacy, it could try to destroy the historic democracy of the United States of America, only this time in 2025 and the three following years.

The word “fascism” gets thrown around a lot, but most Americans have no idea what it would look like or how it would actually play out.

ALSO READ: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military — and then he's coming for us

It’s critical to lay out what a fascist America would look like now, because this is what’s being envisioned right now by many in the Republican Party, and it might come to pass in the course of the next year or two.

Republicans don’t talk about it out loud very much, unlike Nixon’s man G. Gordon Liddy, who used to embrace fascism back in the day when he signed memos using Hitler’s SS symbol. But there is a model here and MAGA Republicans do have something in mind.

What could it be? What would it look like? How will it most likely come about?

First, and essential to American fascism, Republicans envision a strong-man Dear Leader who will hold power for as long as he (it’s almost always a “he”) chooses, with the transition to the next Dear Leader determined by The Dear Leader himself.

This has been the primary characteristic of every fascistic government to emerge in the 7000-year written history of the modern world.

When Trump was running for re-election in 2020, at rallies in both Nevada and Wisconsin, he came right out and said that not only would he win that election but that he’d also be re-elected again in 2024 and 2028. He was dead serious, and brought up running again in 2028 just this week.

Sure, our constitution says a president can only serve two terms: so did the Russian constitution, until Putin got it amended. Trump is apparently planning the same, and his followers are — if the response at the rallies when he “joked” about it is any indicator — ecstatic at the prospect.

That single strongman Leader, and his hand-selected toadies at every secondary or tertiary level of government, is the key to understanding everything else that happens when a country flips from democracy to oligarchy and then to fascism.

For example, in a fascist state the way that you as an average citizen ensure your own advancement and economic, personal, and political security is by sucking up to that one man (albeit often through one of his factotums). You either become an acolyte/follower or you find yourself on the outside looking in.

If you think this sounds extreme, just look at today’s GOP, which has become the prototype for how these MAGA Republicans will reinvent the United States now that they’ve gained power.

Liz Cheney spoke against Trump, and the Wyoming GOP expelled her and Trump supported a primary challenger. Five Republicans who voted to impeach Trump faced such a backlash that they decided to retire at the end of their terms: Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Gonzalez, John Katko, Mitt Romney, and Fred Upton.

Republican freshman Congressman Chris Jacobs, representing a district including parts of Buffalo, NY, was forced to withdraw from 2022’s primary (and, thus, he retired from the House) because after the Buffalo massacre he spoke against Trump’s and his party’s embrace of assault weapons.

Not only is fealty to Dear Leader required for political advancement in a fascist state, it’s also a requirement for individual economic advancement. Employers eager for state contracts or Dear Leader’s endorsements of their products or services demote or fire those insufficiently loyal to him.

Psychologist Dr. Bandy Lee was fired from Yale University for tweeting that Trump was mentally ill. Schoolteacher Leah Kinyon was fired from her job for saying that “I hate Donald Trump. … He is a sexual predator. He’s a literal moron.” Juli Brisker was fired from her job with government contractor Akima for giving Trump’s motorcade the finger.

Rebekah Jones was fired by Ron DeSantis for telling the truth about his covering up Florida Covid statistics. Florida’s Orange County Health Director Dr. Raul Pino was removed for encouraging his staff to get vaccinated.

When companies defy Dear Leader they are brutally punished, as DeSantis did to Disney and the Tampa Bay Rays. Soon companies don’t even try to stand up to The Leader, including media companies. The Washington Post and the LA Times both, for example, decided this year to simply “obey in advance.”

This past weekend, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Largo to kiss Trump’s royal ass, probably at the insistence of network executives since Trump has threatened the very existence of MSNBC.

Trump than ran to Fox “News” to ridicule the pair, saying they, “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books’” and that “it’s too bad that it [Joe & Mika’s ass-kissing] wasn’t done long ago.” He added: “I expect this will take place with others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile.”

In that, he’s certainly right. Expect more media stars and network executives to do in-person or online versions of the same, just as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg already have. And expect guests and hosts on MSNBC, CNN, etc. to stop using the “fascism” word to describe Trump, his actions, and his people.

They think it’ll mollify Trump; instead it’ll empower him to become even more brutal, just as we saw in Florida when DeSantis signed legislation giving him the authority to “hold accountable” college professors, reviewing their politics every five years so those who aren’t totally on board with his agenda can lose tenure and be fired. The headline at Salon says it all:

“DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state: Universities may lose funding if staff and students’ beliefs do not satisfy Florida’s GOP-run legislature.”

You end up doing things on Dear Leader’s behalf, whether you’re an elected official in his party, working at a private corporation, or engaged in the nonprofit sector like teaching at a university or medical center.

Defying or challenging Dear Leader brings opprobrium; supporting Dear Leader is the path to career advancement. The first Trump White House and DeSantis Governor’s Office are filled with examples.

Everything is done for Dear Leader because Dear Leader is the state. The state and Dear Leader have become one.

If you challenge Dear Leader, you’re challenging the state, and that’s treason.As Marjorie Taylor Greene said of speaker Pelosi:

“She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law, representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government — and it’s a crime punishable by death”.

Similarly, Trump now openly proclaims that he intends to use the power of the state against Jack Smith and others who tried to hold him to account for the crimes he has committed.

Whatever Dear Leader says becomes the law. This is called “rule by decree” and it’s where every fascist in history has ended up.

The power to rule by decree goes back to the days of kings and is also embedded in our laws about the president’s emergency powers. Trump came close to invoking it with an “emergency declaration” when he lost the election. General Flynn begged him to do it and “temporarily suspend the Constitution.”

Next year he won’t be so restrained and he will have surrounded himself in advance with people like Flynn who will make it happen.

Yet, while it will change how power is distributed in our government, things will still look much the same to average people.

As a fascistic Trump rises to power again in the United States, there will still be all the trappings of democracy.

The House and Senate, state houses and governors, bureaucracies and political systems will remain intact. Everything looks normal on the surface.

But when you peel off the top layer, you discover that all of those people in all of those offices, whether elected or bureaucratic, are serving only one principle and one person and that is Dear Leader.

Be they governors, secretaries of state, United States senators, members of the US House, state representatives, or even a part-time guy working at a polling place in Michigan, they might get a call at any time from Dear Leader demanding that they do something for him, whether it’s legal or not.

There will still be opposition parties and political candidacies in a Republican fascist America, although if any of them seriously challenges Dear Leader or shows the ability to disrupt the status quo, they’ll be discovered to have a secret drug problem or porn habit, or get imprisoned for corruption, tax evasion, or other made-up charges.

Nobody will really notice, though. People will just shrug their shoulders and assume another crook got caught. The swamp is being cleaned up. Just look at Hunter Biden facing years in prison for checking a box on a gun purchase form that an estimated 20 million other Americans checked, and paying his taxes late like other millions of Americans. Selective prosecutions become the norm.

The prosperity of the company you work for depends in part on how well it supports the politics of Dear Leader.

Dear Leader helps a few dozen oligarchs he knows are loyal to him seize control of the nation’s major industries, and every smaller company in each of those industries must directly or indirectly answer to that oligarch.

Those who fail to are bought out, shut down, or simply cannot find customers or supplies because nobody will do business with them.

The industry where this is most visible at first is the media.

Some media organizations will be absorbed by the government itself, as Putin has done in Russia; others will be bought out and run by the Leader’s oligarch buddies, as is the case today in Hungary and Turkey (among others).

Soon opposition voices vanish from all but the most obscure media, and those few opposing voices that are tolerated are pointed to by Dear Leader as proof the nation is still an open democracy.

Jews and people of color may find a rougher time maintaining a job or staying safe from vigilantes, abuse, and discrimination but most whites will be just fine, particularly white men. The majority of Americans, so long as they pay attention to football instead of politics, will tell you nothing much has changed.

There will still be Christmas parties, although people celebrating Hanukkah or Muslims praying may want to pull the shades closed.

Hate crimes and murders by vigilante groups will start happening with such frequency that the media doesn’t bother to report them anymore.

Within a few years a little bit of every business activity in the country ends up in Dear Leader’s pocket. And Dear Leader uses that revenue to enrich himself, his inner circle, and those who are part of his military entourage, his private military.

That’s right: Dear Leader’s private military.

It’d be put together like what Ron DeSantis organized in Florida, a state-sanctioned militia that answers only to Dear Leader, in this case DeSantis. Trump tried the same, flying 700+ Customs and Border Protection and other federal officers into Portland in 2020 where they hit the streets without identification on their uniforms to beat and kidnap people protesting George Floyd’s murder.

When the private militia is created at the federal level it’ll become a substantial national military force with hundreds of thousands of soldiers under Dear Leader’s direct command. Hitler’s was called the SS and answered only to The Fürher himself. Mussolini had his, as do Putin, Erdoğan, el-Sisi, bin Salman, and others today.

Citing “national security” and the need to “deport criminal immigrants,” Dear Leader’s private militia will have an undisclosed and therefore vast budget. Outside of times it’s called on to intimidate people or make a public display of power, it’ll largely operate in secret.

Its members won’t have to obey the law because, as agents of Dear Leader who’s above the law, they are, too. If they have to kill somebody, there will be no investigation unless it’s to cover up the crime. If they need to make somebody disappear, that person disappears. At first it’ll be done by stochastic terrorism: lone wolf actors not directly connected to Dear Leader but answering his general call to punish political evildoers. As well as by Dear Leader’s private secret police.

Just ask Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence, who both narrowly escaped being murdered on January 6th.

Dear Leader’s oligarch buddies and their media machine, along with his well-indoctrinated followers, promote a law-and-order crime ideology that results in high levels of incarceration, heavily militarized police, and a disregard for the general rights of the average citizen, particularly racial and religious minorities.

This is how the kind of government Donald Trump promises he will establish in America has played out, over and over again, across the world and throughout history. If Trump can bring the Senate to heel with his outrageous Cabinet nominations, you’ll know it’s fully here, now.

In our own time we’ve seen it in Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Cuba, Hungary, the Philippines, Venezuela, and dozens of other countries around the world less well known for the democratic nature of the government.

It may call itself left-wing or right-wing, but what really matters is that all power and authority rests with Dear Leader. Stalin was every bit the fascist that Hitler and Mussolini were; his fascism just had a different face and brand.

As “future dystopian” as all this may sound, there are more governments in the world run this way today than there are democracies. It’s “normal.”

Once established it’s almost impossible to dislodge without a crisis like the death of Dear Leader or an actual revolution. Just ask any Russian. Or the women in Iran today.

Some of the governments around the world that are structured like this were democracies that turned fascist, like Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. But many have been this way for centuries, including the hereditary kingdoms in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

So, how do the democratic countries that make the transition to fascism allow that to happen? And what is life like in those countries, both during and after the time that it’s happened?

After World War II, a Chicago reporter named Milton Mayer struggled to understand how Hitler was able to flip one of the world’s most stable democracies into fascism.

An American Jew of German ancestry and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany seven years after Hitler’s fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

Mayer quotes one of his German friends as describing what happened once The Leader seized power:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”

Did the German people realize they’d abandoned democracy? That they would soon become international pariahs? The college professor Mayer interviewed answered:

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.

“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.

“And one day it is over his head.”

Is it possible this could happen in America? That all these “small steps” would one day lead to a dictatorial form of government that has so cowed the people, the politicians, and even the business community and media that it can’t be challenged?

Doesn’t the nation rise up and protest the destruction of its own democracy? Don’t the people pour into the streets?

Mayer’s professor gave us the answer:

“You see, one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

“You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? — Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”

We can’t say we weren’t warned by our own people, our own politicians, the most senior members of our own institutional power structure.

In a speech that was hysterically criticized by Republicans and Fox “News“ pundits, former President Obama came right out and said it:

“You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we’ve seen societies where that happens.”

Yes, the former President of the United States was invoked Nazi Germany seven years ago while Donald Trump was President, adding:

“Now, presumably, there was a ballroom in Vienna in the late 1920s or ’30s that looked and seemed as if it ― filled with the music and art and literature and the science that was emerging ― would continue into perpetuity.

“And then,” President Obama said, “60 million people died. And the entire world was plunged into chaos.”

The warnings have been there all along. I wrote of this in 2005, quoting Mayer and going off on Bush and the PATRIOT Act as the prequel to fascism.

Americans have been shouting about it lately, in venues like The New York Times and Madeline Albright’s book and from legislators like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And now the President of the United States makes a prime-time address to the nation, warning Americans that fascism is at our door. It gets only a passing mention in the news.

But, still, how do we know? Is there a sudden proclamation by The Leader that the nation is now “officially fascist”?

Back to Mayer’s German friend in 1954:

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

Next year and in 2026 many of us will no longer be able to know if our voices, our attempts to vote, will actually decide who leads our nation.

Many of us will show up at the polls in two years to discover we are no longer registered to vote. Many of our mail-in ballots will be “challenged” by Republican vote observers and we won’t learn about it until after the election is long over.

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that you can be purged from the voting rolls on a whim. In the majority of US states Republicans can take over electoral precincts, install their people (as we just learned they are doing right now) and run them under whatever rules they want.

Already in some states when the GOP inflicts 10-hour lines to vote on their people, for example, you go to jail if you bring them water. If you make a mistake on your voting registration or ballot, or help another person register to vote, they can send you to prison for five years or more.

Somehow, of the many people from both parties who are busted for this, it seems only the Democrats end up going to jail. Particularly Black Democrats.

And yet everything seems “normal.” As Mayer’s professor friend told him, when Dear Leader finally seizes control of all the levers of power from political to economic to spiritual, everything changes but everything also stays the same:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.

“Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

We’re already quite a ways down this road, which is why our democracy has been rated by numerous international groups as being “at risk” or similar designations.

Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the proliferation of phony media selling rightwing propaganda as “news,” armed militias on our streets (and the GOP recruiting them for “election monitors”), the media bending its collective knee to Trump, are the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?” Mayer’s friend asked rhetorically.

And, without the benefit of a previous and recent and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, Mayer had to candidly answer: “Frankly, I do not know.”

That was 1954; this is 2024. We now know.

We know how the poisonous hate that animates fascism seeps into a society because we saw it ourselves during the first 4 years of the Trump administration and throughout the past year’s campaign.

We’re watching it in Red states across the country as MAGA Republicans replace honorable Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

We know how easily a government can be toppled and how close we came on January 6, 2021: if just five Republicans had not refused to go along with Trump we would have been thrown into this fascist dystopia four years earlier.

We can’t pretend we don’t know what’s happening and where it will lead if it’s not stopped. And now that we do know, we can’t escape the moral obligation to resist with everything we have.

ALSO READ: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military — and then he's coming for us

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no lnx

alternet

America is at a crossroads

Thom Hartmann November 18, 2024

Oligarchy is a form of government where the richest people in a country have captured its political system (or even filled it with themselves) and use that control to direct much of the government’s efforts to increasing their own wealth and power.

We’ll soon again have a billionaire president — helped to power by the richest billionaire on the planet — with his election campaign funded in large part by at least $2 billion in direct, reported donations from roughly 150 billionaire families.

It appears that the other roughly 350 billionaires who openly funded Trump in 2020 chose, this time, to instead donate to “dark money” SuperPACs created by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court with Citizens United that don’t list their donors or, in many cases, even report their expenditures. With an estimated $15 billion spent on this 2024 election, their expenditures probably dwarf the ones we know about (and collectively they carpet-bombed Americans in often-deceptive political advertising).

And none of that covers the additional billions in “free media” Trump got from FOX “News,” rightwing hate radio, and Musk apparently altering the Xitter algorithm to favor messages friendly to himself and/or Trump while suppressing anti-Trump or pro-Harris posts.

This is extraordinarily bad for average Americans: With billionaires calling the shots in the upcoming Trump administration we can expect more pollution, fewer consumer protections, a war on unions, a frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage, bigger subsidies and grants to billionaires’ companies (from the fossil fuel industry to defense and SpaceX), lower taxes on the morbidly rich, and cuts to social services and entitlement programs.

But far more concerning is the simple reality that oligarchies are merely transitional forms of government, as I mentioned on Ali Velshi’s show Sunday morning and wrote in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Ever since Ronald Reagan embraced neoliberalism (free trade, gut unions, low taxes on the morbidly rich) the top .01% have pillaged the American working class, essentially stealing over $50 trillion over the past 43 years and using that money to buy megayachts, penis-shaped rockets, European chateaus, private jets, and to fill their money bins.

So far, Republicans have been able to largely distract Americans from this naked theft by tossing out red herrings; blaming the ills of America on immigrants, big-city Black people, teachers, and the queer community. But there’s a limit to how long you can gaslight people; eventually working-class Americans figure out what’s going on and who’s behind their falling behind previous generations.

When that happens, oligarchies begin to tremble, something that’s been gradually happening for several decades. People protest, what’s left of union movements stand up, and progressive political parties begin to get a significant toehold on the national debate. The success of Bernie Sanders in his presidential efforts is an example of the leading edge of this dissatisfaction and dawning realization by average citizens of an early indicator that we were approaching this cusp.

Once protest against the oligarchs buying politicians and manipulating government reaches a critical mass, the oligarchy is faced with a terrible but necessary choice.

They can allow democracy to proceed and end up being voted out of power (as happened in Brazil when Bolsonaro was thrown out), sometimes even facing jail themselves (as happened here in 2020, although Merrick Garland dragged his feet for two long years).

Or the kleptocratic government can clamp down on their opposition, labeling protestors and democracy-advocating politicians as terrorists and “the enemy within,” using the power of the state (guns and jails) to suppress popular pro-democracy movements.

This latter path was the one Vladimir Putin chose as Russia moved from democracy to oligarchy and then to outright dictatorship. Speak up and go directly to jail, if you’re not killed outright like Alexi Navalny was. It’s also the path Viktor Orbán, the man many Republicans claim is their role model, has taken in Hungary.

And, if the rhetoric coming from Trump and his acolytes is translated into action starting in January, that is the path America will soon take.

Numerous Americans have been warning about this ever since Trump’s first term in office (and some, including me, for decades before).

Reagan began the destruction of the middle class (which has gone from two-thirds of us in 1981 when he came into office to 43% of us having that wealth today), Bush and Cheney used 9/11 to expand presidential authority, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court granted king-like powers to Trump, and now the wannabee Mussolini is echoing traditional fascist rhetoric about women, minorities, the press, and his political opposition.

Soon, millions of Americans will be confronted with a choice. Will they, like “good Germans,” Russians, Chinese, and Hungarians did, abandon politics and go back to sports, music, and keeping their heads down? Or will they — like millions in Brazil, Chile, and Ukraine — stand up, protest, join the Democratic Party (while it’s still legal) and form a real resistance to an oligarchy that appears bent on morphing itself into America’s first raw tyranny?

In particular, it appears we’re approaching a time when Democratic state governors will need our support in their efforts to resist Trump’s fascist impulses. And, as our mainstream media continues to act like Trump is merely business-as-usual, help sustain independent media that engages in radical truth telling (there are many on Substack: check out my recommendations).

And it’s not too late for America to return to democracy; the next election of great import will be in two years and we all need to prepare.

Those who have faced the violence of state oppression have told us about the importance of times like this.

Elie Wiesel said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented,” and Martin Luther King Jr. told us, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

We still have the power to make the choice to resist, awaken others, and organize. Seize it, before it’s gone.

no lnx

alternet

Trump's Cabinet of horrors exposes his totalitarian drift

President Donald Trump and former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard embrace, joined by Tucker Carlson on stage at a campaign event sponsored by conservative group Turning Point USA, in Duluth, Georgia, U.S., October 23, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Donald Trump nominated an alleged rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general. He picked a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence. He chose a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense. And for secretary of health and human resources, he selected an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who once had a literal brain worm, and who habitually takes (“legal”) steroids to maintain, at the age of 70, the appearance of a physique of a man half his age.

There are the obvious things to say about this motley crew. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr are not qualified, respectively, to lead the agencies they have been chosen to lead. None has managed anything larger than an office. None has the expertise required. Gaetz has never worked in law enforcement, Gabbard in intelligence, Hegseth in military leadership or Kennedy in public health. Their only qualification is their loyalty to the man who picked them, and how they look to him when they are on television.

Right now, the discussion seems to be concentrated on the Senate Republicans, who will have majority control of that chamber in January. They will be responsible ultimately for vetting Trump’s cabinet picks. The question is whether they will find the courage to restrain the president-elect or roll over, either by approving them or by letting Trump have what he wants through recess appointments.

Among liberals, the discussion seems to be limited to the absurdities each of these people brings to governance as well as the dangers they pose. “Yes, shake your head at the seeming absurdity of these picks,” wrote MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “But don’t stop there. These choices aren’t just controversial; they require us to stay vigilant about how each potential new Cabinet member could negatively affect our lives.”

But I think we’re missing the bigger picture. These nominations signal the totalitarian drift that’s coming to Washington and the country. Yes, that’s right. No, I’m not exaggerating. It’s time to start using that word.

Totalitarianism seeks dominion over the individual to the point where individuality is erased. That’s what happened to the Republican Party. Individuals have looked the same, talked the same, acted the same and thought the same for a long time. (The men sometimes literally dress the same as Donald Trump, with a blue suit, a long red tie.) After the election, however, Republican behavior has finally been totalized.

As one GOP congressman said, Trump “is the leader of our party. … His goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads.”

The objective is forcing the rest of America to conform the way the Republican Party has conformed. This can be seen in the anger expressed by some magas. It wasn’t enough to win. Losers must now shut up and get in line, too. As a Trump attorney said recently: “You’ve got to own when you lose and say: this is America. We have to stand behind President Trump.” Senate Republicans are likely to approve his picks, no matter how bad, because the losers must be taught a lesson.

Totalitarianism also seeks to dominate the individual’s mind by going to war against facts, reason, science and any useful meaning of the word “proof.” In normal times, pre-Trump, we could expect in the Senate a spirited debate over a president-elect’s cabinet nominations, beginning with whether they’re qualified. Such debate is going to be impossible now, because “being qualified” is a meaningless term.

It is a stone-cold fact that Kennedy’s views on vaccines are not only insane, but in direct opposition to the moral principles of public health. But that fact won’t be accepted as fact. It will be taken as evidence of Trump’s enemies trying to sabotage his presidency. And there’s no way to break through this conspiracist mindset, as Lindsay Beyerstein calls it. It is impervious, she said. “When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that’s what conspirators to kill our children would say.”

Because there’s no empirical anchor to conspiratorial thinking, totalitarians can make reality into whatever they want. Up is down, left is right – or in the words of the totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Therefore, the Republicans are likely to see nothing wrong with his picks. His nominee for the law is anti-law. His nominee for national intelligence is anti-intelligence. His nominee for national defense is anti-defense. His nominee for science is anti-science. But there’s no dissonance in the world of conspiratorial thinking. Up is the new down, and the only measure of morality is whether it pleases the dear leader.

The drift toward conformity and away from individualism isn’t limited to the GOP. Thanks to the rightwing media apparatus, which is global in scale, totalizing groupthink has also been growing in the culture at large. The trick is that it comes disguised as subversive individualism.

During his interview with Trump, popular podcaster Joe Rogan said “the rebels are Republicans now. They’re like, you want to be a rebel? You want to be punk rock? You want to, like, buck the system? You’re a conservative now. That's how crazy. And then the liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They’re pro-censorship online. They’re talking about regulating free speech and regulating the First Amendment.”

If you are listening to liberals directly, you know there are no such efforts. But if you are listening the rightwing media apparatus, or if you just feel the conspiratorial ambiance that it generates, it’s possible to cast yourself as a man who’s bucking the system, as if the party of billionaires is the party of the common man, as if people who look the same, talk the same, act the same and think the same are punk rock.

But the strongest evidence of totalitarian drift is the plain awfulness of Trump’s cabinet picks. They have not earned the right to be called on. They haven’t studied or mastered their disciplines. They haven’t built reputations among leaders, peers and professionals in their fields. They haven’t overcome adversity and hardship. They haven’t reached high and achieved. They certainly haven’t followed the road toward the American dream, which asks us to work hard and play by the rules.

And that’s the point. Totalitarians fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level.

With this cabinet, Trump can pick up where his second campaign left off, which is movement toward “the consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity …” as Hannah Arendt once wrote.

“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics).

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AN 11 24

“The press freedom fire is at our door step now," saidone Washington Post journalist on Thursday night after news broke that two months before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office, he has already begun to wage legal warfare against on the news media.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)reported that days before the election, a lawyer for Trump, Edward Andrew Paltzik, sent a letter toThe New York Times and Penguin Random House demanding $10 billion in damages for publishing articles and a book that were critical of the president-elect, who was convicted of 34 felony counts earlier this year.

Trump's legal team took issue with a book by Times journalists Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner titled Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. They also said they were demanding damages over "false and defamatory statements" in the October 20 article "For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment" by Peter Baker and the October 22 piece "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator"by Michael Schmidt.

The former article covered numerous wrongdoings by the president-elect and accusations against him, pointing out that he "is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges, and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact)," and that he has also boasted about sexually assaulting women and spearheaded numerous businesses that went bankrupt.

The latter article detailed comments by Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, who told the Times that the definition of fascism accurately describes Trump.

The president-elect himself said while campaigning that he planned to govern as a dictatoronly on "Day One"of his term in office.

"Governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries."

Paltzik told the newspaper that the articles demonstrate the Times' "intention of defaming and disparaging the world-renowned Trump brand that consumers have long associated with excellence, luxury, and success in entertainment, hospitality, and real estate, among many other industries, as well as falsely and maliciously defaming and disparaging him as a candidate for the highest office in the United States."

TheCJR reported that theTimes responded to Paltzik's letter, telling him the newspaper stood by its reporting on Trump.

As Barry Malone, deputy editor-in-chief of the Thomson Reuters Foundation,saidon social media on Friday, Trump's legal threats may be designed not to actually win billions of dollars in damages but "to tie the media up with time-consuming and often prohibitively expensive cases."

The Timesand Penguin Random House threats were reported two weeks after Trump suedCBS News for another $10 billion, claiming an interview with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the November 5 election, was unfairly edited to present her in a positive light and qualified as "election interference."

CBS said it would "vigorously defend" its journalistic practices and called the lawsuit "completely without merit"—a similar response to the one by The Washington Post, which was accused by Trump on the same day of making an illegal in-kind donation to Harris.

Anne Champion, an attorney who has represented several journalists and CNN in legal cases initiated by Trump, told the CJR that the legal threats will likely have "a mental chilling effect" on reporters and news outlets in the United States as Trump prepares to take office.

"It is both conscious and unconscious," said Champion. "Journalists at smaller outlets know very well that the costs for their organization to defend themselves could mean bankruptcy. Even journalists at larger outlets don't want to burden themselves or their employees with lawsuits. It puts another layer of influence into the journalistic process."

Trump has a longstanding disdain for the media, saying numerous times during his first term that journalists were the "enemy of the people." During one campaign rally just before the election he said he wouldn't "mind" if reporters at the event were shot, and he called the media the "enemy camp" during his victory speech last week.

During his first term he also threatened to "take a strong look at our country's libel laws"—which are actually controlled by states, not the federal government—and ensure that "when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts."

The American Civil Liberties Unionpointed outat the time that the First Amendment and the lack of federal libel laws would stand in Trump's way, but on Thursday Lachlan Cartwright wrote atCJR that "the drumbeat of legal threats signals a potentially ominous trend for journalists during Trump's second term in office."

AsWashington Post columnist Karen Attiah noted on the social media platform Bluesky, "governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries."

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see fascism bypass senate, gaetz weaponize doj

reich an 11 24

trump is giving his middle finger to America.

Nominating the alleged sexual trafficker Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General, Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense, and bizarro Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence are acts of nihilistic disruption.

Now, nominating conspiracist and fabulist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the nation’s leading health job — overseeing the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health, among other sensitive positions — is an act of utter hubris.

At a time when the truth is a precious common good, and the public’s health is already precarious, RFK Junior has made a name for himself spreading dangerous health lies.

He claimed that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” And that “the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”

He has promoted the baseless claim linking vaccines to autism. He’s been a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, erroneously suggesting the vaccine has killed more people than it has saved.

In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he alleged, without plausible evidence, that Dr. Fauci performed “genocidal experiments, sabotaged treatments for AIDS, and conspired with Bill Gates to suppress information about COVID-19.”

All nonsense.

Friends, I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy Junior is no Robert F. Kennedy. If not for his lustrous name, RFK Junior would be just another crackpot in the ever-growing pool of bottom-feeding fringe characters encircling Trump like ravenous slugs.

So why nominate this collection of bozos?

If Trump wants to smoke out the Senate Republicans who aren’t fully behind him, he has easier ways of doing so than putting an entire Star Wars cantina of idiots up for Senate confirmation.

I can see why Trump might want total loyalists in key positions that would enable him to turn America into a police state — more on this tomorrow — but why nominate a nut job to run America’s health system?

What possible point is there to subjecting Americans to poisonous food or drugs? Why undermine the Centers for Disease Control when Americans and their children need the protections vaccines provide?

Or is all this just another manifestation of Trump becoming deranged?

If Americans suffer buyer’s remorse for electing him, the next time we’ll have a chance to do anything about it will be the midterm elections of November 2026. But how much damage can Trump and his cantina do between next January and then?

NOW READ:Trump finds a new lawman is who even more lawless than he is

*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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11 24 an dr earl b

...Don’t breathe the noxious gas that there is a Republican mandate right now. Battleground States flipped. It happens. Here in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris actually got more votes than Joe Biden did on 2020. We worked our asses off up here and simply got beat in large part by the massive rightwing propaganda machine that I warned about above. Wisconsin is 90 percent white and under conventional wisdom should be a bright-red state. It’s not, because we have leaders and ideas that resonate with everybody. In fact … the best thing we can hope for is that Republicans read this election as a mandate, because as you know most of their odious plans will sting their voters at least as much as everybody else. Let them get out over their skies as far as possible, and then watch them crash.

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an 2 22 bill blum

...The political scientist Robert Paxton, one of the world’s leading authorities on fascism, has identified five stages of fascism:

  1. The initial creation of movements;
  1. The rooting of the movements in a political system;
  1. The acquisition of power;
  1. The exercise of power; and
  1. Radicalization or entropy, the stage at which movements reach their most extreme heights, or exhaust themselves and fizzle.

We are well beyond the first two phases. We flirted with the third and fourth during Trump’s first term, but our democratic institutions—weak and tattered as they are—were able to resist.

The election of Joe Biden offered only a temporary reprieve. Now, with Biden’s coalition fraying, the GOP and Trump have another opportunity to impose their will and vision, and deal a death blow to what remains of our diminished democracy.

As I have written before, fascism is a loaded term, but if used correctly, it aptly applies to Trumpism.

In his seminal study, “The Anatomy of Fascism” (Harvard University Press, 2004), Paxton offers an instructive definition:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great Italian writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism:

As the current situation demonstrates, fascism is by no means a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22, 2020 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s,the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Trump in 2016.

Churchwell’s article is aptly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.” In it, she offers another working definition of fascism, noting that while fascist movements differ from nation to nation, they are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:

...

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11 7 24 thom

Donald Trump is preparing to crash the American economy. He intends to do it by tearing up vital parts of our American government. He may even hire Elon Musk to pull it off. And from his point of view, this is not going to be a bad thing. The farther the economy crashes, the greater the buying opportunity for billionaires. It all has to do with something called the administrative state.

While it’s not sexy or even particularly interesting to the average American voter, having a strong administrative state is essential to a high-functioning economy. A strong administrative state is the only thing that protects entrepreneurs and small businesses from being squashed like bugs by monopolistic behemoths, and small businesses are our nation’s main growth engine. }:

:{ :{For example, over 70 percent of all new jobs created since 2019 were created by small businesses, producing almost 13 million new jobs over the past 25 years. Small business creation is up 50 percent over Trump’s years because the Biden administration has been enforcing the rule of law, including taking on the giant tech monopolies. Small businesses now account for over 43 percent of all American economic activity.}:

A strong administrative state is also the only thing that can protect the environment from those who’d destroy it for their own profits. It’s the only thing that can protect consumers from defective or even deadly products and food or drug contamination. It our only defense against predatory banks, airlines, and insurance companies, among others. A strong administrative state that follows and enforces the rule of law — as opposed to the kind of grift-driven kleptocracies typical of strongman governments — is essential, in other words, to a functioning national economy.}:

Here in America, we see this best in the contrast between lightly bureaucratic and largely unregulated Red states and more bureaucratic and regulated (and taxed) Blue states and counties. While Red and Blue states are represented in Congress about 50/50, as the Brookings Institution found a few years ago: > “Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29% of the economy.”

But now the administrative state is in the crosshairs of the incoming Trump administration, and their planned assault on it will almost certainly cause a loss of economic vitality, probably even leading to a major recession (every*Republican president since Nixon has had a major recession after tinkering with tax and regulatory policies;none*of the Democratic presidents have created one since Carter, and his started under Nixon). We also see this at the level of the nation-state. As Professor Timothy Snydernotes: > “Now consider the Russian and Hungarian economies. Russia sits on hugely valuable natural resources, and yet is a poor country. The profits from its oil and gas are in the hands of a few oligarchs. > >

“Hungary sits in the middle of the European Union, the most successful trade project of all time. And yet Hungarians are poorer than their neighbors, in part because the Orbán regime corruptly channels EU resources to friendly oligarchs. > > “The lesson is clear. Democracy is a method of checking corrupt rulers. When there is no functioning democracy, corruption is unchecked. And democracy is an element of a more fundamental guarantor of prosperity, the rule of law. In Hungary and Russia, the rule of law has been bent and broken, to the benefit of the few, and to the detriment of the many. Ending the rule of law is the Trump-Vance platform.”

Gutting the administrative state is the first and imperative aspect of ending or weakening the rule of law. Because, as Steve Bannon famously told America, the main goal of the Trump administration is “the ‘deconstruction’ of the administrative state.” He added: > “Every business leader we’ve had in is saying not just taxes, but it is also the regulation. I think the consistent …[thing] is the deconstruction. The way the progressive left runs is, if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.”

We saw this movie before, during the last Trump administration. He put a coal lobbyist in charge of EPA, an oil lobbyist at Interior, a Telcom lobbyist and lawyer at FCC, a professional union-busting lawyer in charge of the Labor Department, an advocate for replacing public schools with religious ones in charge of the Education Department, etc., etc. But that was more mere corruption than a wholesale destruction of administrative agencies. Since the Chevron deference decision by the Supreme Court this past year, though, it’s now possible that Trump could actually destroy the American administrative state.

Even whenChevronwas still intact eight years ago, the result of Trump’s corruption in his previous administration, just like with Reagan’s and Bush’s deregulatory campaigns, was a massive recession that started*before*Covidcame along. Trump will fire Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission, blowing up the antitrust efforts of the Biden administration; the fat cat billionaires already are eagerly anticipating running amok (which is why they threw billions at Trump’s campaign). The result, predictably, will be another Republican economic disaster for America’s working class.

Interestingly, our country’s most famous investor also seems to be thinking along these same lines. Warren Buffett has recently sold over $325 billion in stock and is simply sitting on that huge pile of cash. Why? Probably the Oracle of Omaha can see the same thing I’m pointing out here: Trump is preparing to turn the economy over to Musk and his billionaire buddies and the result will be a disaster.

A disaster, by the way, that will be very useful to Buffett and other billionaires; recessions and depressions are when America’s largest fortunes are typically made or expanded because they represent great buying opportunities to those with cash, while at the same time the small companies being squeezed are willing to sell for a song.

:{:{ So get ready; we’re in for a bumpy few years as America descends into a strongman-run oligarchy while the Supreme Court and Trump’s toadies rip apart the protections of the administrative state we’ve so carefully constructed in the years since the Civil War and the Republican Great Depression. It may well be a disaster for your 401(k), and millions will lose their jobs in a recession. If Musk cuts $2 trillion from the federal budget, as promised, it will almost certainly impact Social Security and take a huge bite out of programs for veterans, children, and the disabled. It would probably also have to end all subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, and end hundreds of billions in federal aid to infrastructure construction programs. Get ready now, to the extent that you can. Forewarned is forearmed. }:

===

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an 11 24

alternet-lno lnx

The list of who Donald Trump has 'pledged to punish' — according to one of his targets

David Badash November 06, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris, now the former Democratic presidential nominee, frequently said on the campaign trail: “On day one if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemy’s list. When elected, I will walk in with it to do list.”

Donald Trump is now President-elect and, according to Politico, he has “a lengthy inventory of people he’s pledged to punish.”

“For years, Trump has peppered his speeches and social media posts with vengeful calls for his political opponents, his critics and members of the media to be prosecuted, locked up, deported and even executed. In the waning weeks of the 2024 campaign, he escalated those promises of retaliation to a fever pitch,” Politico reports Wednesday. “Now that he’s won, he has both a popular mandate — and the power — to begin implementing his platform of punishment.”

Trump “will be emboldened by a Supreme Court ruling that grants presidents broad immunity from criminal accountability after they leave office. And he is expected to be surrounded by aides more willing to dispense with norms to carry out his wishes.”

READ MORE: ‘Be the Guardrails of Democracy’: Liz Cheney and Other Never-Trumpers Suggest Path Forward

Back in March of 2023, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

Who’s on his list? According to Politico, nearly two dozen individuals, largely in the legal and political spectrum, along with dozens of intelligence specialists, and unnamed journalists:

President Joe Biden

Vice President Kamala Harris

Former President Barack Obama

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi

New York Attorney General Letitia James

Manhattan Justice Arthur Engoron

Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney

Special Counsel Jack Smith

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg

Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley

Former FBI Director James Comey

Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden family

Former FBI special agent Peter Strzok

Former FBI attorney Lisa Page

Rep. Adam Schiff (Now Senator-elect Schiff)

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Mark Pomerantz

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen

U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd

Rep. Jamaal Bowman

51 intelligence professionals who signed letter about Hunter Biden laptop

Members of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack

Unspecified people engaged in election fraud

POLITICO reporters, editors and publisher

It’s not just Politico.

Trump has often called the mainstream media, the “enemy of the people.”

In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Trump referred to the press as, “the enemy camp,” according to The Guardian.

“Introducing his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump said: “I told JD to go into the enemy camp. He just goes: OK. Which one? CNN? MSNBC? He’s like the only guy who looks forward to going on, and then just absolutely obliterates them.”

===

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REF

NYT

NO LNX

On Telegram, a Violent Preview of What May Unfold on Election Day and After

Right-wing groups, which use Telegram to organize real-world actions, are urging followers to watch the polls and stand up for their rights, in a harbinger of potential chaos.

Telegram played a small but significant role in the 2020 election as an organizing tool for planners of the Jan. 6 attack.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

By Paul MozurAdam SatarianoAaron Krolik and Steven Lee Myers

Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano, Aaron Krolik and Steven Lee Myers analyzed more than 1 million posts from election skeptics and right-wing extremist groups on Telegram.

Nov. 4, 2024

:{:{Updated}:

Groups backing former President Donald J. Trump recently sent messages to organize poll watchers to be ready to dispute votes in Democratic areas. Some posted images of armed men standing up for their rights to recruit for their cause. Others spread conspiracy theories that anything less than a Trump victory on Tuesday would be a miscarriage of justice worthy of revolt.

“The day is fast approaching when fence sitting will no longer be possible,” read one post from an Ohio chapter of the Proud Boys, the far-right organization that was instrumental in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “You will either stand with the resistance or take a knee and willingly accept the yoke of tyranny and oppression.”

The messages were all posted on Telegram, the lightly moderated social media platform with nearly one billion users, which has become a harbinger of the potential actions and chaos that could unfold on Election Day and after. More so than other social apps, Telegram is a prime organizing tool for extremists, who have a tendency to turn digital coordination into real-world action.

A New York Times analysis of more than one million messages across nearly 50 Telegram channels with over 500,000 members found a sprawling and interconnected movement intended to question the credibility of the presidential election, interfere with the voting process and potentially dispute the outcome. Nearly every channel reviewed by The Times was created after the 2020 election, highlighting the growth and increased sophistication of the election denialism movement.

The Times reviewed messages from “election integrity” groups across a dozen states, including battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan. Their posts overwhelmingly spewed disinformation and conspiracy theories and featured violent imagery.

More than 4,000 of their posts went further by encouraging members to act by attending local election meetings, joining protest rallies and making financial donations, the analysis found. Posts from other right-wing groups reviewed by The Times urged followers to be prepared for violence. These calls to action extended the right-wing language typically found on other major social media sites into the physical world.

In New Hampshire, one Telegram channel instructed people to question local officials in person about absentee ballot tallies. In Georgia, followers of a local Telegram channel were urged to attend election board meetings to argue for limits to absentee voting. In New Mexico, people were told to monitor voting stations with cameras, file police reports if necessary and be ready to “fight like hell.”

“If you have ever said, ‘What can I do?,’ this is your opportunity,” said one post from a Telegram group focused on Pennsylvania.

Katherine Keneally, a former intelligence analyst with the New York Police Department, said views shared on Telegram should not be dismissed as the musings of a fringe minority but rather seen as a warning about what could happen on Election Day and beyond.

“Telegram is very often central to actually organizing people to engage in offline activity,” said Ms. Keneally, who now works for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research firm that monitors Telegram. She recalled attending a meeting in 2022 of election skeptics in Montana, where participants taught one another how to use Telegram. Among more extreme movements, she said, Telegram is used “very strategically to radicalize and recruit.”

In a statement, Telegram, whose founder was arrested in France in August on charges related to the spread of illicit material on the service, said it had ramped up content moderation leading up to the election. The company added that it would cooperate with the authorities to remove “criminal content.”

“Telegram does not tolerate content that encourages disrupting legal democratic processes through violence or destruction of property,” it said.

Telegram played a small but significant role in the 2020 election as an organizing tool for planners of the Jan. 6 attack. Today, its influence is greater and potentially more ominous, according to The Times’s analysis.

Right-wing media channels post a stream of news, memes and misinformation about perceived voting irregularities, which are then picked up by other groups that use them to argue that the Democrats have begun to steal the election. Mixed in are calls for citizens to show up at the polls and to monitor and report irregularities — or fight if necessary.

Image

Right-wing media channels on Telegram post a stream of disinformation about perceived voting irregularities, which other groups pick up to argue that Democrats have already begun to steal the election.Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times.

“While other platforms are primarily about self-expression, ‘owning the libs’ and hateful buffoonery, Telegram often generates an ambience of ‘let’s get something done,’” said Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University.

The “election integrity” movement on Telegram includes a loose network of accounts devoted to “auditing” the vote and amplifying election malfeasance theories, such as false claims that election workers are giving Republican voters Sharpies that are incompatible with voting machines.

One channel focused on election auditing in New York featured recruitment ads from United Sovereign Americans, which calls itself a national “election validity” advocacy group. One of its lawyers is a former solicitor general of Pennsylvania who defended Mr. Trump during his second impeachment in 2021 after Jan. 6.

Under an image of Uncle Sam and a bold red “WE NEED YOU!” banner, the group recently claimed, without any credible evidence, that 2022 voter records showed “millions of ‘irregularities’ which, when ignored, are election fraud.” Many claims about voter fraud have been debunked. The group did not respond to a request for comment.

Another group, focused on vote auditing in Pennsylvania, offered paid compensation for election monitors but only if they worked in the traditionally Democratic stronghold of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is.

“Fill out your information, and we’ll contact you to get you trained and ready for Election Day!” the group said.

Another Telegram channel run by a group called the People’s Audit posted a video that offered a “hypothetical situation that is totally possible,” in which the Department of Homeland Security used the driver’s licenses of undocumented immigrants to cast votes en masse for the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. The video floated the scenario even though it is illegal and rare for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.

“Yes, they would be engaging in ID theft, election interference and treason, which is punishable by death,” the video concluded.

Kris Jurski, who posted the video, said on Telegram that it had been taken down from X. He said he was grateful that the video had remained on Telegram, which he used later to advertise a webinar teaching people how to secure voter rolls and deter fraud. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Image

Trump supporters wore attire associated with the Proud Boys — the group’s colors are yellow and black — at a rally in December 2020.Credit...Luis M. Alvarez/Associated Press

Many posts casting doubt on election reliability made their way into the channels of extremist groups like the Proud Boys, which has preferred Telegram to other platforms after being restricted by sites like Facebook, Instagram and X.

The group’s posts questioned why states might not be able to fully tally election results on election night and repeated misleading claims about voter registration numbers in Michigan. In one video, a truck with a Confederate flag chased after immigrant children, with a caption reading: “1/20/25: Trump is sworn in as President. 1/21/25: Me and the Proud Boys begin the deportation.”

“When you look at the postings, even if it’s not actually calling for violence or even if it’s not saying we need to get whoever, there’s a very ugly tone to it,” said Wendy Via, a founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which tracked a 317 percent spike in election denialism on Telegram in October. There was no significant left-wing movement like this, she said.

In recent months, many Telegram channels run by chapters of the Proud Boys have celebrated a return to relevance, including perceived attention from Mr. Trump and his allies. Several accounts pointed to the black-and-yellow ties and hats — which are Proud Boys colors — worn by Mr. Trump in the days before, and the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson during, a recent rally at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Image

Recent posts on Telegram channels associated with the Proud Boys celebrated a perceived show of support from Mr. Trump.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Image

Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, at a recent Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times.

Asked whether Mr. Trump had intended to send a signal, a spokeswoman for his campaign responded, “Lol. No.” Mr. Carlson did not respond to a request for comment but posted on X that The Times “knows a Proud Boys necktie when they see one.”

“They feel activated,” said Michael Loadenthal, who researches political violence at the University of Cincinnati, adding that Proud Boys groups had assembled publicly less often than they had before the 2020 election. “There’s a feeling they are in the right.”

Recruitment messages on the public Telegram accounts of various Proud Boys chapters have sought to capitalize on the perils of election fraud, often implying a need for violence. One popular image showed an armed man wearing a balaclava.

“Free men do not obey public servants,” it read.

Another portrayed a tit-for-tat with “leftist Democrats” going back to Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“Enough is enough!” read a part of the post. “Be ready for anything and everything!”

Methodology

The Telegram channels reviewed in this article were provided in part by researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. The Times used software, including large language models, to organize and analyze the posts and to identify messages with calls to action.

A correction was made on Nov. 4, 2024: An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Katherine Keneally of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue attended a meeting of election skeptics in Montana. It was in 2022, not this year.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul. More about Paul Mozur

Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent for The Times, based in London. More about Adam Satariano

Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul. More about Steven Lee Myers

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press sez rally scarier

an 11 24

'Pretty terrible stuff here': Experts react to Trump suggesting he wouldn’t 'mind' reporters were shot

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thom 11 24

Trump calls for Cheney's execution - by firing squad

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400? historian petition for harris 11 24 jon meacham

===

AN 11 24 2X?

One expert is warning that the United States is about to enter a period of "American fascism," in which both Americans and American institutions will be under constant attack.

That's according to City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who recently authored a Medium essay entitled: "How F—ed Are We?" Jarvis wrote that Americans can expect "vast tragedy and destruction" over the next four years assuming President-elect Donald Trump intends to enact his campaign promises. He began his essay by emphasizing that blame for Trump's victory shouldn't lie at the feet of Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he argued "did everything she possibly could to win."

"The fault is in our nation. We must come to the realization that America is deeply racist and sexist, incapable of electing a Black, Asian woman to its highest office because of our culture’s innate, widespread, and unreconciled bias and hatred," Jarvis wrote. "That is the root of it. That is the weed that will now grow unkempt no matter how much media wish to groom the nation to make us look as if it were not so. Its aims of oppression will grow daily."

READ MORE:'Made violence his brand': Fascism scholar says threat of 2nd Trump term 'uniquely dangerous'

Jarvis laid out a comprehensive list of things that are likely to happen once Trump takes power on January 20. Chief among them were women losing "control of their bodies, their health [and] their lives." He wrote that Black Americans "know better than anyone, of course, how racist America is" and that now "there will be no limits to it" as the election result gives racists "permission." And he opined that LGBTQ+ people may be deprived every precious right they fought so bravely to attain as bigots try to "force them back into closets."

"Some portion of Latino voters may think — like Italians long before them, who once were considered people of color and then were not — that they might buy their way into favor with white America with their votes," he wrote. "[But] discrimination never ends. No matter their contribution to Trump’s victory, some citizens will again be called garbage by those in power."

Axios reported Wednesday that Karoline Leavitt, who is Trump's 2024 campaign spokesperson, promised that the president-elect would follow through on his promise to deport millions of immigrants upon taking office. And in Jarvis' essay, he explained that all immigrants will be at risk of the incoming Trump administration's wrath, whether they're documented or not.

"[Immigrants] will find their families and lives torn apart as Trump follows through on his promise of mass deportation, tearing husbands, wives, parents, and children from each other on the suspicion brought by an accent, a name, the color of skin," Jarvis wrote.

READ MORE:'One of the oldest dictator tricks': Here's why Trump is lying about Project 2025

And as economists have already warned, Trump's promise of high tariffs on imported goods will have a direct impact on all Americans' finances. The president-elect has proposed tariffs as high as 20% on goods from China, which retailers typically pass on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Jarvis reminded readers: "Every consumer will suffer higher prices — no matter what their yard signs promised — as Trump undertakes his deportations and tariffs."

But Jarvis' essay didn't stop there: He wrote that in a second Trump term, it's a near-certainty that "institutions of voting rights, fair elections, and equal rights under the law will diminish further," that "RFK Jr. will drive Trump to outlaw vaccinations, essentially outlawing the institutions of medicine and science" and that "free speech will be very much at risk, even as Trump, [Elon] Musk and their supposedly contrarian lock-step thinkers argue they are its protectors."

"They will forbid and harass speech of which they do not approve," he wrote.

"This election was my hope that we could find a different way, to rebuild not from the ashes but from where we stood. Now I am not sure," he added. "What is ultimately broken is not the set of institutions the extremists are trying to destroy but instead our nation itself. Until we face its faults of racism, sexism, and inequity we will never be finished fighting our war, our endless Civil War."

READ MORE:How Trump's tariffs would 'aggressively' transfer wealth from the poor to the rich: journalist

Click here to read Jarvis' full essay on Medium.

===

alternet no lnx

Citizenship cannot save you from fascism

Donald J. Trump, joined by Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch and U.S. Attorney General William Barr, meets with states attorneys general on protecting consumers from social media abuse Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, in the Cabinet Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

John Stoehr October 31, 2024

The debate over Donald Trump’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden has focused primarily on fallout from insulting Puerto Ricans with a “joke” about the US territory being an “island of garbage.”

“That is the October surprise,” GOP strategist Mike Madrid told Greg Sargent. “Surprise, Donald Trump, you blew yourself up. Yes, it could absolutely bring Pennsylvania into the win column for [Kamala] Harris."

But something’s missing from the debate.

Why did this backfire?

I mean, Trump hasn’t been campaigning for president so much as leading a vengeance movement against alleged “enemies from within” – ie, anyone who displeases him. He has vowed to purge America of “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. Last weekend’s rally was merely a culmination of a year’s worth of prejudice porn. Speakers there assailed immigrants, Jews, Black people and more.

But somehow Trump seemed to have taken a lot of people by surprise, particularly Puerto Ricans. Puerto Rican celebrities seemed especially revolted. Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin endorsed Harris only after the “island of garbage” line blew up. Musician Nicky Jam had actually endorsed Trump, but rescinded his endorsement afterward.

“I never thought in my life that a month later a comedian would come along and criticize my country [sic], speak poorly of my country [sic], therefore I renounce any support for Donald Trump," Jam wrote.

How is this possible?

The answer might be rooted in the complicated nature of Latino identity and the hierarchies within it that have emerged in relation to white-power politics in America. Put plainly, some Puerto Ricans are white or can pass for white. Most of them speak English. Because the island is a US territory, all Puerto Ricans are US citizens who can vote.

Compared to Latinos who are not white, who do not speak English and who cannot vote, Puerto Ricans have a lot going for them in a country like ours that’s still shaped and formed largely by the cultural and political preferences of white people. Some Puerto Ricans might have even believed that no matter how bad Trump gets, it won’t affect them much. After all, they have the rights and privileges of citizenship.

I don’t want to undervalue the fact that lots of people just don’t pay attention to politics. Nicky Jam said he had endorsed Trump, because “I thought that was the best for the economy in the US, where many Latinos live, including myself, where many immigrants are suffering because of the economy, and him being a businessman I thought that was the best move." I would guess that Jam had other things to do.

But I don’t think Jam and others were shocked by “island of garbage” because they were preoccupied. I suspect they were shocked because they realized something profound – that their assumptions were wrong. They presumed that citizenship was an issue of legal status. Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how you look. But Trump’s hate-rally undermined that understanding. It revealed that his fascists will not honor the letter of the law, much less the spirit of it. They will target you if you’re illegal. They will target you if you “don’t look legal” – and “don’t look illegal” isn’t a matter of law. It’s a matter of whiteness.

I don’t mean to suggest Puerto Ricans don’t experience racism. That would be stupid. I do mean to suggest that some, including perhaps Nicky Jam, underestimate what it means when someone says, as Stephen Miller did, that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” It means there’s nothing legally special about being Puerto Ricans. From Miller’s view, they’re all “Mexicans” and all “Mexicans” need to go. If Trump wins, Miller would likely be in charge of executing a massive operation to arrest and detain everyone who doesn’t “look American.”

That operation is usually described as a “deportation program,” but I don’t see any reason why such an undertaking would be restricted to “illegal immigrants.” The point of the exercise is to purge the “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. It is to “cure the disease” and eradicate “the enemies within.” Things like legal status and citizenship won’t stop fascists from pursuing those goals once they have power. Nothing will, not even another white person’s whiteness.

This is why the “island of garbage” line should be profoundly shocking to more than the Puerto Rican population of the United States. It should shake everyone to their core. Its message is as simple as it is horrifying - the rights and privileges of citizenship cannot save you.

To achieve the goal of dominance and control – of making America for Americans only – fascists in power need only define “American” according to the most restrictive terms possible. But these terms would never be static. They would change according to need.

So even if you meet the fascist definition of “American,” you might not be white enough or male enough or Christian enough. This is what happened to the GOP. No one could say Mitt Romney wasn’t a Republican, but to the fascists, he would never be Republican enough. He didn’t belong and over time, they purged him from the party.

As it stands, the debate over Trump’ fascist rally is centered on the outrage felt by Puerto Ricans who are now remembering Donald Trump’s treatment of the island after Hurricane Maria ravaged it in 2017. They are remembering that he called them dirty, that he threw paper towels at them, and that he held up scores of millions in relief until the last days of his term. The story now is about how Trump alienated voters he needs to win. The story is about PR payback.

There’s more to the story. If native-born citizens can be dehumanized as “garbage,” anyone can be. If anyone can be, no one is truly safe.

===

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timing? right after MSG nazi rally and VPH elipse in which she called out

after bret b clip fail apology?

mma

Fox’s John Roberts denies that Trump has talked about deploying the military against Americans

In an interview on Fox, Trump recently suggested using troops against “the enemy within”

Written by Bushra Sultana

Published 10/30/24

On the October 30 edition of America Reports, Fox anchor John Roberts falsely claimed that Donald Trump has never said that he would use the military against the American people, claiming instead, “He said that he would bring in the National Guard to quell demonstrations that turned violent.”

Roberts was seemingly referring to Trump’s comments in an interview from early October in which Fox’s Maria Bartiromo asked the former president about “outside agitators” creating chaos on Election Day. Trump responded, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” adding, “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. … It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

Roberts also ignored the larger context of Trump’s comments repeatedly calling Democrats and people who don’t support him “the enemy from within.” In an interview with Fox’s Howard Kurtz, Trump called Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) “an enemy from within,” claiming, “These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at ‘Shifty Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within.” Trump has also repeatedly called mainstream media “the enemy of the people” since his 2016 election campaign.

Video

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CitationFrom the October 30, 2024, edition of Fox News' America Reports

JOSE ARISTIMUNO (FORMER DNC DEPUTY NATIONAL PRESS SECRETARY): On the disinformation, there's a whole lot of Republicans out there that are saying that Kamala Harris is a socialist when she's not. When you have a former president, on Donald Trump, that wants to militarize the Department of Justice, wants to use the military on the American people. He said it himself —

JOHN ROBERTS (ANCHOR): He never said that.

ARISTIMUNO: And he’s the one who doesn’t recognize elections. He doesn't recognize the 2020 election. That's what Nicolás Maduro does in Venezuela. So I invite my friends that are watching the program today, actually research of what these people are doing. Both Kamala and Donald Trump — look at their policies, look at their actions, not just their words. That's what's going to make a difference come November 5.

ROBERTS: Steve, quick final word to you, with the caveat that Donald Trump never said that he was going to sic the U.S. military on the American people. He said that he would bring in the National Guard to quell demonstrations that turned violent.

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10 24

aha:

PUTIN ACTIVE MEASURES DISINFO FOREVER TO DEGRADE FAITH IN INSTITUTIONS ESP CENTRAL ONE ELECTIONS

// TRUMP BIG LIE if dems cheAT violence is our only option

BANNON OUT OF JAIL STOKES militia revival, const sheriffs

BIGGEST LIE IS ILLEGAL ALIEN VOTERS INCORPORATES RACISM; THEY DARK ENEMY ARE STEALING YOUR MOST SACRED PRIVILEDGE = VOTE/RULE

RELATES TO PSEUDO-POPULISM? THEY are all corrupt so no matter if trump and putin aRE? watters sez all pols have an enemies list eg bannon navarro...

nihilism started in alt rt machosphere?

//

state of exception margin

1/20:(

anti-terrorism?:(

aha-ish: 1st they came for...:

at the border, inner city,  prisons, on the margins authoritarian power, violence, violation of civil/human rights can be test, done w/o much scrutiny

BLM trump wanted to shoot in legs by military // unmarked van border guards in Portland

see dapl water protectors, indigenous green, baby jail trump border?

recall gen mike kelly cos def of fascism built in natural racial hierachy;

legit righteous glorious to use violence to keep THEM in their right place[low south down in shithole 3rd world]

one really rough hour by cops on brown venezuelan gang savages enough to scare those cowards into subjugation/fear

===

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mAD sQ gARDEN Nazi rally 10 24

USA = garbage can PR trash island vph anti-christ = satan

{{{ msg

COMM DR 10 24

From start to finish, Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night was a torrent of bigotry and fascistic rhetoric, with the former president and a bizarre lineup of preceding speakers trashing Puerto Ricans and Palestinians, condemning the press, and casting their political opponents as a satanic "enemy from within."

rupar she is the devil anti-christ

The New York City event, held on the second to last Sunday before the November 5 election, amounted to a closing pitch for a candidate who has pledged to wield the power of the federal government—including the U.S. military—against those he views as obstacles to his ascent to power and his political project, which includes a large-scale deportation campaign, massive deregulation for industry, and another round of tax cuts for the wealthy.

"When I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy," Trump said Sunday, characterizing Democratic nominee Kamala ^Harris and other party leaders as mere "vessels" for the "radical left machine," which the former president called "massive, vicious, [and] crooked."

"It's just this amorphous group of people. But they're smart and they're vicious. And we have to defeat them," said the Republican nominee, who falsely claimed the U.S. is an "occupied country" facing a "migrant invasion" that only he can stop.

While the rally featured familiar bloviating from Trump about crowd sizes and other petty obsessions—as well as absurd speakers such as Hulk Hogan and Dr. Phil—historians and other observers were horrified by what they described as the authoritarian ambitions that were front and center and shamelessly expressed Sunday night.

"The point here is that fascism is on full display, openly: no dog whistles, no plausible deniability," said Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University whose work has focused on the white supremacist movement in the United States.

"It's a show of power and another attempt to make this look and feel normal," Belew added. "And it will not just magically disappear after the election, regardless of the outcome. In fact, it might be worth thinking through the very likely possibility that this kind of display suggests that this candidate and this movement don't care that much about the outcome."

One journalist called Trump's event "the most overtly fascist mass rally in New York since 1939"—referring to a pro-Nazi rally held that year at Madison Square Garden—and criticized media coverage of the former president's remarks, pointing to a now-changed USA Today headline as a particularly stark example.

House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) appearance at the rally made clear that Trump and the leadership of the Republican Party are in sync as the GOP pursues full control of Congress on November 5 and lays the groundwork to enact the former president's agenda.

"We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected, because we can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we're going to do really well with the House. Right?" Trump said late Sunday, pointing to someone in the audience—possibly Johnson.

"He and I have a secret," Trump added, in remarks carried live by all three major cable news networks. "We'll tell you what it is when the race is over."

Other speakers at the rally included far-right pundit Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and billionaire Elon Musk, who has funneled roughly $118 million into the 2024 campaign in support of Trump.

"I'm not just MAGA," Musk said, pointing to his black hat. "I'm dark, gothic MAGA."

MSG fail 10 24 no pix twt

Popular, famous, and highly-influential Latino stars, and superstars including Bad Bunny, Luis Fonsi, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin, are lashing out at Donald Trump after his six-hour Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday served up racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic rhetoric. A New York Times headline described it as "Trump's racist rally."

The most-noted racist remarks came from a comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, in an attack calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” and saying, "these Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do, they do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country,” before talking about Black people carving watermelons.

The Trump campaign waited several hours before issuing a statement saying, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” It was unclear why other racist remarks made throughout the event, including by Hinchcliffe, were not addressed by the campaign.

"Battleground Pennsylvania," NBC News reports, "where polling margins show a razor-thin race between Trump and Harris, is home to thethird-largest Puerto Rican diaspora in the country. Last month, the former president invitedPuerto Rican artist Anuel AA onstage at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to publicly throw his support behind the Republican ticket."

READ MORE: ‘What’s He Confessing to?’: Trump’s Mike Johnson ‘Secret’ Draws Electoral College Concerns

Variety reports, "Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin were among the notable industry figures who boosted Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Sunday after a speaker at Donald Trump‘s political rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden called Puerto Rico 'a floating island of garbage.'"

"Bad Bunny, one of the world’s biggest music superstar[s] with more than 45 million Instagram followers, boosted Harris’ campaign video targeting voters in Puerto Rico and noting what a contentious relationship that Trump had with the island during his tenure in the White House. Lopez posted Harris campaign material targeted at Puerto Rico as well as the same video pitch that Bad Bunny boosted."

"Singer-actor Ricky Martin, with 18.6 million Instagram followers, did the same thing on his Instagram Stories feed, adding the comment 'I remember' on the Harris video. He also included a clip of Hinchcliffe’s 'garbage' comment."

Variety continued, reporting, "Luis Fonsi, the Puerto Rican singer who had a worldwide smash in 2017 with 'Despacito,' also reposted the Harris video and added a comment."

“We are not OK with this constant hate. It’s been abundantly clear that these people have no respect for us and yet they want our vote,” Fonsi wrote. “I purposely wrote this in English cause yes we’re American too.”

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Political strategist, CNN commentator, and co-host of ABC's "The View," Ana Navarro, has two million followers on the social media platform X and is a highly-influential Republican.

"Today, @KamalaHarris released policy proposals to help Puerto Rico. On the other hand at the Trump rally, this is going on," she wrote, pointing to a clip of Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."

"But nah. They’re not piece of s--- racists who treat Puerto Ricans as second-class US citizens. It’s just our imagination. Puerto Ricans, pay attention!"

READ MORE: ‘:{Ten-Cent Dictator’: Trump Threatens Mass Arrests of Opponents in ‘Cease and Desist’ Post}:

She also noted posted a screenshot of Bad Bunny's post, in which he shared Vice President Harris's proposal for Puerto Rico with his 45 million followers.

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And, pointing to Hinchcliffe's racist remarks about Latinos making babies, Navarro wrote:

"Latinos, defend our community’s dignity.

Show some self-respect.

A vote against racism is a vote for @KamalaHarris."

Monday morning on "The View," co-host Sunny Hostin, who is Puerto Rican, served up a monologue strongly criticizing Donald Trump.

"This Puerto Rican has something to say about the island that I love, where my family is from," Hostin began. "Puerto Rico is 'trash'? We are Americans, Donald Trump. Americans. We voluntarily serve disproportionately high in the military, while you have bone spurs."

"And we vote."

"Pennsylvania is home to almost half a million Puerto Ricans. North Carolina, 115,000. Georgia, 100,000. Arizona, 64,000. Wisconsin, 61,000. Michigan, 43,000. Nevada, 27,000. We vote Donald Trump."

"Trash?"

"And by the way, Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny, Luis Fonsi, and Mark Anthony have over 345 million followers on Instagram. I think you only have 26 million, since you care so much about size. And we don't like what was said about Puerto Rico. And we know how to take the trash out Donald Trump. Trash that has been collecting since 2016. And that's you, Donald Trump. And finally, my fellow Puerto Ricans, trash collection day is November 5th, 2024. Don't forget it."

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Former Fox News political commentator Geraldo Rivera let loose Sunday night:

"'A floating island of garbage…?' Referring to Puerto Rico??? 'Poisoning the blood of our nation…?' We have 'murder in our genes….?' Fuck these racists. Latino men of good will, have pride in yourselves and your ancestors. A vote for Trump is a vote against self-respect."

Monday morning he added: "Latino men, for the love of your parents and children, for your pride and your honor tell this little gringo s--- to go f--- himself."

See the video and social media posts above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Malignant Narcissism’: Trump Is an ‘Existential Threat to Democracy’ Health Experts Warn

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U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned Monday that the hate-filled campaign rally held by former Republican President Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden in New York City was meant to further prime supporters for another January 6-style attempt to seize power by force if Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris wins next month's election. VID]

Sunday's event—whichdrew comparisons to a1939 Nazi rally that packed the iconic Midtown Manhattan arena—featured speakers including billionaire Elon Musk, conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage."

Although the Trump campaign has attempted to distance the GOP presidential candidate from Hinchcliffe's bigoted remarks, Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said during a Mondayinterview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Sunday's event was "not just a presidential rally," it was "a hate rally."

"I think it's important for people to understand that these are mini January 6 rallies. These are mini 'Stop the Steal' rallies," Ocasio-Cortez said, referring to the 2021 Capitol insurrection and movement born from the conspiracy theory that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential contest from Trump.

"These are rallies to prime an electorate into rejecting the results of an election if it doesn't go the way that they want, because Donald Trump and that entire cadre of people up on that stage... do not respect the law of the United States of America, and they either want to win this election or they are using rhetoric of taking it by force," she continued.

"That is what they mean, and that's what they're doing when they're inciting violence and hatred against Latinos, against Black Americans, against Americans who don't have children."

Ocasio-Cortez singled out the Republican vice presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), for "talking about watering downpeoples' right to vote depending on if they can viably carry a child or not."

"We have to understand how unhinged this campaign has gotten and the only reason that the rhetoric has gotten this far is precisely because they are trying to prime the kind of froth that led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol," she said.

"And so it's very important that we connect those dots, and right now the [Trump] campaign is scrambling and they're trying to blame this rhetoric on a so-called comedian?" Ocasio-Cortez added. "This is not a comedian. This is the Trump campaign. They invited this rhetoric on their stage for a reason."

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Former Washington Post editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, revealed to The Daily Beast on Saturday that the newspaper's owner — Amazon's Jeff Bezos — and 2024 GOP nominee Donald Trump, allegedly agreed on a plan to "kill" thePost's endorsement of 2024 Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, the news outlet reports.

The Beast notes:

Bezos knows first hand the consequences of criticizing the former president. The Post’s 2016 endorsement of Hillary Clinton is widely thought to have led to him losing out on a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract awarded by the Trump administration.

Following his Friday resignation from thePost,Kagan told the Beast "that Trump’s meeting with executives of Bezos’ Blue Origin space company the same day that the Amazonfounder killed a plan to support Harris was proof of the backroom deal."

READ MORE:['Bit of a panic': Trump adviser’s attack on bombshell WaPo report fact-checked by expert

The ex-Post editor said, "Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people. Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”

Per the report, Kagan warned that this kind of "alleged collusion between" the billionaire tech founder and Trump "is just the beginning," and emphasized there will be "a lot of self censorship [in the media] and a lot of changing course just to be sure that they’re not going to be punished," if the MAGA leader wins the White House.

"This is what we have to look forward to," Kagan told the Post. "All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee."

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ALL IN ON FASCIST TO THE CORE ENEMY WITHIN

10/25/2024 RWW

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Kyle Mantyla

Former President Donald Trump posted an ominous threat to Truth Social on Friday, promising prosecutions at “levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Donald Trump likened America to a “garbage can for the world” while ranting about illegal immigration in a doom-laden rally speech in Arizona on Thursday.

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Jesse Watters calls Gen. John Kelly's accusations that Donald Trump admired Nazis a “hoax” 10/23/24 MMA

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Mike Huckabee wouldn’t rule out using the military to stop abortion. Trump is campaigning with him. 10/24/24

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Fox News host and anchor Harris Faulkner quickly shut down a Democratic guest as soon as he brought up the name of Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, who this week declared the ex-president meets the “definition a ‘fascist.'”

General Kelly is far from alone.

Last week, former Trump Chairman of the Join Chiefs, General Mark Milley, said he believes Donald Trump is “fascist to the core,” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”

And on Wednesday, former Trump Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, The Washington Post reported, agreed with General Kelly that Trump meets the definition of a fascist.

READ MORE: ‘Shameful’: Naval Academy Cancels Authoritarianism Lecture After ‘MAGA Pressure’*

Esper “said in a CNN interview that he was reluctant to use the same label that Kelly used in a New York Times interview published Tuesday. But Esper then noted that Kelly had looked up the definition of a fascist in the interview — and Esper urged ‘everybody’ to do the same.”

“Ask yourself, does he fall into those categories?” Esper asked. “And it’s hard to say that he doesn’t when you kind of look at those terms. He certainly has those inclinations, and I think it’s something we should be wary about.”

In addition to declaring the ex-president meets the definition of a fascist, General Kelly shared more disturbing details about his time with Trump.

“Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff is warning that the Republican presidential nominee meets the definition of a fascist and that while in office, Trump suggested that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ‘did some good things,’” The Associated Press reported Wednesday. “The comments from John Kelly, the retired Marine general who worked for Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019, came in interviews with both The New York Times and The Atlantic. They build on a growing series of warnings from former top Trump officials as the election enters its final weeks.”

Trump allegedly was very specific in his praise of Hitler and his regime.

“In his interview with The Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing ‘German generals,’ Kelly would ask if he meant ‘Bismarck’s generals,’ referring to Otto von Bismarck, the former chancellor of the German Reich who oversaw the unification of Germany. ‘Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,’ Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’”

The AP also reported, “Kelly added that Trump often fumed at any attempt to constrain his power, and that ‘he would love to be’ a dictator,” and told The Times: “He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Thursday afternoon, Fox’s Harris Faulkner stopped her guest from sharing those allegations on-air.

READ MORE: ‘Within Two Seconds’: Trump Vows to Fire Special Counsel Jack Smith if Elected President

“It’s very difficult for them. They hear all this negative, both sides, and they’re tuning it out, so how do you break through?” a Democratic guest told Faulkner. “What I think is telling is that you have someone like President Barack Obama going and stumping for his candidate where on Donald Trump’s side, you don’t see George W. Bush, you don’t see Michael Pence or leading Republicans doing that, and I think that’s a glaring thing that will come evident.”

“His former chief of staff, John Kelly, coming out —” he said before Harris interjected.

“Alright,” she declared, before her guest continued: “with these accusations —”

“You know what,” Faulkner said, talking over her guest. “I’m not going to go down that road.”

“She used the backdrop of the Naval Observatory,” Faulkner said, “to bring up some some items that were years old and without much time left, I would love for us to go into it…”

Rather than allowing her guests to continue on that topic, she called for their last quick thoughts.

Faulkner closed by asking, “I just want to know, where’s the joy? Because he’s dancing and she’s no longer joyful. Find the joy.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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NEW REPT ON HOW MANY TRUMP TRIED TO TURN DOJ ON, KERRY?!

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A massive new study finds a large number of Republicans, Trump supporters, and conservatives support violence under the guise of saving the country or ensuring the “rightful” leader is put in the White House.

Three in ten Republicans (29%) believe “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” according to the nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization PPRI’s “2024 American Values Survey.”

Nearly one in four MAGA Republicans (23%) “say that if Trump loses the election, he should declare the results invalid and do whatever it takes to assume office.” That view is also held by nearly one on five (19%) Republicans overall, including those who do not support Trump.

MAGA Republicans, or “Republicans who view Trump favorably are three times as likely as those who hold unfavorable views [of Trump] to support political violence (32% vs. 11%).

RELATED: ‘Zero Remorse’: Trump Doesn’t Condemn Gunman Who Allegedly Threatened FEMA Workers

More than one in five Republicans (22%) agree that “if the 2024 presidential election is compromised by voter fraud, everyday Americans will need to ensure the rightful leader takes office, even if it requires taking violent actions.”

The study also looked at the politico-religious component of support for political violence, and found one-third (33%) of “Christian nationalism Adherents and Sympathizers” agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

Additionally, one-third of Latter-day Saints (33%) and nearly one in three white evangelical Protestants (28%) “agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

Where Americans get their news appears to be a factor in their views on issues including violence and immigration.

“Americans who trust conservative news outlets are the most likely to support political violence (41%), followed by 30% of those who most trust Fox News, 18% of those who do not watch any TV news, and 13% of those who most trust mainstream TV news.”

READ MORE: ‘God, Religion and Teaching of the Commandments’: Eric Trump Says Dad Saved ‘Christmas

Six in ten Republicans (61%) agree that “immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country,” PRRI’s survey finds, along with a “majority of Americans who most trust far-right news (70%) or Fox News (65%).”

Similarly, nearly two-thirds of Republicans (65%) support the “Great Replacement Theory,” and agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” PRRI also finds that the “vast majority of far-right news (83%) and Fox News viewers (66%) agree with this theory,” as do the majority of Christian nationalism Adherents and Sympathizers (63%) and white evangelical Protestants (62%), as well as half (50%) of Latter-day Saints.

“Nearly eight in ten Republicans (79%) favor putting undocumented immigrants in encampments,” PRRI also found. “The vast majority of Americans who most trust far-right news (91%) or Fox News (82%) favor militarized encampments for undocumented immigrants.”

“White evangelical Protestants (75%) are most likely to favor militarized encampments for undocumented immigrants, followed by the majority of white Catholics (61%), white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (58%), and Latter-day Saints (56%).”

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and these answers … are keeping me up at night,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones told Axios. “It’s all pretty dark and worrisome.”

Axios had reported: “The growing number of Republicans willing to shun democratic norms — and possibly embrace violence — comes as Trump continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from him and is saying the 2024 election is already rigged.”

“Jones said those supporting the loser of the election doing whatever it takes to assume office are essentially endorsing a coup against the United States.”

Last week, Jones told MSNBC’s Joy Reid (video below), “there are [survey] questions that we have had to write during the Trump era as social scientists that I never thought we would have to write.”

“So to write that question and put it on a public opinion survey and say, we actually need to know what the American people think about this statement, that whether immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country, right, is just, I think we just pause for a minute, to say how astonishing that is.”

He added, “we’re all taught to kind of not be knee-jerk and kind of use the Nazi analogy…but like, ‘poisoning the blood’ — Mein Kampf uses the word blood 150 times,” referring to Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto.

“That’s Hitler’s word, right? And it’s often, it’s almost always used in this way, this kind of idea of purity and defilement, contamination, and it’s a politics of disgust that we’re really seeing here.”

Watch Jones on MSNBC below or at this link.

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'Defending Nazis': Fox host under fire for 'excusing' Trump wanting 'Hitler’s generals' kilmeade

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'Will absolutely make sure his enemies pay': Trump has made 100+ direct threats during 2024 campaign

Alex Henderson:

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A new bombshell report describes how, during his first administration, former President Donald Trump longed for the same kind of absolute dictatorial power that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler enjoyed.

In a Tuesday report, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote about his conversations with General John Kelly (Trump's former Department of Homeland Security secretary and ex-White House chief of staff) who described how Trump harbored a peculiarly disdain for the military. He specifically lamented that he lacked the same kind of unwavering support from American military leadership that Hitler had during his reign.

"I need the kind of generals that Hitler had," Trump said, according to unnamed White House aides speaking confidentially to the Atlantic. "People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders."

READ MORE:This Trump trait makes him 'even more dangerous' than Hitler and Mussolini: ex-Dem senator

Kelly told Goldberg that he had to gently remind Trump that there were multiple occasions in which Hitler's generals tried and failed to assassinate him, like on July 20, 1944. And of course, Hitler's generals ultimately lost World War II, with the ones who weren't killed dying in a bunker with Hitler as Stalin's army razed Berlin.

The four-star Marine general also frequently had to educate Trump about the basics of both military structure and military history. When Trump asked him who the "good guys" were in World War I, Kelly told him that it's customary for U.S. presidents to consider any nation allied with the United States to be the protagonists in any foreign war. He also had to caution him from praising Hitler, even when not referencing the Holocaust.

"He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’" Kelly told CNN's Jim Sciutto in an interview for his book. “[H]e said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world... I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”

As an illustration of how he feels about the U.S. military, the article described how incensed the former president was that the family of Pvt. Vanessa Guillén — who was beaten to death by her boyfriend at age 20 while stationed at Fort Hood in Texas — sent the White House the bill for their daughter's funeral after Trump specifically asked them to at a White House meeting. Her funeral cost approximately $60,000. Unnamed participants in a 2020 meeting confided to Goldberg that the ex-president became irate after hearing about the cost.

READ MORE:'Why he's going to lose again': Trump slammed for keynoting event filled with 'Nazi-linked groups'

"Trump became angry," Goldberg wrote, adding that Trump reportedly said “it doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f—ing Mexican!" He then told Mark Meadows, who was his chief of staff at the time, “Don’t pay it!”

“Can you believe it?” he then said, according to meeting attendees. “F—ing people, trying to rip me off.”

The report comes as the ex-president's campaign rhetoric has taken a decidedly more authoritarian tone. Sidney Blumenthal, who was an advisor to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, recently wrote in the Guardian about how Trump is echoing Hitler in calling Democrats "the enemy from within," and his claims that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country."

Click here to read Goldberg's full article in the Atlantic (subscription required).

READ MORE:'Modern-day Hitler': Experts sound alarm over Trump heaping praise on 'autocrat' Orbán

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use military on oppon = fascism

In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign cycle, former President Donald Trump has made ominous threats against "the enemy from within." He specifically assigned that description to top Democrats like Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Adam Schiff.

The ex-president doubled down on those remarks during a Fox News town hall hosted by Harris Faulkner that was packed full of his supporters. And Vice President Kamala Harris used her interview with Fox News' Bret Baier to draw attention to those remarks and remind viewers that Trump has called for deploying the military against U.S. citizens.

Now, Trump's campaign surrogates are publicly defending his remarks on national cable news. On Tuesday, CNN host Jim Acosta gave Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Florida) three different opportunities to denounce the ex-president's "enemy from within" comment. And each time, Donalds deflected and demurred.

READ MORE:[Harris destroyed Fox's 'completely fictional' image of Trump in one exchange: analysis

"Congressman, do you consider Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi to be the enemy from within?" Acosta asked Donalds.

Donalds didn't answer yes or no, but rather pivoted to a litany of talking points in which he accused Schiff of leaking classified material. This echoes similar claims by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Schiff leaked classified information, though he admitted it was "difficult to pin down precisely what happened."

The Florida Republican referenced Schiff being removed from the House Intelligence Committee over the supposed leaks by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California), but as Axios reported, that was seen more as a retaliatory move for Pelosi stripping Reps. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) of their committee assignments for amplifying threats of political violence and trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, respectively.

"Congressman, I asked you a yes or no [question]," Acosta said again as Donalds continued speaking about the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

READ MORE:['Modern-day enemies lists': Harris campaign warns how Trump could have 'unchecked power'

Acosta reminded Donalds that he did not oppose Pelosi and Schiff being characterized as "the enemy from within" before then asking him whether he would support having them "rounded up" and arrested under a potential second Trump presidency. Donalds replied by saying "absolutely not," and notably again did not dispute Acosta telling viewers that Donalds agreed with Trump calling Democrats "the enemy from within."

Trump's "enemy from within" comments mirror a direct quote from Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. In 2012, the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom noted that during World War II, Hitler repeatedly warned of the "enemy within" in reference to Jewish people. Those remarks came just before Hitler recommended the "final solution," which was the extermination of the Jewish community.

Watch the clip of Donalds' interview below, or by[clicking this link.

READ MORE:[GOP rep defends Trump's calls to deploy the military against his political opponents

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Donald Trump and his MAGA movement fit “the definition of fascism,” according to retired U.S. Army Majority General Randy Manner who warned that if the former president were to return to office — especially in light of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling — “everything changes.”

“If he was to be the commander in chief again, everything changes," Manner said during an interview Monday night with CNN anchor Laura Coates. “The Supreme Court has given him immunity and the threshold for turning the National Guard into his personal police force is quite low."

Manner noted that as long as Trump remains out of office, “he cannot do anything to harm Americans directly," but then added a stark warning.

“Most Americans don’t know how easy it would be for an unhinged president to use the military against our own citizens," he said.

ALSO READ:[Trump keeps telling us he believes he’ll lose]

“President Trump is not like any sane leader,” Manner said.

He went on to recite a dictionary definition of fascism after Coates read a statement from retired U.S. Army General Mark Milley to journalist Bob Woodward, in which he called Trump “a total fascist.”

“Let’s back up a second, if you go to Webster online, you will find that it’s usually nationalistic, it’s far-right — ok, let’s see, so that’s definitely the Trump campaign,” Manner said as he as he went on to read other aspects of fascism that he says lines up with Trump.

“Check, check…that is actually the definition of fascism,” Manner said. “If he as the chairman of the joint chiefs is calling the president a fascist, I am so proud of him for breaking that barrier to say — to speak to the truth — that he is.

He added at the conclusion of the interview that “the very far-right, the hard-core — they don’t understand what fascism is. The reality is they are in fact fascist themselves by the definition.”

Watch the clip below or at this link.

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Republican strategist's attempt to minimize former President Donald Trump's threat of "enemies within" spurred a swift fact check and heated debate on CNN Monday morning.

Conservative commentator Shermichael Singleton was checked by CNN anchor Jim Acosta as he tried to claim Trump's threat to sic the military on political enemies was limited only to those who live in the U.S. without citizenship status.

"I think he's talking about immigration," Singleton said. "And when you look at—"

The video player is currently playing an ad.

"No, no, no," interrupted Acosta. "He was talking about what he called radical left people in this country. Americans. Political opponents."

Singleton shrugged off what Acosta described as a "dangerous" threat — arguing Republicans cared more about policy than rhetoric — and in doing so outraged Democratic strategist Julia Roginsky.

"Let me just say something right now," Roginsky said. "This is not Donald Trump saying crazy stuff...he's done this before."

Roginsky argued Trump meant what he said at a Coachella rally over the weekend that he'd bully Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) into supporting his border control policies by threatening to withhold "fire money....for all the forest fires."

She pointed to recent reports from two former staffers who said Trump tried to block wildfire relief from reaching California in 2018 until he was shown voter data proving supporters lived there and raised a crucial concern.

"There were people around him [during his first term] to stop the worst impulses...they're not going to be there this time around," she said. "He's basically letting the voters know that, you know, this is what you're voting for."

When Acosta asked if Democrats needed to do more to call out Trump's authoritarian rhetoric, Roginsky replied with an incredulous shake of the head and a figurative finger pointed at his industry.

"The media has not done enough to call this out," Roginsky snapped back. "Here you have a fascist — and General Milley is right because all of the markers of a fascist exist in Donald Trump — and yet our news media has not done enough, by any stretch of the imagination, to call this out."

As proof, Roginsky pointed to intense media scrutiny of President Joe Biden's age and Gov. Tim Walz' (D-MN) location during the Tiananmen Square protests 35 years ago.

Singleton, given a chance to respond, interestingly did not slap back with a defense of his political party — but of colleagues in the media he argued could not be blamed for focusing more important issues than Trump's rhetoric.

"We have covered it," he said. "i just think there are far more consequential issues that impact people's day-to-day lives."

"With all do respect," Roginsky replied, "Take a look at the ratio. This is an existential problem."

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Donald Trump over the weekend repeatedly said he wants to use the U.S. military against Americans who oppose him, called his critics “the enemy from within,” and declared they are more dangerous than America’s greatest foreign adversaries, including Russia, China, and North Korea.

“I always say we have the outside enemy, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say, Kim Jung-Un,” Trump told supporters at an Aurora, Colorado rally on Friday (video below). But, he added: “It’s the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with. that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia,” he said as the audience cheered.

On Sunday, Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo of his desire to use armed forces against Americans on Election Day.

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military.”

READ MORE: ‘Fascist to the Core’: Trump’s Top General Slams Ex-President as ‘Most Dangerous Person’

Pointing to those remarks, constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe says, “Just think what this means for the 2028 election if Trump & Vance are in control as of January 20, 2025.”

In both events Trump had been talking about undocumented immigrants before switching his target to American citizens.

AFP called his remarks against U.S. citizens a “sinister election-related threat.” Rolling Stone called it a “a fascist plan to deploy military forces against U.S. citizens who oppose him on election day.” HuffPost described his remarks as “echoing similar language used by Nazis,” and HuffPost legal/justice reporter Brandi Buchman warned the “level of danger that people face if he is ever allowed near office again cannot be understated.” The New Republic declared Trump went “Full Dictator.”

“Trump as President and Commander in Chief would seek to wage war on the American people,” warned historian and professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarianism. She adds, “our armed forces could have a new authoritarian role: domestic repression. ‘Handling’ the Leader’s enemies=violence.”

Attorney and former federal and state prosecutor Eric Lisann responded, writing: “Trump has already requested military equipment and protection for him now, as a mere candidate. He will gut the military of its finest leaders, many of whom have identified the historic threat he poses to the country, and turn it into his personal guard.”

The popular historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson called Trump’s attack on his political opponents, “the full leap to authoritarianism.”

“Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi ‘race science’ and fascism is deadly dangerous,” she added, noting his “campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday.”

RELATED: Trump’s Upcoming Madison Square Garden MAGA Rally Sparks Comparisons to 1939 Nazi Event

And historian Steven A. Woodbridge wrote: “Pointing to the ‘enemy within’ is a classic strategy used by those with authoritarian tendencies many times in the past & it would appear nothing has changed. This man is a clear threat to democracy.”

Journalist Ahmed Baba warned, “Trump’s rhetoric is growing more violently authoritarian. His migrant fear-mongering is increasingly racist and now he’s once again saying he’ll deploy the military against people he disagrees with. Trump’s insane authoritarianism is the most important story of this election.”

===

hype hate --> fascism

September 27, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): The Harris-Biden regime, they are stuffing foreigners in the reddest communities across the country, in small town red America, I think partially as revenge. Blake might not agree with this, but I think that they get, like, off on this sinister, like, we're gonna go send the Haitians into red America.

BLAKE NEFF (CO-HOST): Maybe a bit of that. Maybe a bit of that.

KIRK: I think there's an element there. You can't convince me. I have no evidence of that, but it's just gut instinct. I'm not gonna get into what states can do to resist this yet because I wanna win the election and do this properly through the federal government. If we lose in November, it's gonna get very, very messy. I'm just gonna be honest. Like, it's gonna get messy of states being —

NEFF: Especially if they start packing the courts, then you're you really have to start thinking, like, OK. What are we gonna do about, like, this truly out of control wants it all —

KIRK: Do we have a country at this point?

NEFF: Yeah.

KIRK: And I don't wanna get there yet, Emily. But, Emily, just so we're clear, the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night — it's only gonna get worse if — unless Donald Trump wins. A new report from Fox News shows that across the border, 13,000 people convicted of murder, 15,000 people convicted of rape on the non-detained list — meaning they're currently roaming free around our country. So right now, roaming free on the interior of the United States are 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 convicted rapists. And they're just — they're having a field day, and they're coming for your daughter next.

...

KIRK: I want you to understand this. That means that they're coming across the border, they run a background check, or someone knows, and then they say, just have fun. That's what that means. That means that they — we know who they are, and then we just release them into the interior and say —

NEFF: It just shocks me, like, the level of control you can have over media narrative that. Like, you know, The New York Times or whoever can blow this off. 13,000 homicide convictions just roaming the US as an elective policy choice.

KIRK: And the election is close. I mean, the election is close. It's very close. And, it — again, there was a poll that just showed up here. Arizona women voters, favor Kamala Harris 52%, 43%. And that does not include the 2 million gotaways. And since those are the border jumpers who avoid border encounters, it's safe to conclude the proportion of convicted criminals is even higher than that 2 million plus of them. Thank you for being a member, and stay safe in Alabama, and pray Trump wins, or else things are gonna get really bad.@@ They're gonna get even worse. There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama, and they will become your masters.

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===

FASHY

September 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Five

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): Let's not forget, there is a story to be told about January 6th. It's -- days before it, Trump met with senior Pentagon officials with a directive to protect property and people, and -- including using the National Guard, and it was ignored. This is a contradiction of the DOD IG report, so people need to know that. If you're going to ask questions about that, you know -- the whole commission was designed for this election. It was all designed for this. And they've squeezed the juice out of this lemon. Now it's time to squeeze the commission. Put those jerks behind bars.

===

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scotus coup

SCOTUS 'staged a coup' and will resemble Russian courts if Trump wins: conservative expert - Alternet.org

carl gibson jun 2024

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has grown far too powerful, and could permanently alter the government established by the framers if current trends continue, according to a conservative legal expert.

On Saturday, Norman Ornstein — who is an emeritus scholar at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute — offered a frank and stunning condemnation of SCOTUS in a post to X (formerly Twitter). After a wave of controversial rulings in the final week of its 2023-2024 term, Ornstein opined that the Supreme Court is rapidly transforming into courts seen in authoritarian governments seen in other parts of the world.

"I wonder how long it will take before Americans wake up to the brutal reality that the US Supreme Court has staged a coup, brazenly seizing power from the other two branches in a way that is utterly contrary to the framers vision of the role of a court and a judiciary," he tweeted. "And it is crystal clear that if [former President] Donald Trump wins, the Supreme Court will be much closer to the Russian or Hungarian courts than the one in our constitution."

READ MORE:'Loss of trust': Growing chorus of federal judges speak out against 'out of step' SCOTUS

Ornstein's tweet comes on the heels of a busy week for SCOTUS, with justices siding with a January 6 insurrectionist in his challenge of a criminal charge against him — potentially impacting charges filed against hundreds of other participants in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Court also notably overturned 40 years of precedent after officially disposing of a long-respected legal process known as the Chevron Doctrine.

Under that doctrine — which was first established in the 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council case — courts deferred to experts within federal agencies to interpret how federal laws impact the industries those agencies are tasked with regulating. In summing up January’s oral arguments, SCOTUSBlog noted that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out that if the Court overturned the Chevron Doctrine, it would mean policy decisions wouldn’t rest with experts working for federal agencies, but with the Court itself. After Friday's ruling overturning that precedent, the federal judiciary now has additional powers to set policy within all federal agencies.

Judges taking the place of experts in deciding how to interpret regulations could prove problematic, as Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch recently demonstrated in his opinion in a separate decision. Forbes reported that in the Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency case, Gorsuch mistakenly referred to the pollutant nitrogen oxide as "nitrous oxide," which is the laughing gas used by oral hygienists.

Perhaps the most highly anticipated decision of this term is Trump v. United States, in which the former president is arguing that he has absolute broad criminal immunity for all official acts carried out as president. His D.C. election interference trial has been on hold while SCOTUS considered his argument, which was already rejected by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and by a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel. Despite flags seen flying outside two of conservative Justice Samuel Alito's homes that were carried by insurrectionists, the justice refused calls to recuse, and Chief Justice John Roberts declined to meet with two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss the incidents.

READ MORE:Flag outside Alito's vacation home 'literally carried by insurrectionists': J6 investigator

Ornstein isn't alone in his view of the Roberts Court becoming an increasingly partisan institution. Earlier this week, Newsweek reported that multiple federal judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents are casting doubt on the Court's ability to rule on cases in an objective manner.

David S. Tatel, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton to the D.C. Circuit, wrote in his memoir that his "low regard" for SCOTUS prompted him to retire from the bench.

"My views, I think, are widely shared throughout the judicial system," Tatel said. "Obviously, there are people who don't agree with them, but there are, I can assure you, a large number of judges who will not find anything I've said in this book surprising."

READ MORE:'Political and traitorous decision': Experts outraged by SCOTUS taking Trump immunity case

===

an 9 24

In Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants have been fearing for their safety after former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), promoted the racist and debunked conspiracy theory that Haitians in the area have been kidnapping residents' dogs and cats and eating them.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, both conservative Republicans, have said there's zero truth to the claim. And DeWine praised Haitian immigrants in Ohio as "great workers" and "a boost to the economy."

The Washington Post's Catherine Rampell, in her September 24 column, cites the bogus claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio as a troubling example of the way in which MAGA rhetoric echoes the "blood and soil" themes that fascist dictators used in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s.

READ MORE:[This far-right MAGA candidate is exposing Trump’s Project 2025 lies

The columnist cautions that in many cases, "equating a political figure with fascists sounds absurd" and is "so over the top." But in Trump's case, she warns, it's accurate.

"In recent weeks," Rampell explains, "the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) have ramped up their baseless claims about violent invasions from impure foreigners, echoing 'blood and soil'-style rhetoric deployed nearly a century ago. At a rally this past weekend in North Carolina, Trump declared that 'a vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens will invade across our borders, stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life.' Chillingly, he added that migrants were already 'attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest.'"

Rampell continues, "This followed earlier remarks in Arizona, in which he alleged that 'young American girls' are 'being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.' Vance has likewise baselessly accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio of not only butchering and eating people's pets, but also, of killing people."

The columnist notes that before Vance became a Trump ally, he described him as "America's Hitler."

READ MORE:'Furious' Trump is panicked as MAGA becomes monster he no longer controls: analyst

"Lest Trump's fascist echoes be too faint for Vance to hear these days, the former president occasionally cranks up the volume with antisemitic tropes," Rampell observes. "For instance, he accused American Jews of voting for 'the enemy' and agreed with a radio host that Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, is a 'crappy Jew.' Debates over 'good' and 'bad' Jews rarely end well for Jews."

READ MORE:['Are you trying to lose the election?' Haley rips Senate candidate for remark about women

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===

Take Trumpist threats to jail journalists seriously

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 09/23/24 mma

Last year, after I criticized the Republican political operative Mike Davis, he publicly declared that he had added me to a list he maintains of Americans he would imprison if he led the Justice Department. I am far from alone: The former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer has issued similar threats to several of my colleagues as well as journalists at other outlets.

When Davis is challenged about his openly fascistic musings, he retreats to claiming that his deranged threats are only trolling. But two disturbing reports last week show that if Davis is just kidding about punishing the press and other presumed Trump critics, portions of the MAGA movement — including Donald Trump himself — are not in on the joke.

Indeed, Davis’ psychotic behavior helped turn him into a MAGA favorite who gets floated for a high-ranking role in a second Trump administration — perhaps even attorney general. The former president’s most zealous supporters, who frequently call for politicized prosecutions against his foes, can’t get enough of Davis’ authoritarian diatribes.

It’s not just trolling: Trump is an authoritarian leading an authoritarian movement, and if he returns to the White House, he will again try to carry out his authoritarian impulses. And journalists, whom the former president often describes as the “enemy of the people,” will not be spared.

*A Mike Davis post from X/Twitter. Davis claims to have “five lists, ready to go,” if he becomes attorney general; List 2 is people he would indict and List 4 is people he would imprison in the “DC gulag” or Guantanamo Bay.

Davis told a Politico reporter he was trolling. Then MAGA thugs cornered the reporter.

In a profile of Davis published Friday, Politico reporter Adam Wren discussed being accosted by Trumpist goons while he was reporting from the Republican National Convention.

Wren’s piece chronicles how Davis’ star has risen within the MAGA movement due to his willingness to defend Trump in the wake of his indictments on state and federal changes. Wren particularly highlights Davis’ incendiary calls for retaliatory prosecutions if Trump is elected in November, such as his August 2023 statement that he would use a “three-week reign of terror” as attorney general to carry out his “five lists” of people to fire, indict, deport, imprison, and pardon.

But in interviews for the piece, Davis maintained to Wren that his statements about sending people like me to a “gulag” shouldn’t be taken literally. From the profile (emphasis in the original):

Davis will admit to being quite serious about much of what he says in the media, including wanting to dismantle the power of the federal government, an idea he has held onto since his Gingrich days. But he told me he is obviously joking about some of the more inflammatory promises — putting kids in cages and detaining journalists in a gulag. He later told me the sound bite was “a self-inflicted wound,” but also said he “didn’t want to back down from it.”

“It’s hilarious that it’s so easy to trigger these people. I’m obviously trolling them,” Davis told me of Democrats.

Davis’ allies are apparently not quite so sure.

Wren writes that when he accompanied Davis to a ninth-floor hotel bar frequented by the Trump family and their hangers-on during the Republican National Convention, he observed Davis being “greeted by Republican revelers like a caesar” — and overheard Donald Trump Jr. telling the GOP operative, “I want you to be my father’s attorney general for all four years.”

Then a woman “demanded” that Wren either delete his notes of that interaction or hand over his phone, “recruited four men to block the elevators” when he refused, and issued a not-terribly-veiled threat. Unable to access the elevators to leave the bar, Wren wrote that he fled down the stairs, pursued by two of the goons.

Wren further described the incident in an interview with The Bulwark:

IFrame Content

Davis, Wren explained in his piece, subsequently “confronted the aide near the elevators and dressed her down” and told the reporter what happened was “fucking shocking.”

The Politico profile concludes with an adviser to Donald Trump Jr. telling Wren that the behavior he had experienced was unacceptable — and also that Don Jr.’s comments to Davis about serving as attorney general were merely “trolling.”

Donald Trump spent his White House years demanding — and receiving — probes of his enemies

In a lengthy investigation published over the weekend, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt reviewed the cases of 10 individuals who “faced federal pressure of one kind or another” following Trump’s “public or private demands for them to be targeted by the government” during his presidency.

Schmidt revealed:

Schmidt’s list of investigations Trump demanded into his foes is lengthy but by no means exhaustive. It mentions, for example, that “federal prosecutors and a special counsel examined nearly all the issues and conspiracy theories Mr. Trump raised about Mrs. Clinton, her campaign and the Clinton Foundation,” but it omits the ultimately fruitless two-year review of her role as secretary of state in the sale of the company known as Uranium One that he had sought.

Nor does it reference every instance in which Trump sought government retaliation against his critics. Schmidt’s list notes that “the Justice Department obtained phone and email records for reporters for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times” as part of leak investigations, but it does not detail Trump’s efforts to use federal regulatory powers to punish news outlets.

Nevertheless, it shows quite clearly that Trump’s impulse to prosecute his political foes found few restraints during his presidency — and could be even more dangerous in a second term.

The staffing plans developed under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are intended to empower loyalists while keeping out people like McGahn, who reportedly tried to prevent Trump from exercising his whims. Meanwhile, presidential efforts to pressure Justice Department officials to take action were specifically rendered immune from federal prosecution thanks to the radical doctrine the Supreme Court enshrined over the summer in Trump v. United States.

Trump, for his part, continues to regularly accuse his political opponents of crimes. That has critics worried he would once again urge the Justice Department to initiate investigations if he returned to office. But Trump’s supporters say such claims are overwrought. “His defenders often seek to explain away Mr. Trump’s threats to take legal action against opponents as campaign trail bluster,” Schmidt wrote.

In other words, they’re claiming that Trump is just trolling.

Related

  1. ### Trump Jr. says he wants self-described “Islamophobe” Laura Loomer as White House press secretary and Mike Davis as attorney general

11/10/23 11:39 AM EST

  1. ### “Trump's viceroy of DC”: The violent threats and bigotry of MAGA media favorite Mike Davis

02/29/24 11:08 AM EST

  1. ### Trump is threatening to use the government to “come down hard” on the free press. Believe him.

11/30/23

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Christian nationalists more likely to support 'all forms of authoritarianism': report an 9 24

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an 9 24

When former President Donald Trump debated Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia on September 10, he hoped to frighten Americans into voting for him. But many of Harris' supporters — from arch-conservative former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) and The Bulwark's Mona Charen (a former Nancy Reagan speechwriter) to self-described "democratic socialists" like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — have been warning that the real threat the U.S. is facing is the possibility of a second Trump presidency.

In an article published on September 23, the Washington Post's Ashley Parker details Trump's use of fear on the campaign trail.

"In Donald Trump’s imaginary world," Parker explains, "Americans can't venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors' cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day's end having undergone gender reassignment surgery."

READ MORE:Harris sees 'largest favorability increase for any politician' since Bush post-9/11: report

Parker continues, "The former president's imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris Administration.

The Post reporter stresses that Trump often promotes outright lies with his use of fear. For example, Trump falsely accused Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, of promoting "execution after birth" — which, Parker notes, is "illegal in all states."

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, Parker observes, believes that Trump is even more hinged in 2024 than he was in 2016 or 2020.

In a September 7 post on X, formerly Twitter, Rosenberg wrote, "The percentage of his speeches that are about things that happen in this world, not in his imaginary world, is plummeting. He's spending far more time in a place where he's a hero not a villain, where Hannibal Lecter is a real person, where climate change isn't real, where he is running against Joe Biden, where Russia is an ally not an enemy, where the economy is weak not strong, where crime is exploding not falling, where the flow to the border is higher today than when he was President (it isn’t), where the deficit is rising, not falling, where he hasn't already turned his Presidency over to Vance and Elon, where he is not a rapist, fraudster, traitor and felon."

READ MORE:A grim question that must be asked

According to Parker, Post analysis shows how frequently Trump lies.

"In Trump's presidency alone," Parker observes, "an analysis by The Post's Fact Checker found that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims — an average of about 21 untruths per day.

READ MORE:Trump is 'losing women voters' badly — here's why it may get even worse

*Ashley Parker's full Washington Post article is available at this link (subscription required).

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nov 2023 an 2x?

With a government shutdown looming a week from today, the House of Representatives adjourned yesterday for the weekend after Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson failed to get a successful vote on two essential funding bills.

One, a transportation bill, would have gutted Amtrak, so a few east coast Republicans objected; the other, funding government operations and oversight of banks, went down in flames because it had a draconian anti-abortion provision built into it and Tuesday’s election appears to have spooked the GOP.

Just a week earlier, Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott — who became a near billionaire running a company convicted of the largest ($1.7 billion) Medicare fraud in American history and hails from Ron DeSantis’ home state — endorsed Donald Trump.

These stories are connected, and answer the question: “Why have Republicans in the House and Senate become so unable or unwilling to do the nation’s business?”

It turns out they actually want the chaos they’re creating, the government defaults, the mass shooters, the fights on school boards and city councils, the racist, antisemitic, and homophobic vigilantes. They think it will all work to their advantage: none of this is accidental.

They think it will discourage voters by amplifying American cynicism and discouragement, making it easier for them to take over.

Rick Scott is betting that when Trump becomes president and declares martial law on his first day, as he’s promised to do, morbidly rich people like Scott will be unscathed.

His vast wealth has always insulated him from having to interact shoulder-to-shoulder with the unwashed masses: private jets, exclusive clubs and restaurants, chauffeurs and butlers, a dedicated security detail and gated communities.

The billionaires and CEOs funding the Republicans in Congress who are disrupting our government believe the same thing. They think they’re invincible. They believe the GOP embrace of fascism to replace the democracy that is increasingly rejecting them at the polls will keep them safe.

They’re wrong.

From the time in 1980 when David Koch ran for Vice President on a platform of ending Social Security and Medicare along with gutting all federal support for education, healthcare, and “welfare” programs, “Libertarian” billionaires have worked to end every part of what they call “big government” that may help average working people, the environment, or the poor.

Reagan won the election that year, but Koch’s worldview prevailed, taking over the GOP.

Over the past 42 years, Reaganomics has moved over 60,000 factories and nearly 20 million good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

It’s cut taxes on billionaires to the point they pay an average 3.4% income tax (when they pay anything at all: Trump, taking in billions, paid $750 a year for almost two decades).

Reagan’s policies destroyed the American union movement and stole $51 trillion from working class people, putting almost every penny of it into the money bins of the GOP’s morbidly rich patrons.

Devastating the working class was actually part of the plan: now that the American middle class has gone from over 60% of us down to a mere 43%of us, Republicans are trying to harness the outrage people are feeling and then use it to tear our society apart.

Out of the chaos, they believe they can rebuild a nation on the foundations of hypermasculinity, racism, religious bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, and threats of violence. These are the weapons that every fascist leader in history has relied on, and in every case those leaders — from Mussolini to Hitler to Putin — were first heavily supported by the morbidly rich who thought they could “control the madman.”

Pro tip: you can’t control the madman.

Fritz Thyssen, the steel baron who was one of Germany’s richest industrialists in the 1930s, wrote a book about how he made the same bet American billionaires and Republican politicians are making today: he thought he could ride a tiger that would make him richer and it would never turn and devour him.

His book I Paid Hitler (my book-collecting father gave me a copy 51 years ago for my 21st birthday) — which lays out how he personally convinced Hindenberg to make Hitler Chancellor and raised the Nazi Party’s first 3 million Reichsmarks so they could win their first national election — reads like a modern-day tragedy.

At first, Thyssen got along with Hitler, even believed he was influencing the man, but when he began to object to some of the Nazi leader’s worse excesses he had to flee the country with his family to avoid being murdered.

Fascists play for keeps.

Just ask the families of the four police officers killed by Trump’s January 6th rioters. Or the mourning parents of over 1,000 children Trump stole at the southern border and then trafficked into a “Christian” adoption scam and are still missing.

Once they acquire power, fascists rarely relinquish it, regardless of how many people must die, how many lives are destroyed. When they fail to hold onto power, as Hitler did when he was arrested in the 1920s and Trump did in 2020, they fight like hell to regain it. And once they succeed, their commitment to revenge makes them ten times more deadly.

Speaker Mike Johnson and his House Republicans are making the same bet as the morbidly rich men who own them. They naively believe that fascist leaders like Trump actually care about “unborn children,” budget deficits, and Drag Queen Story Hour.

In fact, all America’s morbidly rich who fund the GOP care about is power and the obscene wealth that is protected by it. Everything else is chum they toss into the water to bring along the lowest-common-denominator voters. And once Trump seizes total power, he’ll turn on them, too.

Nonetheless, American billionaires are still funding and thus growing this fascist movement within the GOP, just like Fritz Thyssen did back in the day.

Pushing conspiracy theories. Casting minorities (gender, race, religion) and politicians as actual evil. Passing laws that increasingly narrow our democracy until one day there will only be one party governing this country and that party will be wholly beholden to them.

Can they pull it off? Can they create a righwing movement so powerful it will lock the Democratic Party out of national power forever? Will their stooges on the Supreme Court help them block future Democrats from the White House with more corrupt endorsements of political bribery, gerrymandering, and voter purges?

Or will the beast they’re empowering turn on them, like it did on Fritz Thyssen when he had to flee his homeland to avoid the brutal fate so many of his wealthy peers suffered?

Outlawing actual (as opposed to purely symbolic and impotent) opposition took a few months in Chile when Pinochet took over; it took about two years in Germany; arguably four or five years in Russia. If Trump, DeSantis, or somebody like them becomes president next year, it could happen very quickly. They even have a plan for it, called Project 2025 according to the Washington Post.

It can happen here. And the morbidly rich are not going to save us.

Next year’s election will determine the fate and future of what’s left of our democracy, so badly battered by bought-off and corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and in Congress: this cancer that started with Reagan and was put on steroids by Trump’s racist “birther” claims about Obama in 2008 has now fully metastasized across American society.

As long as our rightwing billionaires can keep their billions in dark-money “donations” relatively quiet and minimize outrage over their practice of nakedly purchasing elections, of carpet-bombing American homes with lie-filled television advertising, of turning the algorithmic social media screws to fill our nation with hate, the path we’re following won’t change.

That will take an overwhelming number of us waking up and becoming politically active.

And we’re going to have to get it done soon, while it’s still legal to write, protest, and vote. Because if Trump or someone like him is elected, all those rights will quickly vanish.

===

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vic of bubble gertz finally implodes?

bubble provides praise and protects from crit/reality no court jester? mil and head of state laughing at you, fired by 81 million ~ fascism

his plan was to doinate, tie her to failed biden policies, only in final stat why not done it? he stood over/behind hillary creepily, kamala shook his hand broke his space;

satis b/c jiu jitsu biden old man attacks; he was crazy uncle out of touch gpa

9 24

MATT GERTZ (MEDIA MATTERS SENIOR FELLOW): If you go through the fact-checking in the debate, it's like four things. One of them is, "Actually, there were no pets being eaten in Ohio." One of them is, "You didn't actually win the 2020 election."

JOHN FUGELSANG (HOST): Small detail.

GERTZ: You know, it's just that we're talking about, like, basic stuff. You know, "Actually, violent crime is down, not up, according to the FBI." And I think the fourth one is --

FUGELSANG: And then "Women aren't murdering their newborn babies. Women aren't committing infanticide with the help of doctors and hospitals."

GERTZ: And, so, that's the whole list. Like, if you can't get through that level of fact-checking in your debate and you're also getting dramatically more time than Kamala Harris did -- I think he had, like, eight more minutes total, something like that. He can't actually drive a message. And the reason he can't drive a message, as I've written, is because he is so deeply entrapped in this right-wing media bubble. He just is focused on the bizarre fixations of the weirdos who love him and have their own TV shows.

FUGELSANG: That's it.

GERTZ: And, you know, at that point, you end up saying you you end up talking about how dogs and cats are being eaten in Ohio and saying things that are not just wrong, but if someone came up to you at a bar and started talking to you about that, you would move to the other end of the bar. Like, you would not want to be near someone who is randomly screaming about how the pets are being eaten. It's just, it is totally incomprehensible.

...

But if you're a normal person, like, if you're just going about your daily life, and all of a sudden -- and you say, "Huh. I think I want to find out some information about the presidential election. I'm gonna watch the debate tonight." And all of a sudden, one of the candidates is screaming about cats being eaten. You just -- that is not an appealing situation for you. And that, I think -- it's a huge problem for Donald Trump. It's a huge problem for the Republican Party as a whole that all of these crazy weirdos have such a huge impact on the party's message.

...

FUGELSANG: I mean, Donald Trump completely failed to bring anybody new to his ticket. But, Matthew, this has got to be because he's listening to these right-wing influencers. He doesn't seem to be -- listening to the people he pays to give him advice.

GERTZ: Yeah. I mean, I think that's a huge part of it and also that he is personally addicted, to getting his news from these crazy people. Like, on the one hand, they're speaking to him directly, like Laura Loomer apparently is now traveling with him to campaign events. But also, I mean, he gets his news from watching Fox News and seeing what people are Truth Social-ing at him and, you know, basically immersing himself in these crazy places.

This was the largest audience that either candidate is likely to see for the entire election cycle. Right? This was, it was 57 million people tuned into this debate. Dramatically more than either of them got for their convention speech, way more than, obviously, either of them will get for any other speech or television appearance or anything else. A huge opportunity to speak to people who might not be inclined to vote for you and make your case. And he just couldn't do it. He couldn't come close to doing it. He ended up babbling and ranting about all manner of nonsense partly because Kamala Harris was incredibly effective at baiting him, but partly because he is psychologically incapable of not taking that bait under any circumstance.

===

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an 9 24

Critics of former President Donald Trump have been debating the shape that authoritarianism would take in the United States if Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris in November and the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 agenda is carried out.

Some critics have predicted that Trump would embrace the fascist model favored by Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain, Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Alberto Stroessner in Paraguay. But other critics have argued that Trump 2.0 would favor a more subtle brand of authoritarianism along the lines of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's so-called "illiberal democracy" in Hungary — where checks and balances have been greatly eroded but technically, voting rights still exist.

In a podcast discussion for The Atlantic's "Autocracy in America" series, hosts Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev stress that capturing the courts is one of the ways in which authoritarians undermine democracy and advance their agenda.

READ MORE:'Nothing is off the table': Trump plans for 'bureaucratic bullying' of enemies if he wins

"In a democracy," Applebaum explains, "we have something called rule of law, and that means that the law exists independent of politics. There are lawyers. There are courts. There are prosecutors, who at least, in theory — they are trying to legitimately find out who's broken the law, who's guilty, who's not guilty…. whereas in a dictatorship, that’s not what the law is for. The law is not to find out what happened. It’s not to establish the truth. It's not to find out who's guilty and who's not guilty. The law is to pursue politics by a different means."

Applebaum warned thatdemocracy can be eroded by "the politicization of the courts." And Pomerantsev agreed, telling her, "What I find so worrying in America is that people actually feel, already, that the justice system is politicized."

Pomerantsev continued, "They already feel that there's a red justice system in one place and a blue justice system in the other. And when people talk about the dangers of democracy being eroded in America — when I hear that from so many Americans — that's when I get really worried because if you can't get anything above politics, that's a very, very dangerous place."

Applebaum added that in "nondemocratic systems," the law "is about punishing political enemies with absurd cases" and "about justices not thinking about themselves as justices but as bureaucrats trying to climb a greasy pole."

READ MORE:'Hell isn't hot enough': Fury at Trump as more school evacuations follow lies

*Listen to The Atlantic's full podcast at this link.

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trmp in own spin room after fail; next day said polls won 65-95%

The right’s post-debate assault on ABC is a preview of Trump’s authoritarian agenda

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 09/13/24 mma

Donald Trump’s flailing performance at Tuesday night’s debate triggered a multiday right-wing freakout at the ABC News moderators, punctuated by calls from the former president and his allies to target the network and its parent company with a regulatory crackdown, congressional investigation, and even prosecutions. It’s a dark preview of the authoritarian tactics they could use if Trump returns to the White House and carries out his stated desire to retaliate against news outlets whose coverage displeases him.

Trump used Tuesday’s opportunity to address a massive national audience at the debate to spew nonsense incomprehensible to people who aren’t familiar with the deep lore of the right-wing fever swamps and repeatedly take the bait offered by Vice President Kamala Harris. The result was such a disaster for Trump’s campaign that he quickly called off future debates.

Trump’s right-wing media allies reacted to his disastrous performance in real time by lashing out at ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who fact-checked the former president on a handful of occasions. While debate moderators typically come in for criticism from pundits who take issue with how they handled the high-profile job, it is difficult to blame Muir or Davis for a candidate picking up a racist and false fourthhand internet rumor about Haitian immigrants in Ohio anddeclaring, [vid]“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Moreover, the right’s discussion quickly blew past mere critiques of ABC’s performance to far-reaching conspiracy theories about its purportedly corrupt behavior and calls for government retribution against the network.

“Remove ABC’s broadcast license and criminally charge the moderators and executives for campaign finance fraud,” Sean Davis, CEO of the right-wing digital outlet The Federalist, declared on X the night of the debate.

Trump himself began calling for the stripping of ABC’s broadcast license the following morning.

“ABC took a big hit last night,” he said in an interview on Fox News’ Fox & Friends. “I mean, to be honest, they're a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”

Trump’s remarks drew cheers from MAGA figures like Laura Loomer, who posted that “ABC News deserves to be INVESTIGATED.”

Trump reiterated his demand for retaliation in a Thursday night Truth Social post, claiming that “people are saying that Comrade Kamala Harris had the questions from Fake News ABC” and that if “an investigation” determines that that is the case, “ABC’s license should be TERMINATED.”

The former president then reposted a claim that an “ABC whistleblower allegedly will release an affidavit” showing that “the Harris campaign was given sample questions.” That claim originates with a random X poster — whose profile states, “Black Insurrectionist--I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS” — who claimed earlier that day to have received the purported document, which he promised to release ”before the weekend is out.”

Trump’s call for retribution has support from some Republican legislators. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) said he would demand from ABC News and the Harris campaign “all correspondence, records, and potential coordination between the two parties ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate,” while Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is threatening to “re-examine the laws” he claims allow “the left’s near-complete domination of broadcast TV”

Meanwhile, Trumpists like Eric Metaxas and Hugh Hewitt are floating boycotts of ABC parent company Disney, and Mark Penn wants an independent review of ABC’s internal communications to assess whether the network was “rigging the outcome of this debate.”

The credibility of Trump’s call to strip ABC’s license is unclear. The Federal Communications Commission does not license broadcast networks — but it does license individual broadcast stations, including the eight owned and operated directly by ABC and the hundreds of additional affiliates. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Biden appointee, responded to Trump’s call by suggesting it runs afoul of the First Amendment, and Ajit Pai, her Trump-appointed predecessor, offered a similar response when Trump called for retaliation against NBC as president. That said, one of the goals of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is to ensure future Trump appointees are willing to prioritize his personal whims.

Moreover, Trump’s eagerness to use such tactics to halt critical coverage — and the right’s support for them — is a dire sign for the future, even if the specific deployment of retaliatory FCC licensing decisions doesn’t work out.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has a cover story in its latest issue detailing the possibility that a second Trump administration could be characterized by “slow-burn authoritarianism,” which Sargent describes as “lower-profile” efforts to use state power to create hardships for Trump’s critics and benefits for his allies.

Trump’s attack on the media is likely to follow such a pattern if he returns to the White House, as I told Sargent on The Daily Blast podcast earlier this week. Rather than the high-profile action of stripping broadcast licenses, Trump’s allies could use the threat of adverse regulation or congressional investigations to more quietly encourage corporate owners to clamp down on critical coverage or sell their networks to someone who will.

Indeed, the Trump administration pursued that strategy, albeit largely unsuccessfully, during his presidency. Trump-controlled agencies issued unfavorable regulatory decisions to the corporate owners of disfavored outlets like CNN and The Washington Post, and favorable ones to the Trump-aligned owners of Fox News and Sinclair Broadcast Group.

The owners of CNN and The Washington Post held out against this pressure before but it’s unclear how they would respond to a second Trump term, particularly if the coercion becomes more intense. Nor is it clear what ABC’s Disney ownership — with sprawling business interests that produce numerous bureaucratic pressure points — would do if Trump moved it to the top of the target list.

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an 8 24

Countless Donald Trump foes, from special counsel Jack Smith to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. to former Elle Magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, have been inundated with death threats from the former president's MAGA supporters.

The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson, a Never Trump conservative and former GOP strategist, obtained a license to carry a concealed weapon because of the MAGA death threats he has received. And Paul Pelosi, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, was attacked by a hammer-wielding MAGA extremist who broke into their home in October 2022.

Many Trump critics fear the possibility of violence during the 2024 presidential election — a possibility that liberal economist Robert Reich, former labor secretary in the Clinton Administration, explores in his December 19 column for The Guardian.

POLL:Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Reich notes that death threats have been a disturbing reality for many of Trump's detractors, including Smith, Judge Tanya Chutkan and Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis. And Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, he adds, said she received "64 death threats" within three weeks after filing a lawsuit calling for Trump to be removed from the state's election ballot.

These are not isolated incidents, Reich warns, but rather, show a pattern of violence from the MAGA movement — and everyone from judges and prosecutors to members of Congress has been threatened and feared for their safety.

"In 2016, the Capitol Police recorded fewer than 900 threats against members of Congress," Reich explains. "In 2017, after Trump took office, that figure more than quadrupled, according to the Capitol Police. The numbers continued to rise every year of the Trump presidency, peaking at 9700 in 2021.… Data also shows extraordinarily high levels of threats against mayors, federal judges, election workers and administrators, public health officials, and even school board members. The threats have clearly intimidated some Republican lawmakers."

Reich continues, "The retiring Sen. Mitt Romney recounted, in McKay Coppins' biography of him, that during Trump's 23 January 2021 impeachment for incitement of insurrection, a member of the Republican Senate leadership was leaning toward voting to convict Trump. But after several other senators expressed concern about their personal safety and that of their children, the senator in question voted to acquit. Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney said that in that impeachment vote, 'there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.'

READ MORE:Election workers 'scared to death' of threats from 'volatile' conspiracy theorists in 2024

"Political violence," Reich warns, "is an inherent part of fascism."

"America is not the Weimar Republic on the eve of 1933, and Trump is not Hitler," the economist/Guardian columnist argues. "But it is important to understand the parallels."

READ MORE:PA man imprisoned for death threat against Eric Swalwell announces run for Congress

*Robert Reich's full Guardian column is available at this link.

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When Vice President Kamala Harris held a large campaign rally with her running mate, Tim Walz, at Philadelphia late Tuesday afternoon, August 6, the Minnesota governor was more than happy take credit for an insult that numerous Democrats are using to attack former President Donald Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and other MAGA Republicans: "weird."

The "weird" insult originated with Walz. And Harris' running mate drew loud applause when he told the Philly crowd, "You know it, you feel it: These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell."

In an op-ed published by MSNBC the following day, historian/author Ruth Ben-Ghiat lays out some reasons why the "weird" insult infuriates MAGA Republicans.

READ MORE:Ex-fundamentalist sounds alarm about presidential election and 'Christian patriarchy'

"For scholars of authoritarianism," Ben-Ghiat explains, "the success of 'weird' is no surprise. That's because humor has long been one of the most effective weapons of anti-authoritarian politics. Behind the facade of their omnipotence, most strongmen are brittle and insecure personalities. They don't mind being called evil, but being ridiculed is a different matter."

During its 49-year history, "Saturday Night Live" has lampooned one U.S. president after another. Most of them, from Gerald R. Ford to George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden, had a sense of humor about it. But Trump was seriously offended by Alec Baldwin's portrayal of him.

Ben-Ghiat, author of the book "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present Reprint Edition," emphasizes that one thing authoritarians really can't stand is being mocked.

"Strongmen have their own sadistic sense of humor, which is amply displayed in the awful authoritarian spectacles staged by their governments," according to Ben-Ghiat. "The Nazis enjoyed making communists who entered Dachau concentration camp in 1933, like Hans Beimler, wear signs that said 'A hearty welcome!' But they cannot take a joke when they are the targets."

READ MORE:New rule to 'threaten' possibility of 'secure election results' in Georgia: report

Ben-Ghiat continues, "That's why they have to surround themselves with sycophants and lackeys, and their enablers know their prestige must be policed. When a man brought his pet rabbit named Mussolini to a bar in fascist Italy, thinking others would enjoy seeing him order it around, he was quickly arrested and served a year in confinement."

READ MORE:'No caller ID': Walz reportedly didn't answer when Kamala Harris called to offer VP nod

*Ruth Ben-Ghiat's full op-ed for MSNBC is available at this link.

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Psychotherapist/author Steven Hassan, an ex-member of the Unification Church, is known for his expertise on cults. And he views former President Donald Trump as much more than a right-wing politician: Hassan sees Trump as the leader of a cult-like "authoritarian" movement.

During an interview with Salon's Chauncey DeVega, Hassan (author of the book "The Cult of Trump") warned that "silencing critics" will be a key part of Trump's far-right agenda this election year.

"Steven Hassan possesses a deep understanding Donald Trump's power and control over the MAGA people and the larger Republican Party," DeVega explains. "He has been warning, for at least eight years, that Donald Trump is not a normal politician, but instead, the leader of an extremely dangerous authoritarian personality cult."

READ MORE:[JD Vance suggested America should 'punish' people for not having children

Hassan didn't mince words during the interview, laying out some reasons why the United States is "in a lot of trouble."

"The silencing of critics is an example of authoritarian control," Hassan told DeVega. "Information control has several basic elements such as deception, overt lying, withholding vital information and/or distorting it. Authoritarian control also involves telling members to not talk to ex-members or critics, only believing in the propaganda and information that is approved by the leader and the cult organization. We are seeing that play out in front of us with Trump and the MAGA movement."

Hassan continued, "The attempt on Trump's life has just amplified and spread it. There are too many powerful people in too many different positions of influence in America and around the world for the MAGA movement and Trumpism to collapse. The anti-democracy movement is too widespread now for it to just dissipate quickly. It will take lots of work to do that."

When DeVega mentioned that some political pundits consider it "not polite" to describe Trump supporters as part of a cult, Hassan responded, "I would tell them that the MAGA movement is, in fact, an authoritarian cult."

READ MORE: 'Same old show': Harris claps back at 'divisive' Trump’s attack on her racial identity

The anti-cult expert continued, "It is dangerous, destructive, anti-human rights, anti-woman, racist and white supremacist, anti-gay and has many other antisocial values and beliefs. The Trump authoritarian personality and the larger anti-democracy movement are very dangerous. People tried to stop these evil forces in the 1930s and 1940s. We can learn from them and rise to the challenge today. It is the very definition of being responsible to tell the truth about these dangers."

READ MORE: Trump allies accuse Kellyanne Conway of aggressively 'undermining' JD Vance

*Chauncey DeVega's full interview with Steven Hassan for Salon is available at this link.

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an raw 7 24

former President Donald Trump's allies are working to reshape American law into a weapon to be used against their political enemies, wrote Jesse Wegman in a scathing editorial for The New York Times.

Trump's pick of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) underscores this, he wrote, because Vance embodies the far-right's commitment to a key goal of the controversial Project 2025 plan to transform the government into an authoritarian loyalty cult to the GOP.

Vance, wrote Wegman, "predicted ... that the former president, who had been recently disgraced by his insurrectionary attempt to overturn the 2020 election, would nevertheless run again in 2024. Should Mr. Trump win, Mr. Vance said, he had some advice: 'Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.' And if the courts ruled against him? No problem, Mr. Vance said: Just blow them off."

This is already happening, wrote Wegman — and another of Trump's appointees, District Judge Aileen Cannon, is showing how it will work in her move to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, which special counsel Jack Smith is already moving to appeal.

In her decision, Cannon concluded Smith, "Was not validly appointed to his post because no federal law authorizes the appointment of someone from outside the Justice Department to perform that task," wrote Wegman, noting she based this entirely on a non-majority concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas in the case granting Trump a presumption of immunity in a separate case.

ALSO READ:'Keep lying': Late night Trump rant about Harris quickly turns against him

"As a matter of law and fact, this is not merely wrong, it is flagrantly, embarrassingly wrong ... It is not a close or complicated legal question" — indeed, the Supreme Court ruled the law allows this in 1974, and Cannon pretends they didn't.

These sorts of machinations by Vance and Cannon are exactly what to expect the whole government to become should Trump get his way, Wegman concluded ominously.

"This is what a second Trump term would look like," he wrote. "Ambitious judges who may not have been Trump loyalists at first will watch what’s been happening in recent days and get the message about what it takes to advance their careers. In this way, Judge Cannon embodies the future that Mr. Vance described in 2021. She is part of a legal elite raised on Trumpism that will use their perches in the judiciary and legal world to enforce a one-sided version of law that is about power and outcomes over any liberal principle."

In other words, he said, this is a reality where "the rule of law is for suckers or, worse, only for specific people. Our people."

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Some Donald Trump supporters are dismissive of arguments that the former president is a would-be dictator, claiming that Democrats, via "wokeness" and "cancel culture," are the real authoritarians.

But other Trump voters have flat-out said they would welcome a strongman leader, and they aren't offended by Trump's praise of far-right authoritarian leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin. And members of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank that has become increasingly MAGA in recent years, have argued that liberal democracy is failing the United States.

In an article published by The New Republic on July 18, journalist Susan Milligan details reasons some Americans believe that rejecting democracy would be a good idea.

READ MORE:'Made violence his brand': Fascism scholar says threat of 2nd Trump term 'uniquely dangerous'

The "very uncomfortable and inconvenient truth," according to Milligan, is that "a big chunk of the public actually wants an authoritarian leader." The journalist notes that 32 percent of Americans favor a military regime or authoritarian leader for the U.S.

"Why would people want to live under an authoritarian's thumb?" Milligan writes. "It's rooted, experts say, in a psychological need for security — real or perceived — and a desire for conformity, a goal that becomes even more acute as the country undergoes dramatic demographic and social changes. People also like to obey a strong leader who will protect the group — especially if it is the 'right' group whose interests will be protected."

Joe Pierre, a health sciences clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco's Weill Institute for Neurosciences, told The New Republic that people who favor authoritarianism believe it will be used against others rather than against them.

Pierre told The New Republic, "For those of us who value representative democracy, the fact that some of our fellow citizens might prefer authoritarianism can be surprising or even unfathomable…. Authoritarianism and a 'strongman' leader who's willing to trample over civil rights can sound like a very appealing solution. In turn, democracy — which tells us that our ideological opposites deserve to be heard or should be given equal voice — can sound like the root of the problem."

READ MORE: 'Let's be realists': Conservative lays out game plan for surviving 'nightmare scenario' if Trump wins

Kets de Vries, who teaches business at INSEAD in Paris, had similar insights.

De Vries told The New Republic, "Human beings are actually very primitive. They are looking for a father figure to take care of them. They are willing to be blind to all the defects of Trump. He appeals to their most primitive instincts."

READ MORE: Beware: Trump is Project 2025 — and he cannot escape it

*Read Susan Milligan's full article for The New Republic at this link.

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an 7 24

While the beltway media spent the last week haranguing President Joe Biden over his lackluster performance in the CNN presidential debate, former President Donald Trump largely got a pass despite several days of shenanigans that Rolling Stone described as a "week from hell."

In a Friday article, Rolling Stone reporters Tom Dickinson and Asawin Suebsaeng summed up how the former president exhibited increasingly unhinged behavior while the press scrutinized Biden's debate mistakes. On his Truth Social platform, Trump posted a meme of him and his wife, Melania, with the text "Where We Go One We Go All" – the slogan of the far-right cult QAnon. The graphic also featured the letter Q, in another nod to the conspiracy theorist movement that Trump is secretly battling a cabal of wealthy elite pedophiles and will one day bring them to justice (also known as "the storm").

This is merely the latest instance of the former president flirting with the movement that researchers have described as "a danger." A 2021 study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism And Responses to Terrorism (START) found that QAnon adherents are prone to committing "acts of interpersonal violence, often targeting those around them, including their own children." Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) was a devout QAnon believer before she was elected to Congress, though she has since tried to distance herself from the movement.

READ MORE:Trump hopes you won't notice 'close partnership' with Project 2025: former Labor Secretary

That same year, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) released a report by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. That report found that, following Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, QAnon believers "likely will begin to believe they can no longer ‘trust the plan’ referenced in QAnon posts and that they have an obligation to change from serving as ‘digital soldiers’ towards engaging in real world violence."

Trump was also caught this week in a hot-mic moment in which he unleashed a profane tirade against both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris while he was golfing. The ex-president wrongly stated that he had already forced Biden out of the race and that Harris would be his general election opponent.

"She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic. She’s just so f—ing bad," Trump was heard saying.

Dickinson and Suebsaeng also characterized Trump as having a "God complex" this week, in which he praised his debate performance as "the greatest single debate performance in the long and storied history of Presidential Debates." Opining that he was "feeling himself," the two journalists noted that Trump felt his 2024 bid for the White House was "guided by divine providence."

READ MORE:Revealed: Trump's hot-mic Biden conversation while sitting in golf court leaked online

As Rolling Stone reported, Trump reposted a Truth Social user's post of a photo of Trump with the text: "GOD HAS CHOSEN HIM TO LEAD THIS FIGHT FOR FREEDOM. GOD WINS!"

Also this week, Trump called for former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) to be prosecuted for "treason" via a "televised military tribunal." Former Republican National Committee senior official Doug Heye told the outlet that Trump is benefiting from a media double standard in which Biden's every slip-up is meticulously torn apart, while Trump's increasingly erratic behavior is given a ho-hum treatment.

"[H]is language, for years, has been so over-the-top that even with his record as president, he still gets graded on a massive curve by so many voters,” Heye says. “It’s already factored in, in a way that it could never be for almost any other candidate for the presidency. Trump saying something crazy is the oldest news there is at this point. It doesn’t mean it’s not crazy, and it doesn’t mean it’s not damaging. But this [dynamic] benefits him greatly.”

Click here to read Rolling Stone's report in its entirety (subscription required).

READ MORE:Trump: 'I know nothing' about Project 2025 despite numerous ex-officials' involvement

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an 7 24

National security expert Marcy Wheeler is probing a report recently released by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) that targets the intelligence officials who discounted the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election as Russian interference.

While those intelligence officials agreed that the laptop had been tampered with, Jordan feared a "deep state" conspiracy — and dug into every aspect of the officials' identities and responsibilities in contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies.

In the interviews with the officials, Wheeler found a number of details previously unknown to the public. At one point in the questioning, former U.S. Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael Morell revealed he was concerned about Donald Trump's "deep narcissism."

Speaking to the House Judiciary Committee on April 4, 2023, Morell had already retired from government but was questioned about signing onto an intelligence letter dismissing the laptop concerns, along with a number of other communications he had despite being a private citizen.

At one point, the committee asked about an email that he sent to others who signed the letter in which Morell called the 2020 election, "The most important election since 1860 and 1864 when the very existence of the country was on the ballot."

"You know, it's funny, reading the letter from the generals supporting President Trump, I agree with a number of the points that they make," Morell said when asked why he thought the election was so important. "I'm as concerned about the defense budget. I'm a pretty conservative guy when it comes to national security.

"But I have to tell you that, you know, spending 33 years at CIA and watching literally hundreds of world leaders during that time, President Trump's personality traits deeply concerned me, what I believed to be deep narcissism, what I believed to be deep paranoia, what I believe to be a type of sadism where you — not sexually, of course, but a type of sadism where you, you know, are happy when your opponents have been injured in some way — I'm talking politically — that those were all traits that I saw in foreign leaders who did significant damage to their country and significant damage to the democracies of their country," Morell continued.

He specifically cited leaders he felt match that kind of Trump personality: Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Vladimir Putin in Russia.

"So, I was deeply concerned about the potential impact of President Trump on our democracy," Morell explained. "And, you know, my fear, in my view, was borne out by his failure to act on January 6, 2021. So that's what I meant when I wrote that. That's what I was thinking."

Read the full transcript of the interview here.

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'Bragg will get assassinated': Jack Smith displays MAGA threats in new filing to Judge Cannon

an 6 24

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an 6 24

Trump's fundraising emails have long been viewed as over-the-top. But recently, they have, according to Rolling Stone and The New Republic, taken an especially dark turn.

On Wednesday morning, June 12, Trump's campaign sent out an e-mail that read, in all caps, "HAUL OUT THE GUILLOTINE!"

Rolling Stone's Nikki McCann Ramirez notes that "thankfully," the e-mail "was not a declaration of intent by Trump, but a melodramatic fundraising pitch accusing his political opponents of wanting to behead him."

READ MORE:'MAGA imperial presidency': Analysis reveals the radical 'theocracy' central to Project 2025

The e-mail read, "Remember when that Sicko Kathy Griffin made the rounds parading my BEHEADED head when I was President?! The radical-left CHEERED! Obama and Biden were SILENT! And the Fake News BLASTED it everywhere! The SAD and HORRIFIC TRUTH is that this is STILL the Sick Dream of every Trump-Deranged lunatic out there! And it's not just me they want gone, THEY'RE REALLY COMING AFTER YOU."

In an article published by The New Republic the same day, reporter Talia Jane cites the "guillotine" pitch as an example of how paranoid Trump's fundraising pitches are sounding.

"The e-mails, written by Trump's campaign but styled to sound like they're coming directly from Trump, intend to provoke supporters into donating," Jane observes. "A fundraising e-mail sent last week falsely claimed Biden directed the FBI to assassinate Trump, saying, 'He tried to publicly torture and humiliate me.… but he failed. He tried to raid my home and take me out with deadly force.… but he failed."

When CNN's Jim Acosta noted the "guillotine" e-mail on X, formerly Twitter, historian/author Ruth Ben-Ghiat — known for her expertise on fascism and authoritarianism — gave her take on Trump's email with a tweet.

READ MORE:Imprisoned Jan. 6 rioter leading 'network of armed militias in all 50 states': report

"From Fascism onward, authoritarians have prepared people to accept and commit violence by conjuring existential threats," she wrote. "Those threats must be not only to the beloved leader, but also to his followers. Jan. 6 was another [example]: it was a rescue operation of a cult leader in distress. Now a desperate convicted felon, Trump conjures a guillotine meant for them too. #Strongmen."

*Read Rolling Stone's full article at this link (subscription required) and The New Republic's reporting here.

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an 6 24

If he wins the election in November, former President Donald Trump's rumored top pick for his White House chief of staff would likely help him fast-track his plans to consolidate executive power and circumvent traditional checks and balances.

The Washington Post recently did a deep dive on Russ Vought — an avowed Christian nationalist who leads the far-right Center for Renewing America (CRA) — and his openly stated plans to help Trump fundamentally restructure the federal government. The Post cited anonymous sources familiar with Trump's thinking to report that Vought is under consideration to be selected as the former president's top deputy, should he defeat President Joe Biden this fall.

Under Vought's leadership, the CRA has become "a hub of Trump loyalists" according to the Post. The organization is staffed by people like former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, who was indicted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in her Georgia election interference case. Another key CRA staffer is former Trump Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, whose appointment was eventually ruled illegal by a federal judge. Both men could also have high-profile roles in a potential second Trump White House.

READ MORE:'Essence of authoritarianism': Expert warns Project 2025 would create Trump 'autocracy'

In September of 2022, Vought argued that Americans "are living in a post-Constitutional time," and called for a philosophy he referred to as "radical Constitutionalism" in order to crush the "deep state" and radically expand executive power. Vought's school of thought involves unorthodox ways of interpreting the Constitution in order to accomplish far-right political goals. This includes things like declaring the influx of undocumented immigrants to be an "invasion," then using wartime powers to handle immigration in ways that may be considered illegal.

"We showed that millions of illegal aliens coming across, and Mexican cartels holding operational control of the border, constitute an invasion,” Vought wrote in the essay. “This is where we need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”

Vought and the CRA are also closely tired to the far-right Project 2025 initiative championed by the Heritage Foundation. At the heart of Project 2025 is its 920-page blueprint for a radical restructuring of the federal government, which is entitled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." Vought authored the section on "the executive office of the President of the United States." He's also reportedly working on his own playbook for the first 180 days of a second Trump administration, which he has so far not publicly released. However, his past writings suggest his first six months as a possible White House chief of staff would be helping Trump gut the federal civil service and replace experienced career professionals with political loyalists and toadies.

According to the Post, Vought helped write Trump's "Schedule F" executive order, which would have stripped the civil service of numerous employment protection and greatly expanded the number of presidential appointees from around 5,000 to more than 54,000. President Joe Biden notably rescinded that order shortly after taking office.

READ MORE: Experts blast GOP's plan to end recreational sex: 'You're gonna love what the Manhattan DA has coming

Republican strategist Tim Chapman told the Post that the relationship between Vought and the 45th president was "a marriage of convenience."

“Russ has been pursuing an ideological agenda for a long time and views Trump’s second term as the best way to achieve it, while Trump needs people in his second term who are loyal and committed and adept at using the tools of the federal government," Chapman said.

One project Trump will likely trust Vought with is his stated goal of prosecuting his political enemies. Vought has argued against the DOJ being an independent agency, and insists that it ultimately be run at the direction of the sitting president. He told far-right activist Charlie Kirk on a podcast that he would be in favor of turning the DOJ against law enforcement officials who prosecuted Trump, and insisted the administration's response to efforts to hold Trump criminally accountable "can't just be hearings."

"It has to be investigations, an army of investigators that lead to firm convictions," he said.

READ MORE:'MAGA imperial presidency': Analysis reveals the radical 'theocracy' central to Project 2025

Click here to read the Post's report in full (subscription required).

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an 6 24

If he wins the election in November, former President Donald Trump's rumored top pick for his White House chief of staff would likely help him fast-track his plans to consolidate executive power and circumvent traditional checks and balances.

The Washington Post recently did a deep dive on Russ Vought — an avowed Christian nationalist who leads the far-right Center for Renewing America (CRA) — and his openly stated plans to help Trump fundamentally restructure the federal government. The Post cited anonymous sources familiar with Trump's thinking to report that Vought is under consideration to be selected as the former president's top deputy, should he defeat President Joe Biden this fall.

Under Vought's leadership, the CRA has become "a hub of Trump loyalists" according to the Post. The organization is staffed by people like former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, who was indicted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in her Georgia election interference case. Another key CRA staffer is former Trump Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, whose appointment was eventually ruled illegal by a federal judge. Both men could also have high-profile roles in a potential second Trump White House.

READ MORE:'Essence of authoritarianism': Expert warns Project 2025 would create Trump 'autocracy'

In September of 2022, Vought argued that Americans "are living in a post-Constitutional time," and called for a philosophy he referred to as "radical Constitutionalism" in order to crush the "deep state" and radically expand executive power. Vought's school of thought involves unorthodox ways of interpreting the Constitution in order to accomplish far-right political goals. This includes things like declaring the influx of undocumented immigrants to be an "invasion," then using wartime powers to handle immigration in ways that may be considered illegal.

"We showed that millions of illegal aliens coming across, and Mexican cartels holding operational control of the border, constitute an invasion,” Vought wrote in the essay. “This is where we need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”

Vought and the CRA are also closely tired to the far-right Project 2025 initiative championed by the Heritage Foundation. At the heart of Project 2025 is its 920-page blueprint for a radical restructuring of the federal government, which is entitled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." Vought authored the section on "the executive office of the President of the United States." He's also reportedly working on his own playbook for the first 180 days of a second Trump administration, which he has so far not publicly released. However, his past writings suggest his first six months as a possible White House chief of staff would be helping Trump gut the federal civil service and replace experienced career professionals with political loyalists and toadies.

According to the Post, Vought helped write Trump's "Schedule F" executive order, which would have stripped the civil service of numerous employment protection and greatly expanded the number of presidential appointees from around 5,000 to more than 54,000. President Joe Biden notably rescinded that order shortly after taking office.

READ MORE: Experts blast GOP's plan to end recreational sex: 'You're gonna love what the Manhattan DA has coming

Republican strategist Tim Chapman told the Post that the relationship between Vought and the 45th president was "a marriage of convenience."

“Russ has been pursuing an ideological agenda for a long time and views Trump’s second term as the best way to achieve it, while Trump needs people in his second term who are loyal and committed and adept at using the tools of the federal government," Chapman said.

One project Trump will likely trust Vought with is his stated goal of prosecuting his political enemies. Vought has argued against the DOJ being an independent agency, and insists that it ultimately be run at the direction of the sitting president. He told far-right activist Charlie Kirk on a podcast that he would be in favor of turning the DOJ against law enforcement officials who prosecuted Trump, and insisted the administration's response to efforts to hold Trump criminally accountable "can't just be hearings."

"It has to be investigations, an army of investigators that lead to firm convictions," he said.

READ MORE:'MAGA imperial presidency': Analysis reveals the radical 'theocracy' central to Project 2025

Click here to read the Post's report in full (subscription required).

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an 6 24

Trump once again is threatening to jail his political opponents, including President Joe Biden. And unlike his 2016 presidential debate remark to Hillary Clinton, this time there’s an actual plan in place to do just that.

In addition to saying, “lock her up,” Trump has a history of repeatedly threatening or calling for Clinton to be thrown in prison. One month before the 2016 election Trump told a Florida crowd, she has to go to jail.” That was just days after the second presidential debate, when Trump told Clinton she would “be in jail” if he were president.

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Trump has been strongly focusing on prosecuting and putting President Joe Biden in prison.

“Since the start of last year, Trump has issued direct or implied threats on Truth Social to use the powers of the federal government to target Joe Biden during a second Trump administration 25 times. Specifically, Trump has threatened him with FBI raids, investigations, indictments and even jail time,” government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote last month.

Tuesday night on the right wing media outlet Newsmax, Trump again threatened to jail his political opponents.

“So, you know, it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to,” he said, NBC News reported, blaming Democrats for his criminal conviction, “and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”

READ MORE: ‘Utterly Horrible’: Trump’s Putin Claim Ignites Anger, Again

Trump, according to Newsmax, also called his New York criminal conviction last week on 34 felony counts, “a terrible precedent for our country. Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question.”

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“One of Trump’s most consistent talking points on the trail centers on his intention to prosecute Biden if he regains executive power,” NBC News reported in February.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family,” Trump said last year in June. That was “just hours after being arraigned at a federal courthouse in Miami on charges alleging willful retention of classified documents.”

When Trump first entered the Oval Office, he had institutional guardrails, as many experts have noted. He appointed former government officials, including his “generals,” to top posts and they worked to steer him away from his most extreme desires.

Over time, those institutionalists resigned or were fired.

Now, thanks to a massive multi-million dollar enterprise funded in part by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, there’s a plan in place to jail Trump’s political opponents, should he win back the White House.

Project 2025 is the far-right’s plan to entirely remake the Executive Branch to hand Trump massive, unchecked power, via a 920-page policy “mandate.”

“Trump and his aides are reportedly assembling a list of people to be investigated, prosecuted, and possibly jailed,” The Atlantic‘s Tom Nichols wrote last year. Nichols is a former U.S. Naval War College professor and expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.

“Trump also wants to go after President Joe Biden for ‘corruption,’ which (like so many of Trump’s accusations) is pure projection,” Nichols continued. “If Trump follows through on all of this lunacy, half the government will spend its days investigating the other half, while the military is put on alert in case too many Americans object to Trump’s destruction of their constitutional rights.”

READ MORE: Johnson Says GOP Will Defund DOJ in Retaliation for Trump Conviction

“If you’re wondering how Trump plans to accomplish all of this, he likely has no idea. But his cronies at the Heritage Foundation (including former administration officials) do, and they are busily making plans. They’ve even written them down in something called Project 2025, a detailed blueprint for a right-wing takeover of the United States government. Trump, who seems to be losing his grip on reality more each day, might be devolving into a flaming piñata of offensive nonsense, but his enablers and the authors of Project 2025 know exactly what they’re doing.”

Take Steve Bannon.

Last year Media Matters called Bannon’s “War Room” podcast “the media home of Project 2025 and Trump’s retribution plans.”

Last week, Bannon made the right’s plans clear.

“The DOJ is completely corrupt from top to bottom,” he said on his podcast in video reposted by The Recount. “It’s going to have to be purged, it’s going to have to be restructured,” he said, insisting “they’re going to have to get rid of lots of personnel on the afternoon of January 20, 2025.”

“The FBI is the American Gestapo,” Bannon added, also insisting it be “totally restructured.”

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Axios on Wednesday reported on “MAGA’s jail plan.”

“If former President Trump wins in November, top supporters will push him to investigate, prosecute — and even try to imprison — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who won Trump’s conviction in the hush-money case,” the news outlet reported.

“‘Of course [Bragg] should be — and will be — jailed,’ Steve Bannon, one of the top voices of the MAGA movement, told us — saying for the record what many Trump supporters are privately plotting.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘I Worship God’: Greene Melts Down Again After Attacking Fauci in Profane Lie-Filled Rant

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an 5 24

“Off Leash" is not only the name of a podcast started by Erik Prince, former CEO of Blackwater (now part of the security firm Constellis Holdings) and brother of ex-Trump Administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. It is also the name of a private far-right group chat Prince hosts via the instant messaging program WhatsApp.

The New Republic's Ken Silverstein describes the group chat in an article published on May 30, noting that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, GOP activist/organizer Kimberly Guilfoyle (Donald Trump Jr.'s fiancée), Michael Flynn (former national security for the Trump Administration) and House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-Tennessee) are among the MAGA "cranks" who have been invited to participate.

"Collectively," Silverstein explains, "Off Leash provides an informal virtual gathering place for current and former political officials, national security operatives, activists, journalists, soldiers of fortune, weapons brokers, black bag operators, grifters, convicted criminals, and other elements in the U.S. and global far right…. Prominent figures in the Off Leash crew are well-known for their paleoconservative political views, but the private opinions expressed in the group chat are even more extreme and jarring than we normally see voiced publicly."

READ MORE: 'Back to square 1': Legal expert breaks down jury deliberations in Trump hush money trial

According to Silverstein, his investigation of Off Leash conversations via WhatsApp showed that some of the participants have "chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad."

Silverstein reports, "The group's overall bloodlust periodically proved to be too much for a few more judicious individual members, who in almost any other setting, would be considered ultra-conservatives but in the context of Off Leash, sound like hippie peaceniks‎…. Many other Off Leash participants have also stated that they don't view the group chat as merely a forum to exchange ideas but want it to become a vehicle to put their theories into action."

Silverstein observes that it isn't uncommon for Off Leash participants to advocate "violence."

"On the roster of Off Leash participants," Silverstein points out, "there was one — a poster with the handle of 'S,' whom it took me weeks to identify — who stood out as a particularly dark character. There were some in the group who expressed more unhinged views and others who more casually called for violence against their enemies; what made S distinctive was his dry, bloodless manner and businesslike espousal of a disciplined worldview that was unmistakably fascist."

READ MORE:['Mother Theresa could not beat these charges': Trump not confident about jury deliberations

*Read Ken Silverstein's full report for The New Republic at this link.

===

SEE RULE OF LAW CONCEPT ~ FASCISM

mma

trump legal cases' judges, prosecutors have been attacked by right-wing media and threatened by the public

WRITTEN BY JACK WINSTANLEY & GIDEON TAAFFE

PUBLISHED 05/30/24

In addition to death threats, swatting attempts, and envelopes full of white powder, many of the judges and prosecutors involved in former President Donald Trump's various legal battles have also faced abuse from right-wing media figures. These public servants have been demonized as politically motivated, corrupt, and unethical, and in several cases right-wing media have attacked judges' families as well.

Judge Tanya Chutkan}:

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2x?

an 5 24

Trump has long used the social media platform Truth Social to criticize anyone he views as an enemy, or a threat to his reputation.

Ahead of the start of his New York hush money trial on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records, the MAGA hopeful urged his supporters to turn out in droves to protest the case against him.

A few days later, on April 23, the former president wrote via Truth Social that presiding Judge Juan Merchan is a "'highly conflicted' overseer of a 'kangaroo court.'"

READ MORE:'History is repeating itself': House Dem warns GOP laying groundwork for another January 6

Per a Thursday USA Today report, Trump's "rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence."

MAGA fans "swiftly replied to his post with a blitz of attacks on Merchan," according to the report, and "the comments soon turned ugly," as some devoted Trump supporters "called for Merchan and other judges hearing cases against Trump to be killed."

One social media user wrote, "Treason is a hangable offense."

Another said, "They should all be executed."

USA Today reports:

In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases – two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused* of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

The newspaper also notes:

The Gateway Pundit, a website influential in the pro-Trump community, is also a frequent venue for Trump-inspired violent rhetoric. 'These judges and lawyers should HANG for perpetuating these fraud cases,' a commenter wrote on April 16, suggesting the executions would be '*an example for future generations of judges and lawyers.'

READ MORE:['Ready to start another insurrection’: Gaetz support for Trump echoes Proud Boys order

Former New York Police Department Director of Intelligence Mitchell Silber, according to the report, "compared the Trump supporters now calling for violence against judges to the Capitol rioters who believed they were following Trump’s 'marching orders' on Jan. 6, 2021."

Silber emphasized, "This is just the 2023-2024 iteration of that phenomenon. Articulating these ideas is the first step along the pathway of mobilizing to violence."

USA Today's full report is available[here

===

ymail pfaw 5 24

Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” email series that serves to remind us of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered during the Trump presidency and the threats that he and others in the MAGA movement still pose – and to keep those moments clear in our memory as we fight to defeat Republican extremists during the upcoming elections.

This week’s Trumptastrophe focuses on former President Trump’s rocky relationship with social media. Indeed, although social media was one of the very tools responsible for his rise to prominence within the Republican Party, Trump and right-wing conservatives often attack social media companies when their content is removed or flagged for violating each platform’s policies regarding what they consider to be acceptable content. This stormy relationship has led to conservatives calling for the weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission if Trump were to be reelected so they can penalize companies unwilling to allow their lies and misinformation to be broadcast to their users:

On May 27, 2020, Trump threatened to “strongly regulate” social media companies or “close them down.” Trump was angry about Twitter putting fact-checking notes on two “potentially misleading” tweets in which he made unsubstantiated claims about mail-in ballots and voter fraud.

Just one day after his threat, Trump signed an executive order that Human Rights Watch called “a profound attack on online freedom of expression globally” by targeting “companies that displease government.” The order included typically Trumpian whining about his tweets having been flagged as inaccurate. At a press event announcing the order, he complained even more, calling fact-checks a form of “political activism.”

The day after Trump issued his executive order, he used his Twitter account to warn that he would deploy the military against people protesting George Floyd’s killing by a police officer, and threatening, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter labeled it with a notice saying it violated the platform’s rules against glorifying violence.

Four years later, Trump and his advisers are vowing that if he gets back into power, he will “come after” big tech companies and media outlets whose moderation policies and political coverage he doesn’t like.

Trump complained in 2020 that social media companies were silencing conservative voices, a frequent complaint from right-wing figures. There was never much substance to the claim, and it is particularly ridiculous now that X/Twitter under the leadership of Trump fan Elon Musk has proudly re-platformed the disinformation-spewing former president, along with far-right figures who promote white nationalism, antisemitism, and other forms of extremism.

Trump’s 2024 campaign team is in fact deploying a “troll army” to attack his enemies on social media. Right Wing Watch noted earlier this year that Trump’s trolls are led by an “overtly racist, unapologetically misogynistic, and gleefully amoral” online activist called Brenden Dilley.

Trump’s 2020 executive order charged the Commerce Secretary with asking the Federal Communications Commission to define standards for evaluating whether social media companies were applying “good faith” in moderating content, and threatened companies with legal action. It sought to ban federal agencies from advertising on platforms deemed to be biased against conservatives. In response, one FCC commissioner said Trump wanted to turn the commission into “the president’s speech police.”

The White House told reporters that some of the ideas in Trump’s order grew out of a “social media summit” Trump held the previous summer with a clown car of far-right online personalities. At that event, Trump gave what The New York Times called “his own unique interpretation of the First Amendment,” saying it’s “not free speech” if “you see something good and then you purposedly write bad.” Afterward, he told supporters that tech companies were, like “the FAKE NEWS media,” an “enemy of the people.”

You don’t have to be part of the MAGA movement to have concerns about the power wielded by huge tech firms and the influence of their platforms and algorithms. Protecting free speech and preventing harm and harassment are a complicated balancing act. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that tech companies could not be sued by family members of a victim of an ISIS terror attack for having failed to keep ISIS content off their platforms. There have been bipartisan calls in Congress to revisit regulation of tech platforms.

In response to current congressional efforts to do away with provisions contained in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protect tech companies from liability for what others publish on their platforms and protect them against legal action for moderating content, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote this month that “Section 230 is about free expression” and warned that repealing the section without a clear alternative in place would “threaten user’s free expression rights and exacerbate the very problems some in Congress seek to solve.” New America has suggested alternatives for addressing online harms.

Trump and his advisers don’t seem that interested in policy nuance. Trump adviser and far-right ideological warrior Steve Bannon has called the people who run tech companies “evil” and “sociopaths.” Attacking “big tech” and the media are reliable ways to get applause at MAGA gatherings.

Trump’s allies at Project 2025 vow that under a likeminded president, they will seize control of any sources of independence in the executive branch that might slow the imposition of the president’s will. Project 2025’s policy agenda says its top priority for the FCC will be “reining in Big Tech,” which they accuse of trying to “drive diverse political viewpoints from the town square.” And, in a show of Trumpian contempt for checks and balances, Project 2025 calls on the FCC to issue an order interpreting Section 230 differently than courts have.

As Bruce Maiman noted in a HuffPost column, “Control of all federal branches would mean control of the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television, radio and internet companies. You can imagine an effort to neutralize the power of a media that routinely has exposed Trump’s well-documented lies and improprieties.” Indeed, it doesn’t take much imagination when you have Trump advisers threatening to “come after” the media, and Trump himself vowing to “come down hard” on MSNBC and “make them pay for their illegal political activity.”

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AN 5 24

Former President Donald Trump has long used the social media platform Truth Social to criticize anyone he views as an enemy, or a threat to his reputation.

Ahead of the start of his New York hush money trial on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records, the MAGA hopeful urged his supporters to turn out in droves to protest the case against him.

A few days later, on April 23, the former president wrote via Truth Social that presiding Judge Juan Merchan is a "'highly conflicted' overseer of a 'kangaroo court.'"

READ MORE:'History is repeating itself': House Dem warns GOP laying groundwork for another January 6

Per a Thursday USA Today report, Trump's "rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence."

MAGA fans "swiftly replied to his post with a blitz of attacks on Merchan," according to the report, and "the comments soon turned ugly," as some devoted Trump supporters "called for Merchan and other judges hearing cases against Trump to be killed."

One social media user wrote, "Treason is a hangable offense."

Another said, "They should all be executed."

USA Today reports:

In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases – two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused* of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

The newspaper also notes:

The Gateway Pundit, a website influential in the pro-Trump community, is also a frequent venue for Trump-inspired violent rhetoric. 'These judges and lawyers should HANG for perpetuating these fraud cases,' a commenter wrote on April 16, suggesting the executions would be '*an example for future generations of judges and lawyers.'

READ MORE:'Ready to start another insurrection’: Gaetz support for Trump echoes Proud Boys order

Former New York Police Department Director of Intelligence Mitchell Silber, according to the report, "compared the Trump supporters now calling for violence against judges to the Capitol rioters who believed they were following Trump’s 'marching orders' on Jan. 6, 2021."

Silber emphasized, "This is just the 2023-2024 iteration of that phenomenon. Articulating these ideas is the first step along the pathway of mobilizing to violence."

*USA Today's full report is availablehere

===

===

an 5 24

in his new book, "The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy," historian/author Federico Finchelstein examines authoritarian movements around the world — and cites Donald Trump's MAGA movement as an example.

Casey Michel of The Human Rights Foundation applauds the book as informative, if imperfect, in a review published by the conservative website The Bulwark on May 14.

Finchelstein, according to Michel, identifies four "primary characteristics" of fascism and lays out some reasons why "Trump and the other budding autocrats rising alongside him" are "so dangerous."

READ MORE:George Conway: Trump’s New York trial is proving to be 'the perfect case'

"As Finchelstein ably argues, it's only in properly defining Trump — and properly understanding his historical context, American and otherwise — that we can truly understand the threat he poses and navigate the world he’s ushered in," Michel explains. "Indeed, much of the book is devoted to definitions, and to identifying where the lines between populism and fascism truly lie.

The four pillars of fascism that Finchelstein identifies in his book are xenophobia, propaganda, political violence, and dictatorship.

According to Michel, Trump has "clearly built out planks" of the first three but "has been unable to construct a full dictatorship."

"In that sense…. Trump is simply an aspiring fascist, rather than a fully realized one," Michel argues. "He is, as Finchelstein writes, a 'populist aspirant to fascism' — or…. a 'wannabe fascist.'"

READ MORE:Trump's price for selling the planet: $1 billion

Finchelstein's book, according to Michel, underscores the dangers of Trump possibly winning the United States' 2024 presidential election.

"Right now, with a U.S. election less than six months away, the American wannabe despot is eager to take power once more in Washington — this time without any need for a self-coup," Michel warns. "It's for Americans themselves to decide whether they'd like to offer Trump the opportunity, as a would-be fascist, to finally get what he wants."

READ MORE:Expert warns dark shift in Trump’s tone is 'how fascists campaign'

*Casey Michel's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

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Johnson demands all Trump prosecutions cease, vows to use Congress 'in every possible way' - Alternet.org

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an 5 24

Trump has been arguing that because he was still president in late 2020 and early 2021, he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution in special counsel Jack Smith's election interference case — an argument that the U.S. Supreme Court examined during a Thursday, April 25 hearing.

That day, the justices heard oral arguments both for and against Trump's immunity claim — which some lower federal court judges have flat-out rejected, including Judge Tanya Chutkan (who wrote that U.S. presidents do not enjoy a "divine right of kings") and a panel of three judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. But it remains to be seen what the High Court will ultimately decide.

Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University in Connecticut, is worried about some of the questions that the GOP-appointed justices were asking on April 25.

READ MORE:Lara Trump is a grift off the old block

During an appearance on MSBNC's "The Last Word," Snyder told liberal host Lawrence O'Donnell, "It's not our tradition that there can be people who are above the law…. And that is the danger which I think hasn't been quite specifically expressed here — that the idea of immunity means that there can be a person who is outside the whole system."

O'Donnell asked Snyder what was "going through your mind" during the April 25 hearing.

The Yale historian responded, "Number One, in holding a hearing on the idea of immunity, you're calling the concept into existence where it hadn't existed before. Number Two, the U.S. history point would be: If you are a textualist or something like that, there is nothing like immunity in the text of the Constitution."

Snyder continued, "But Number Three, most fundamentally, what the history of comparative law teaches us is that there is a tradition in which you say the Constitution is just there for us to wait and find out who is going to break it — and then, we're going to endorse that person and give them special rights. And that tradition — again, this is the history of comparative law — is precisely the Nazi tradition. And this is what worries me: that on January 6, 2021 and the weeks before that, we encountered an individual who tried to put himself above the law — and now, we're flirting with the idea that perhaps that might be alright."

:{:{READ MORE:'Outrageous' Jack Smith ethics complaint shows how 'low' Elise Stefanik will 'stoop' for Trump: analysis}:

The Yale historian lamented that on April 25, the High Court's right-wing justices offered "no real conceptual challenges" to "the idea that there is such a thing as this sort of personal immunity."

Snyder told O'Donnell, "That's precisely the definition of the fascist leader — the person who is outside the law…. I sometimes worry that Americans don't really see what they're flirting with because we're not looking around."

READ MORE:Law firm asks to leave major Trump case: 'Breakdown in attorney-client relationship'

*Watch the full video below or at this link.

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5 24 rnc lara trump will strike hit polls war metaphor, sets up voter suppress violence?

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START AHA DOH

DISRUPTER primary 3 24 on bannon

main chaos disruption is mostly about real stability in physical world, eg ~ global weirding but 

this is more about abstraction/ideas social system as of 11/20

see bannon trump admin state

see boom bust oscillation

hype fear/ anger to justify fascism urban migrant biden crime 2 24

tobacco fossil fuel want tosow doubt

putin wants to disrupt faith in elections

inequality --> instability, polarization --> demonization --> violence

gop rw wants to create doubt on ability of gov't to function

an 3 24

according to Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson, former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon will have an outsized influence on a second Trump administration despite no longer being a key architect of his rise.

In a deep dive into Bannon's strong influence on the MAGA movement, Wilson told the Guardian's David Smith that Bannon is a great believer in sowing "chaos" to achieve his goals and his ramping up his rhetoric as the former president makes his third bid for the Oval Office should set off alarms.

With Smith reporting Bannon harped on Trump winning the 2020 presidential election before an enraptured crowd at CPAC recently, he added, "It was a blunt reminder that Bannon, an architect of Trumpism variously compared to Thomas Cromwell, Rasputin and Joseph Goebbels, remains a potent force in American politics as the 2024 US presidential election looms into view and the re-election of Trump looks a clear possibility."

With that in mind, Smith suggested Bannon would cast " a long shadow" over a second Trump administration.

Former GOP strategist Wilson agreed.

“Steve Bannon is a if not the primary spiritual and intellectual force of this nationalist movement that is in control of the Republican party," he explained. "He is a very powerful figure in today’s GOP [Grand Old Party] and it is inescapable in some ways that he will play a central role in whatever Trump administration emerges if Trump wins. He is the architect. As an avowed Leninist, he is a guy who is trying to engineer the revolution in his image.”

Continuing in that vein, he was asked what Bannon likely has in mind for a second Trump go-around.

“Concentration camps," he replied. "This guy keeps saying out loud they’re the enemies of the people, our opponents are deserve what they get, this hyperbolic rhetoric. He believes in power and chaos and will do whatever he can if he gets it. Whatever he could get away with in that circumstance, he will get away with it.”ENDIT

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/decade-russian-infowar-republicans-weird/

alternet no lnx 2 24

A decade of Russian infowar has made Republicans weird

President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation hold a joint press conference | July 16, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks).

John Stoehr February 29, 2024

There’s a clip going around featuring Malcolm Trumbull, the former prime minister of Australia, describing for a home audience the few times he witnessed Donald Trump interacting with Vladimir Putin. He said: “When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year-old that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team – ‘my hero!’ It is really creepy. It’s really creepy. … It struck everybody. You could touch it. The creepiness was palpable.”

I’ll leave it to worthies steeped in international relations to discuss the ramifications of a former leader of one of America’s closest allies defenestrating Trump’s great claim that all the world respects him.

For me, I’m interested in that adjective, “creepy,” and its cognates – “strange,” “weird,” “not normal,” and so on – because I’m going to suggest two things. One, that we are hearing those words applied to Trump and the Republicans with greater frequency by Americans rooted in mainstream culture. And two, that the more their behavior is called “creepy,” “weird,” etc, the more they are going to appear, to Americans rooted in mainstream culture, to be virtually foreign.

When you think about it, that makes sense.

As I said in yesterday’s edition, the Russian government has, more or less, been waging nonstop information warfare against the United States since at least 2015. During that time, Donald Trump and the Republicans have eaten, digested and metabolized practically all of it.

Their views are nearly indistinguishable from Vladimir Putin’s. State governments run by Republicans are increasingly Russian in practice. (“They have banned books, censored speech, outlawed history, suppressed individual expression and, therefore, individual liberty,” I said. “If they have not used the power of the state to control their populations, they have empowered snitches and vigilantes to reach the same goal.”) The heart of the GOP’s impeachment inquiry is a Kremlin lie. “Basically, the Republicans have become synonymous for [the] Russians at this point,” said Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

I called this the transmogrification of the Republican Party. To see how thorough, complete and total that process has gotten, watch this clip. An MSNBC reporter asked Trump supporters for their thoughts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s threat to democratic Eastern Europe. After watching it, you may be reminded of this piece I wrote in September summarizing the Russo-Republican perspective:

'According to the rightwing view, Ukraine is not a democracy. It is a corrupt regime undeserving of aid. Moreover, it’s an enemy. Among other things, it colluded with Democrat Hillary Clinton in a scheme to undermine US sovereignty and defraud the American people in the 2016 election. The plan was thwarted by the victory of Donald Trump.'

'The rightwing view insists, moreover, that Donald Trump, as president, attempted to expose Ukraine’s corruption in 2019 when he demanded an investigation into then-former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden, according to this view, abused his office and corrupted US foreign policy in 2016 in order to enrich himself and his son, Hunter Biden.'

That’s upside down, backward and prolapsed.

It’s also weird.

Consider that the president ordered and ate an ice cream cone recently. In response, Fox host Jesse Watters suggested not only that Biden has dementia, on account of people with dementia enjoying the taste of ice cream, but that he’s unmanly. “A grown man, especially the president, should not be licking ice cream in public.” (Watters also said a grown man should not eat soup in public. “It’s not a good look.”)

On the one hand, this was an attempt to “infantilize” the president. Jennifer Mercieca, an expert on authoritarian rhetoric, said last night it’s “another way of saying he’s weak and not a Übermensch. He’s not trying to be an overlord strongman. He’s trying to be a president. Ice cream is delicious and eating it is democratic. Fascists gonna fash.”

On the other, this is just weird. “I've said it before: rightwingers are the biggest weirdos,” one person said on Twitter. “It truly sounds awkward, like ‘decadent Westernized male degrades manhood with frozen treats,’” another quipped. James Surowiecki, formerly of The New Yorker and currently of The Yale Review, put the ice cream thing in context. “In the past four weeks, high-profile rightwingers have come out against adults eating ice cream, IVF, recreational sex, Taylor Swift, and the NFL. They're so in tune with mainstream Americans.”

Surowiecki was joking, of course. The Republicans and their media allies are not in tune with mainstream Americans. They don’t like people having abortions. They don’t like in vitro fertilization. They don’t like birth control. They don’t like a self-made female billionaires dating Super Bowl-winning football players. And they don’t like grown men eating ice cream cones in public. (Or soup). They, like Mother Russia, don’t like things that don’t fit into a human society ordered vertically – with straight white Christian men dominating the top.

These people are so far outside mainstream American culture that those on the inside might legitimately ask: “Wait, you’re not from around here, are you?” “The creepiness was palpable,” Trumbull said.

He’s right.

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2 24 an

Political leaders in the U.S. and around the world are expressing outrage at the death of Alexei Navalny, the 47-year old top Kremlin critic widely regarded as a Russian political prisoner who died just one day after appearing on camera from an Arctic Circle jail, reportedly “looking well and laughing during a court hearing.”

“Navalny was serving a 19-year jail term on charges widely considered politically motivated,” the BBC reports. “He was moved to one of Russia’s toughest penal colonies late last year.”

“Within minutes of Navalny’s death being announced by the prison service, the international community hailed the courage of Vladimir Putin’s biggest domestic adversary,” BBC added.

World leaders and political experts are placing the blame for Navalny’s death on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin killed Navalny,” declared former U.S Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Friday morning, speaking from Munich.

READ MORE: GOP Star Witness Against Bidens Charged With Allegedly Lying to FBI About ‘Burisma’

“I don’t know what to say. I’m gonna try to be analytic but I want you to know Alexei Navalny was my friend. I was with his wife last night. I’m here in Munich talking to her. His daughter Dasha goes to school at Stanford,” said McFaul, a professor of political science and the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

“So this is a pretty emotional time for me. Putin killed Navalny, let’s be crystal clear about that.”

“I don’t care about any investigation,” he continued, saying Putin had Navalny arrested and had him in solitary confinement and “put him in a cell … and today he is dead. Putin killed Navalny. And why did he? Because Putin is weak. You don’t kill people if you’re strong. Putin killed because Navalny was the one opposition leader in Russia that Putin feared the most.”

“So this is a really tragic day for me and it should be a tragic day for anybody who cares about democracy,” McFaul added. “Navalny, in my view, was … in the category of brave, courageous leaders that – you know, remember, he went back to Russia, he didn’t have to go back. He went back for his country because he was a Patriot that believed that his country could be different.”

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an 1 24

when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) was first sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2015, she had a reputation for being a "pro-business conservative" along the lines of now-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and former New York Gov. George Pataki. And she was critical of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement during his 2016 campaign.

But Stefanik, now 39, has since flip-flopped, taken a far-right MAGA turn and become a strident Trump defender. In a scathing commentary for CNN in July 2021, Never Trump [vid] conservative[...slammed stef...k as a "shameless" and "disgraceful" opportunist who had totally abandoned her principles and become an apologist for the extremist who attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.

These days, Stefanik is describing convicted January 6 rioters as "hostages" — which, according to The Guardian's Peter Stone, is an example of the extremes she will now go to in support of the MAGA movement.

"As Donald Trump aggressively fights multiple legal and political threats," Stone explains in an article published on January 30, "New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has become his most powerful ally in Congress in key ways by echoing Trump's dangerous falsehoods and pushing outlandish conspiracy theories around the January 6 attack on the Capitol. To bolster Trump, Stefanik has mimicked Trump's calling convicted January 6 prisoners 'hostages,' declined in a TV interview to say she would certify the 2024 election in advance, and filed ethics complaints against two judges overseeing cases against Trump or his allies."

Stone continues, "Stefanik's emergence as a major Trump cheerleader has sparked sharp criticism from historians, ex-Republican members and Democrats for fueling election denialism and disinformation which weaken democracy. But it has earned Stefanik a notable distinction: Her name is frequently mentioned as Trump's potential 2024 running mate."

Interviewees for Stone's article laid some reasons why they find Stefanik increasingly disturbing.

Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University professor and co-author of the 2019 book "How Democracies Die," told The Guardian, "She scares me in several ways. Stefanik appears to be willing to go down Trump's authoritarian path wholeheartedly…. She's smart, politically savvy and skilled, unlike Trump."

READ MORE:'Unquestioning loyalty': Elise Stefanik’s 'outrageous' antics show desire to be Trump’s running mate

Levitsky added, "The most dangerous autocrats like (Viktor) Orbán and (Recep Tayyip) Erdoğan are politically skilled. Stefanik has shown signs she has some of those skills."

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) is also quite scathing in his criticism of Stefanik.

Raskin told The Guardian, "Elise Stefanik is giving opportunism and sycophancy a bad name. She now mimics every move and word of Donald Trump…. Stefanik is clearly auditioning for the running mate slot by suggesting, à la Trump, that she'll reserve judgment on certifying the election."

The Maryland Democrat also said of Stefanik, "A hallmark of fascist political parties is that they don't accept the results of elections if they don't go their way. Stefanik is now embracing this tactic to prove to Donald Trump she's the most obsequious sycophant in the Republican Party and can bow and scrape even better than (Rep.) Marjorie Taylor Greene."

Donald Ayer, who served deputy attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, told The Guardian, "Stefanik seems to have been someone who knew better beforehand, but she now has become one of the shock troops systematically distorting reality in support of Trump."

READ MORE:'Vile' Elise Stefanik facing wave of outrage for calling E. Jean Carroll a liar

*Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

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an 1 24

Republican lawmakers have recently "crossed a new threshold: by suggesting that it’s okay to disregard the Supreme Court," according to a Monday, January 29 analysis by Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake.

"The party that once prided itself as the law-and-order side has leaped headlong into highly speculative theories about the 'weaponization' of the justice system, spurred by former president Donald Trump," Blake notes.

The political reporter points to comments from two Republican lawmakers — US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt — over the last week, in which they encouraged states to ignore court rulings that don't align with their political agendas.

"After the Supreme Court ruled last week that federal authorities can remove razor wire that Texas put on the U.S.-Mexico border," Blake reports, Roy wrote via X/Twitter, “Texas should ignore it.” Days later, Stitt during a CNN interview said, "We all agree that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. And if the Supreme Court gets something wrong — for example, if they tried to ban and say that we didn’t have a Second Amendment right to bear arms — I think the Constitution supersedes somebody in Washington, D.C., telling us, you know."

Blake emphasizes "these kinds of comments certainly lay the rhetorical groundwork for a pretty unthinkable future clash — especially given they come from a party that has demonstrated increasingly little regard for the current application of the rule of law."

Noting that "despite the claims of some on the left, what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is doing right now doesn’t violate what the Supreme Court ruled," the Post reporter writes, "The court overturned a ruling that said the federal government couldn’t remove the razor wire, effectively allowing it to do so; Abbott has signaled he’ll continue to have the National Guard lay the wire, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has rejected the Biden administration’s request for full access to the area."

Blake adds, "Roy’s and Stitt’s comments, then, take this debate quite a bit further. In some ways, it’s a logical extension of the emerging Republican argument about state sovereignty. Anticipating a federal-vs.-state clash, Republicans have taken to arguing that Texas has the authority to defend itself from those crossing the border illegally."

READ MORE:'We keep doing the same stupid stuff': Chip Roy furious funding bill will keep government open

Furthermore, he emphasizes "we’re getting into dicey territory here. The Supreme Court is the institution we charge with interpreting our Constitution; we now have a sitting U.S. governor and a congressman suggesting it’s okay to ignore what the court says if you have a different interpretation."

*Blake's full analysis can be read here.

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rww January 29, 2024

Tired of being criminally prosecuted, Donald Trump and his allies are plotting a way to give presidents a legal shield for life if he wins in 2024.

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an 1 24

MSNBC's Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spoke with Financial Times National US Editor Edward Luce Sunday morning about Donald Trump and the Republican Party's commitment to "worship" and model the leadership of autocrat and Hungary Prime Minster Viktor Orbán.

:{:{"This is a guy — Donald Trump — who has promised to terminate the Constitution," Scarborough emphasized. "He said he was going to ban TV networks that he didn't like. He said he was going to execute generals that were insufficiently loyal to him for quote, 'treason', which by the way sounds like the French resolution with a guillotine. They accused everyone of treason and cut their heads off. And then, he talked about a couple weeks ago, how he could kill his political opponents with Seal Team 6, and be immune from all things.}:

... Talks about Viktor Orbán — you understand that a lot of people, maybe on wall street understand what that means — Viktor Orbán has shut down the free press. Viktor Orbán has crushed all political parts. Viktor Orbán is an autocrat who hates western democracy and freedom. and free markets, the way that Wall Street claims to like free markets. You can't make a deal with the devil. You lose every time."}:

Luce replied, "People around Orban, including the local gas man in his village, the guy who does gas connections, have grown rich beyond their wildest fantasies —the billionaires. Those who are in with him get rewarded, and that is how strong men operate. They don't operate according to free market capitalist rules."

Scarborough continued, "And then on the other side of that, people that owned media empires — people that control newspapers, and control TV stations, that were opposed to him — they got charged with crimes, that literally, the value of the company went to zero, and Orbán said I'll buy it from you, you can leave the country, or go to jail. So yeah, the local gas man got rich. People running the free press got thrown in jail. Politicians get run out of country. This is what America faces under a second Donald Trump administration who brags that Orbán is a strong man that he loves, that he is going to be like."

:{:{Luce said, "CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference], I mean the conservative movement openly adulate Orbán as the model for Trump. This isn't just paying a compliment to an ideological fellow traveler across The Atlantic. It's a much, much more conscious desire to imitate Orban. Orban is what Trump wants to be, punishing business critics, rewarding business friends, a crony system, a patronage based system, in which if you are a friend of Trump, it could become a monopolist.}:

And so I think business leaders — I don't think that [Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase], Jamie Dimon, is a Trumpian. He is actually a registered Democrat, I believe. But I think his ultimate loyalty is to JP Morgan's bottom line. And he knows that if JP Morgan gets out of line under a second Trump administration, which will be far more serious than the first one, then it will get punished. Trump will have no compunction about using the paths of the presidency to award and punish with favors and fines."}:

:{:{Scarborough concluded, "You know, it's amazing, Mika, that the party that I was in, always has talked about personal freedom, personal liberties, talked about small government, take as much money power and authority out of Washington as possible. Get it into local governments. Get it into classrooms. Get it into local police districts. Here you have a Republican party — CPAC — what a joke! Let's not even get started with CPAC. And the Heritage Foundation, what a joke.}:

The RNC [Republican National Committee]. These institutions that used to praise personal liberty, personal freedoms, small government, are all now — as Ed said — they have readjusted, and now they are in support of autocracy. They are in support of a strong man leader. They are in support, the same people who will b**ch and moan about how, 'Oh, the western cannon, and western values are being destroyed, western civilization is at risk!' Those people, now worship — as does Donald Trump — leader of a failed country, who has said that he hates western democracy. says western democracy is dead. He says, 'I'm an illiberal Democrat.' And that's where they've gone.'"}:

Brzezinski added, "Yeah, and if you get what you want, you're not gonna like it."

READ MORE:Trump’s attacks on prosecutors and judges is 'authoritarianism in service of narcissism': legal experts

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AN AH 1 24

Never Trump conservative and former GOP strategist Rick Wilson's prediction that establishment Republicans would ultimately "bend the knee" to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election is proving to be spot on. Despite the fact that Trump is facing four criminal indictments, he has been endorsed by Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and many other prominent Republicans who aren't known for being ultra-MAGA.

With only two Republicans left in the GOP presidential primary — Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — much of the Republican Party is consolidating around Trump just as Wilson predicted.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on January 25, Never Trumper Tim Miller — another former GOP strategist — warns that establishment Republicans are being used to make Trump appear less threatening and "authoritarian" and normalize "raw fascistic Trumpism."

"There will once again be a group of patsies willing to be the Trump Administration's frontmen and frontwomen, offering themselves as tributes to the wannabe strongman," Miller explains. "They will be put forth as evidence that Trump will be constrained, that dictatorship is not imminent, that there will still be a few 'adults in the room.' Moreover, there will be mainstream, establishment figures who encourage 'good people' to serve because they still hold on to their belief that Trump can be reined in and the office must be protected."

The Never Trump conservative, a frequent guest on MSNBC, continues, "So brace yourself: In the weeks ahead, you are going to be introduced to 'Committee To Save America 2.0: We Protect. We Serve. We Care.' The new committee will be weaker and more pliant than its predecessor. But like the previous version, it will serve the purpose of comforting the Republican elites and Wall Street Journal-reading voters who want to go to bed at night without worrying that they might be accidentally ending the American experiment."

Miller cites Scott and Rubio as examples of establishment Republicans who have been "obsequious" in their support of Trump as he moves closer to winning the nomination.

"In the end," Miller warns, "a new Trump Administration would be far more radical and dangerous than the last one. And on balance, it would have a much higher percentage of MAGA true believers, from the cabinet all the way down to the interns buying pens and making coffee. Hell, even Vivek (Ramaswamy) could probably get a job. But Trump and his team are not oblivious to perception."

{READ MORE:Rob Reiner: Trump embodies the 'fascism' Norman Lear devoted his life to defeating}:

Miller adds, "The new Committee To Save America rollout is coming soon. Don't let the voters who might be persuaded by their act be fooled."

READ MORE:Trump is promising an 'authoritarian' Christian nationalist 'task force' within DOJ: analyst

*Tim Miller's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

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an 1 24 no lnx

'The fascist nightmare looms': Columnist says Trump’s election may end democracy worldwide

Carl Gibson January 20, 2024

If former President Donald Trump wins a second term in November, one columnist believes it could lead to the eventual rise of fascistic governments around the globe.

Rather than standing alone as a threat to American democracy, Guardian columnist Simon Tisdall argued that the former president is instead part of a larger trend of far-right, authoritarian leaders taking control of Western democracies in the Americas and Europe. He noted that despite a relatively prosperous economy, liberal institutions today are "weak and discredited." He compared Trump's MAGA movement to Vladimir Putin supporters in Russia, as both have a pattern of "valuing charisma over character, preferring the strongman to the right man, and turning a blind eye to corruption and lies."

Tisdall pointed to Monday's Iowa Caucuses as an example of how Trump's "anti-democratic" strategy prevailed over the face-to-face strategy practiced by other candidates like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who invested tens of millions of dollars in a ground game that spread to all 99 counties, yet failed to win a single one.

"Trump’s approach to Iowa exemplified how anti-democratic anti-politics works. He mostly avoided rallies and meet-and-greets with voters, boycotted debates with rival candidates, and travelled, aloof, in a power-tripping motorcade of black secret service limousines," Tisdall wrote. "Yet his imperial mien, lavishly funded TV advertising and harsh take-no-prisoners policy agenda produced a record win."

When looking at democracies around the world, Tisdall observed that "enclaves of freedom" are "besieged" by authoritarianism as restless voters seek strongmen who will ensure "security, uniformity, conformity and social validation for the dominant majority at the cost of civic freedoms, legal accountability, independent media, diversity and minority rights."

"India is succumbing to one-man rule, beguiled by the intolerant Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi. Israel’s democracy is presently self-destructing. In Africa, coups abound. In Europe, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, scrambled to shore up the national project last week against a surging far-right tide," Tisdall wrote. "In Germany, Italy and Hungary, much the same struggle against a reviving fascism is being fought (or conceded). So much so that Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, joined street protesters to urge resistance to the anti-migrant, Nazi-linked Alternative for Germany party. In the UK, alienation and an anachronistic voting system turn elections into charades."

Tisdall wrote that if Americans don't stand up for democracy in November, it could signal that "the liberal moment" has passed.

READ MORE: How the 'terror of autocracy' could make or break the 2024 election

"The fascist nightmare looms anew," he wrote. "Under darkly lowering skies, the post-democratic age dawns."

Read Tisdall's column in full by clicking here.

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After previously dining with Trump, Nick Fuentes gives Nazi salute and discusses his willingness to commit violence for Trump | Media Matters for America

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an 1 24

Trump complains it was 'ridiculous' he had to 'follow the laws' and leave office - Alternet.org

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an 1 24

in a Sunday article from NBC News, Peter Nicholas, Katherine Doyle, Megan Lebowitz and Courtney Kube report, "a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers is quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater" to Donald Trump's politics.

Per NBC, "Trump has raised fresh questions about his intentions if he regains power by putting forward a legal theory that a president would be free to do nearly anything with impunity — including assassinate political rivals — so long as Congress can’t muster the votes to impeach him" and remove him from office.

"We're already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to," Mary McCord, former US attorney and executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told the news outlet.

Other experts "taking part in the effort told NBC News they are studying Trump’s past actions and 2024 policy positions so that they will be ready if he wins in November," which "involves preparing to take legal action and send letters to Trump appointees spelling out consequences they’d face if they undermine constitutional norms."

NBC notes:

*Among the least-understood tools available to a president is the Insurrection Act. Vaguely worded, it gives a president considerable discretion in deciding what constitutes an uprising and when it is OK to deploy active-duty military in response, experts say.

*Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill worry that Trump might invoke the act to involve the armed forces in the face of domestic protests or if the midterm elections don’t go his way.

"There are an array of horrors that could result from Donald Trump's unrestricted use of the Insurrection Act," US Senator Richard Blumenthal (R-CT) said in an interview, according to NBC. "A malignantly motivated president could use it in a vast variety of dictatorial ways unless at some point the military itself resisted what they deemed to be an unlawful order. But that places a very heavy burden on the military."

Blumenthal, NBC reports, is currently working on legislation "that would clarify the act and give Congress and the courts some say in its use."

READ MORE: 'The end of democracy': Bernie Sanders says 'humiliated' Trump could cause 'collapse'

Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman told NBC, "We are preparing for litigation and preparing to use every tool in the toolbox that our democracy provides to provide the American people an ability to fight back. We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy and it’s incumbent on everybody to do their part."

*NBC News' full report is here.

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an 1 24

as the third anniversary of the deadly January 6 insurrection approaches this weekend, one columnist is calling on journalists and editors to stop treating the future of democracy like a standard partisan issue.

In her latest column for The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan expressed her frustration about the beltway media's tendency to find a both-sides angle when covering former President Donald Trump's repeated threats to democracy.

"In a constant show of performative neutrality, journalists tend to equalize the unequal, taking coverage down the middle even though that’s not where true fairness lies," Sullivan wrote, urging reporters to "get beyond delivery and appearances, to get beyond poll numbers and approval numbers – all the things that they are most comfortable with."

"The mainstream media is not nearly as comfortable with communicating the larger concepts, even when the stakes are this high," Sullivan continued. "Constantly under attack from the right, they fear looking like they are 'in the tank' for a particular candidate or party, so they fall back on those traditional building blocks of coverage – numbers, polls, approval ratings."

"That may have worked in the past, or at least been relatively unobjectionable," she added. "Not any more."

Sullivan cited several examples of false "both sides" narratives in prominent publications, including a New York Times article that she said was "typical of the mainstream media’s tone and focus." That article noted that President Joe Biden was giving a speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania on the anniversary of January 6 to remind Americans that his predecessor's lies about the 2020 election helped fuel an attack on the US Capitol, but framed it as "an effort to redirect attention from Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers." ABC News had a similar approach in a recent article with the headline "One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry."

Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast criticized that headline in a post to X (formerly Twitter).

READ MORE:Michigan elections chief: 'Direct line' between Trump's Detroit call and January 6 riot

"There aren’t two sides to a violent insurrection in the United States capitol," she tweeted.

In her column, Sullivan lauded former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron's blunt evaluation of the threat to democracy Trump posed when he said the ex-president is "the only politician I’ve heard actually talk about suspending the constitution."

"He’s talked about using the military to suppress entirely legitimate protests using the Insurrection Act. He’s talked about bringing treason charges against the then-outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. He’s talked about bringing treason charges against Comcast, the owner of NBC and MSNBC. He’s talked explicitly about weaponizing the government against his political enemies," Baron said. "And, of course, he continues to talk about crushing an independent press... all of those [threats], by nature, by definition, are authoritarian."

Sullivan ended her column by asking journalists and editors to "remember that being in favor of democracy isn’t a journalistic crime. In fact, it’s a journalistic obligation."

READ MORE:'We're going to come after the people in the media': Trump ally calls for prosecuting journalists

Read Sullivan's full columnby clicking here.

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// four horseman?

privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism

yikes trump = offensive = fascism

see AN 12 23 thom 3...

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an 12 23 no lnx

'Kill yourself now so we can save ammo!' How Trump's violent movement could conquer America

:

Thom Hartmann

December 29, 2023

How would you react if one day you were sitting at home and the phone rang and when you picked it up you heard a man shout:

“Kill yourself now so we can save ammo!”}:

Moments later, an email arrives that says:

“I hope the Federal government hangs you and your daughter from the Capitol dome, you treasonous piece of shit! I pray that I will be sitting close enough to hear your necks snap.”}:

This is what happened to “Shaye” Moss and Ruby Freeman when Trump and Giuliani decided to blame Trump’s loss in Georgia on them, incorrectly claiming they were stuffing ballots for Biden. Just a few hours later, a mob with torches and a bullhorn showed up at Freeman’s house, although she’d already left after being warned by the FBI that she was on the “kill list” of a January 6th defendant they’d just arrested.

Mitt Romney, speaking with writer McKay Coppins for his book “Romney: A Reckoning,” told him the story of multiple Republican senators who were so terrified of violence at the hands of Trump’s fascist followers that they set aside their consciences and voted against convicting him of trying to blackmail Zelenskyy and, later, trying to overthrow the government of the United States.

“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?}:

“Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”}:

I know liberals and regular reporters in the media who are quite happy trash-talking Biden but are frankly terrified of the possibility that Trump or one of his high-profile followers might sic Trump’s fascist fan boys on them. As a result, they self-censor.

Similarly, multiple judges in the past few months have been given the chance to take Trump off the ticket because of his clear violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment by inciting and supporting an insurrection. Each one whiffed, and their legal logic was so thin it’s reasonable to conclude they’re also unwilling to have their families suffer the death threats and harassment that comes with being an “enemy of Trump.”

When the justices on the Colorado Supreme Court finally found the spine to vote him off the ballot, within hours the threats began. Now they’re having to pay for security for themselves and their family members, and go to sleep every night dreading the possibility that a lone wolf Trump supporter — like the one who broke into Paul Pelosi’s home and attacked him with a hammer — may be looking for them, too.

As NBC News reported, Trump’s followers reacted to the Colorado justices with predictable ferocity:

“’This ends when we kill these f--kers,’ a user wrote on a pro-Trump forum that was used by several Jan. 6 rioters.}:

“’Kill judges. Behead judges. Roundhouse kick a judge into the concrete,’ read a post on a fringe website. ‘Slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trashcan.’”}:

NBC’s Ryan Reilly added:

“The threats fit into a predictable and familiar pattern, seen time and time again after legal developments against Trump.”}:

Thus, Jack Smith was unable to find even four Supreme Court justices who were willing to grant cert to hear his challenge to Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution; terrified, they left the case with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in the hope those judges will draw Trump’s ire — and his followers’ fire — thus diluting their own risk.

This is how fascism takes over a nation from within: with violence and the fear of violence.

I’ve been doing what is now the nation’s largest progressive radio/TV show for 20 years, reaching an estimated audience of 6 million a week. My writings here on HartmannReport.com are frequently reprinted by other progressive media.

The result is that I regularly get threats, although this is not a phenomenon shared by my rightwing colleagues. When I asked a couple of rightwing radio hosts I’ve known for years if they get threats of violence or death, each said, “No.”

There is no movement advocating political violence on either the American left or in the center. It is entirely confined to the American right, and the media needs to admit that and the FBI needs to recalibrate their efforts.

As fascism expert and historian Emilio Gentile noted about how fascist movements start and gain power:

“In the beginning there was violence.”}:

Violence and the threats of violence are the key to understanding fascists like Trump and the movements they inspire.

As any professional interrogator can tell you, deep down inside, all of us humans are really just scared little kids. The more we’re broken down by the circumstances of life or government policy, the less secure we feel, the harder it is to get by in life, and the more scared we become.

And, for many people, out of that fear comes the willingness — hell, the enthusiasm — to embrace “big daddy” in the form of a tough guy leader who promises to “restore” those who feel the fear back to their previous (or imagined future) positions of power, wealth, and authority.

This becomes particularly easy for fascist leaders when their followers are convinced that the nation’s government has become hopelessly corrupt, a project rightwing fossil fuel billionaires, rightwing media, and Republican politicians have been promoting here in the US for decades.

Ever since the Reagan Revolution, in their zeal to cut their own taxes and stop regulation of the fossil fuel and other polluting industries, they’ve been hammering the message that our government has been seized by “deep state socialists” bent on destroying our country.

Republicans and the billionaires who own them have repeated this conspiracy theory so often for the last few decades that an entire religion, Qanon, as arisen around it.

This belief, that much of what our government does is illegitimate or even malicious, makes it easy for low-information voters to bind themselves to a fascist “reform movement” that promises better times ahead.

As fascist followers act out their violent threats against their leaders’ perceived enemies, they get an inner sense of strength and the feeling that they’ve joined a community: that diminishes their own fear for a short while.

The more an “other” — political enemies; racial, religious, and gender minorities; women — are blamed for the ills of the nation, the more vigilante-style violence against them is justified and the more violent the future becomes.

When the state pushes back against that violence, as America did after January 6th, the calls for increased violence become even louder. Trump is practically shouting “kill them!” with a bullhorn and even our court system is afraid to stop him by throwing him into jail as they would have any other common criminal who encouraged such violence against judges, juries, witnesses, court officials, and their families.

Calling people to violence by denouncing those being scapegoated is central to fascist politics.

Mussolini used to feature Italian “whistleblowers” who, like Joe McCarthy here back in the day, would call out “corrupt” government officials whose only real crime was not supporting him. Hitler had every radio station in Germany play phone calls from local citizens who denounced their neighbors for sympathizing with Jews, socialists, or trade union organizers.

Once publicly targeted in these ways, mobs or lone-wolf assassins would descend on these people’s homes. After a few well-publicized beatings and killings, everybody from media figures to politicians to judges backed away from trying to stop fascists or even hold them accountable.

When he was rising to power in Hungary, for example, Victor Orbàn’s right-hand-man led a torchlight march into a Budapest Roma neighborhood threatening to burn the “gypsies” — who fled in terror — out of their homes. More recently, Orbán started arresting people who “defamed” him on social media.

Soon, nobody in or out of the government is willing to stand up to the fascists; it’s too dangerous and too exhausting. Being the object of regular threats of violence or death is not something anybody would volunteer for unless they saw the stakes as being very, very important.

This is what Trump and the GOP he’s captured are working toward: the silencing of dissent and accountability, replacing them with fear and a guilty complicity. Just take a look at the state of social media today, particularly Xitter and Facebook, which have dialed back on their content moderation and thus loosed the fascists on anybody who dares criticize Trump or the GOP.

As Michael Ebner wrote in his book “Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy”:

“The Fascist state ruled Italy violently, projecting its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination and other quotidian forms of coercion.

“Moreover, by promoting denunciatory practices, the regime cemented the loyalties of 'upstanding' citizens while suppressing opponents, dissenters and social outsiders.”

Trump is telling us right up right now that he intends to rule as a fascist if he’s able to either win or seize power through other means in 2024. Informally, his militia followers will be showing up at polling places next fall to intimidate voters; they see themselves as the shock troops of the new GOP.

Formally, he’s planning on ending your and my protections against state-sponsored police violence, which he openly intends to deploy against anybody who opposes him and his regime:

“I am also going to indemnify our police officers. This is a big thing, and it’s a brand-new thing, and I think it’s so important. I’m going to indemnify, through the federal government, all police officers and law enforcement officials throughout the United States from being destroyed by the radical left for taking strong actions against crime.”

When Trump says “crime,” of course, he’s using the same fascist-speak that Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and Orbán use that means “minorities” and “political enemies.”

And his followers are listening and acting.

The Anti-Defamation League published a report finding there have been more than 170 murders committed by rightwing (and, I’d add, therefore probably Trump-aligned) extremists over the past five years; only 3 deaths could be attributed to people “on the left.” None of the victims were “criminals.”

So, how does a nation deal with an epidemic of violent rhetoric and actual violent attempts?

SEE OFFENSIVE:

Fascists are always a minority when they rise to power in a country. They’re experts at manipulating democratic systems — particularly through things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, voter roll purges, and voter intimidation — to seize power, and then corrupting the existing systems and laws in ways that keep them in power.

At the moment, the fascist movement in the US is very much confined within the GOP and aligned with fringe militia and fundamentalist religious factions.

Merrick Garland should have come down on them hard as soon as he assumed his job as Attorney General; because he dithered for two full years until he was shamed into appointing Jack Smith by the January 6th Committee, Trump’s fascist followers have gained considerable momentum.

By continuing to refuse to investigate or prosecute the people who are still in power and conspired with Trump to overthrow our government, Garland further empowers America’s homegrown fascist movement. This must stop, and news that the FBI has finally acquired some of the content of Congressman Scott Perry’s phone is a positive sign, albeit too little and too late.

But the ultimate victory over fascism in America has to be in the ballot box rather than the courthouse. Americans who believe in democracy and reject strongman oligarchy must turn out next November in overwhelming numbers and so shatter the GOP that the party will be forced to reinvent itself in a way that includes purging itself of its fascist-supporting members.

And we damn well better succeed, because fascists never give you a second chance to defeat them or hold them to account. If we try to stop them and fail, Trump has already told us he’ll have a nice cold cell waiting for you and me in the concentration camps he promises to build to hold “millions.”

There is pretty much nothing more important now than waking up our friends and neighbors to this threat…

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prequel-american-fight-fascism

OCTOBER 18, 2023

Prequel - An American Fight Against Fascism

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddowargued that authoritarianism has existed on the fringe far-right of U.S. politics for nearly a century. Politics and Prose Bookstore and George Washington University in Washington, D.C., hosted this event. cspan booktv

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one of the few foreign correspondents to be granted personal access to Adolph Hitler and his inner circle in the dark winter of 1933 was Welsh journalist Garreth Jones. Assigned by his home paper, the Western Mail,to cover Hitler’s push to absolute power, Jones accompanied the newly appointed chancellor and his entourage to Frankfurt for a massive political rally that was held on March 2 of 1933.

*This article originally appeared on Truthdig.

Jones’ eyewitness account of the event is bone-chilling because it looks so much like what we are seeing today at Trump rallies.

“For eight hours, the biggest hall in Germany has been packed with 25,000 people for whom Hitler is the savior of his nation,” Jones began his story. “They are waiting, tense with national fervor…I have never seen such a mass of people; such a display of flags up to the top of the high roof, such deafening roars. It is primitive, mass worship.”

Then Hitler took the stage to a “roar of applause and the thumping and the blare of a military band and the thud of marching feet.” Hitler, Jones observed, “is … a master in repeating [his] leitmotiv in many varied forms, and the leitmotiv is: ‘The republican regime in Germany has betrayed you. Our day of retribution has come.’”

As a form of political behavior, discourse and ideology, Trump and the MAGA movement are clearly fascist.

The rally closed with Hitler’s pledge to “complete the work which I began fourteen years ago as an unknown soldier, for which I have struggled as leader of the party and for which I stand today as Chancellor of Germany. We shall do our duty.”

“Again,” Jones wrote, “the hall resounds.”

Three weeks later, Hitler secured passage of the Enabling Act, bringing the Weimar Republic effectively to an end.

Flash forward some 90 years and you can hear echoes of Hitler’s Frankfurt address in the persistent messaging of Donald Trump. Speaking at the ultra-right Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 14^th annual “Road to the Majority” conference in Washington, D.C. on June 24, the former president proclaimed:

In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.

Trump delivered a similar message earlier in June, telling an audience of enraptured supporters in Columbus, Georgia, that he was being persecuted by federal and state prosecutors. He insisted that the “deep state” was also out to get those who followed him. “In the end,” Trump complained, “they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.” This was the usual stuff of Trumpian spectacle. In a rambling tirade delivered on Veterans Day in New Hampshire, Trump vowed to “root out…the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Trump’s fixation on Hitlerian imagery, memes and tropes is not an accident. The orange-haired demagogue has had a longstanding fascination with Hitler. According to a 1990 Vanity Fair article, Trump’s first wife Ivana, who died last year, told her divorce attorney that the former president kept a compilation of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender remarked on Trump’s interest in Hitler in his book on the 2020 presidential campaign, “Finally We Did Win This Election.” Bender writes that Trump told his then-chief of staff Gen. John Kelly during a 2018 trip to Europe that “Hitler did a lot of good things,” particularly for the German economy. (Trump vehemently denied Bender’s account.)

The cult-like bond between the movement leader and his most ardent followers, a bond characterized by pledges of mutual aid, threats of revenge and shared delusions of victimization, is one of the bedrock features of fascism. This was graphically illustrated by the ascent to power of the two pillars of 20 ^th-century fascism, Hitler and Bennito Mussolini, whose personal style Trump is often said to emulate.

“Mussolini put his hands on his hips, thrust his chest, jutted his lower jaw,” Jonathan Blitzer wrote in a 2016 New Yorker article that profiled the work of New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the fore most authorities on fascism. “It’s all about showing that he cannot be contained,” Ben-Ghiat told Blitzer. “It was the same with Mussolini.”

“I’ve been studying cult leaders for a hundred years’ worth of them,” said Ben-Ghiat in an appearance on Democracy Now last June. Trump “has all the signs. He is not a conventional politician of either the Democratic or Republican [Party]… He is a cult leader. And the GOP has long been…submissive to him. He put them under an authoritarian discipline, and then he made them complicit. And this is what corrupt, violent authoritarians do. They make you part of their crimes.”

As I have written before in this column, fascism is an emotionally loaded and often misapplied term. But if understood correctly, it can never be dismissed as a vestige of the past. As a form of political behavior, discourse and ideology, Trump and the MAGA movement are clearly fascist. There is no longer room for debate.

Fascism has deep roots in the United States, from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, to the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues, and, fast-forward almost a century, the election of Trump in 2016.

There’s a long-running class factor in the current of American fascism. University of London professor Sarah Churchwell’s June 2020 essay in the New York Review of Books exactly nails it when she quotes rabbi Stephen Wise: “The America of power and wealth is an America which needs fascism.”KPFA? POD? 12 23 WHEN INEQUALITY GETS TERMINALLY SKEWED Fascism is last/only defense

Churchwell’s essay, fittingly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here,” offers a working definition of fascism. She notes that while fascist movements differ from nation to nation, they are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:

*“[N]ostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain ‘bloodlines’ over others.”

If he is reelected next year, Trump could make the January 6 coup attempt look mild. The Washington Post and Politico have reported that Trump and his allies on the extreme right hope to transform the federal government into a virtual presidential dictatorship. Trump and his allies, states Politico, are “collecting the ingredients and refining the recipe for an authoritarian regime.”

The fear is that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to deploy the military. This vision of horror includes Trump in the Oval Office using his immense power to quash civil unrest and dismantle civil service protections for government workers in order to secure their loyalty. And all this while weaponizing the Justice Department to do his bidding.

The New York Times warns that a second Trump term will be especially dire for undocumented immigrants, with mass arrests and the construction of detention camps on a scale not seen since the racist “Operation Wetback” of the Eisenhower era. The Times also reported that Trump plans to cancel the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Fascism thrives in moments of widespread social anxiety and moral panic, when large segments of the population are persuaded that liberal democracy no longer serves their interests. We are living in such a moment now. The urgency we face cannot be understated.

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if Trump is re-elected, he’d be America’s 47th president, so he’s named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47.” At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.

Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans, include:

Part of Agenda 47, Trump says, is “finishing the job” he started as president between 2017 and 2021.

Just two hours after he and Pence were sworn into office, they removed all mention of LGBTQ+ issues from the White House website.

Two days later, his State Department deleted former Secretary of State John Kerry’s apology to the nation for the “Lavender Scare” government persecution of gays and lesbians during the McCarthy era 1950s and early 1960s. A month later, Trump’s Justice Department announced they’d no longer defend the civil rights of trans kids.

His Education and HUD offices both withdrew their court defenses of queer people, particularly students and those in homeless shelters, and his Secretary of State refused to mention to the Russian Foreign Minister the detention and brutal executions of gay men by Russian soldiers in Chechnya. On May 4, 2017 Trump signed an executive order letting the DOJ ignore claims of illegal discrimination against queer people and women throughout every single one of the nation’s federal agencies.

In September, 2017, Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, officially ended that agency’s Title IX guidance requiring schools to do something about sexual harassment, including sexual violence, against women and LGBTQ+ kids. In response to a question from the media about the change in policy and gay men, Trump said that his Vice President “wants to hang them all.”

In January of 2018, Trump rolled out the “Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom” at HHS, which would backstop people who wanted to use the excuse of “deeply held religious beliefs” to justify explicit discrimination against queer people and women, or to simply to make life difficult for government agencies.

All of this is just the beginning. The Human Rights Campaign has documented page after page of anti-queer policies put into effect by Trump that will be resurrected and put on steroids in a second term.

In the Agenda 47 section of his website, Trump explains how he’s going to use our schools and colleges to indoctrinate young Americans in rightwing ideology. He explicitly says:

“When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”

Any colleges that continue to teach “under the guise of [racial] equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”

In other words, just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, he’s going to bankrupt the nation’s schools and colleges if they continue to teach the true history of America and promote egalitarian values. As Trump notes at his website:

“[W]e are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.”

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.

In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, if they can take both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:

“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”

Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.

Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.

First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.

“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information,” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.

He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:

“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”

In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.

They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.

Orbán’s rightwing buddies could buy the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.

Trump wants to do the same here in the US.

When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:

“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”

Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.

Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.

Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and III Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.

In a flashback to Hitler’s “work camps” that preceded the death camps by five years, Trump’s also proposed building concentration camps around the country to house “millions” of undocumented aliens and his political enemies. As he noted in a speech on Veterans’ Day this year:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” adding that Russia isn’t a problem. Instead, he said, “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Presumably that means people like me and you, who would oppose his fascist agenda.

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal speechwriter’s job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office; Jackson’s favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered — was “The Indian Killer”).

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president — himself, at the time — to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by Garfield’s presidency in 1881, routine.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wants to functionally end the Civil Service system and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself.

He tried to do this in the last months of his presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president to keep their jobs.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government, and ending any possibility that people in the government will push back against Trump the way they did during his presidency.

The Department of Justice was established by President Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, in part to enforce federal laws protecting the rights of people who’d recently been freed from slavery.

After Richard Nixon tried to use it against his enemies (and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for his efforts), Congress in 1978 passed the Ethics in Government Act which put a wall of separation between the DOJ and the White House.

Trump has explicitly proclaimed his intention to tear that wall down and go farther than Nixon ever imagined in using our armed investigative services for personal revenge and harassment of people he perceives as his enemies.

He wants the nation’s premiere police agencies to become his own personal enforcers, and has already said they will be hunting down “liberals,” Black Lives Matter protest participants, and Joe Biden, his family, and members of his administration.

He wants to imprison them, as well as the prosecutors and judges who have been participating in the effort to hold him to account for the crimes he committed over the past 7 years.

This politicization of law enforcement has been a first-order and primary feature of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that’s risen to power over the past few hundred years, worldwide. It’s always one of the first things fascist leaders do when they seize power.

In an apparent attempt to portray himself as a visionary like JFK, with his promise to send men to the moon and bring them back safely, Trump is promising to build “freedom cities” in his second term. The main feature he’s discussed is that people will get around in them in “flying cars.”

While it’s being portrayed as a goofy stunt designed to make him seem like an imaginative idealist, in fact there has been a movement among rightwing billionaires for some time to create cities that they basically run as little feudal fiefdoms, the same way the morbidly rich run their companies and their football teams.

Some libertarian billionaires assert that the only reason there’s never been a successful libertarian nation in the history of the world is because true libertarianism — government doing nothing but running the police, army, and courts and everything else left to private charity and business owners — “has never been tried.”

The ”freedom cities” could be a new libertarian experiment, or they may be the 21st century version of the old “company town,” where nobody has rights or protection of the law but is subject to the whims of the local billionaire owner. A group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has already put forward what appears to be a plan to build a new city in California that they may or may not envision running along these lines. The group has so far purchased more than 53,000 acres of land, an area larger than the entire city of Beaumont, Texas, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Trump is also promising that he’ll end the brutal attacks against Ukraine on “day one” by simply turning the country over to his good friend, Vladimir Putin.

For the first time since World War II, this would legitimize a nation attacking another nation simply to seize their land, resources, and people.

It would greenlight China to do the same with Taiwan, and encourage every other tinpot dictator in the world to grab nearby territory that he wants. It would encourage war, and could very easily lead to a world war.

Abandoning Ukraine like this, along with Trump’s oft-stated preference to leave or end NATO and stop support for the UN, would lead the autocracies of the world — particularly Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea — to destroy the democracies in their sphere of influence, replacing those democracies with strongman autocracies.

The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this would signal a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.

Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans for this nation, regardless of which Republican takes the White House next. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.

If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you.

Triple check your voter registration, especially if you live in a Red state where the voter purges have already begun, and make sure everybody you know is registered to vote.

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mma 12 23 matt g

the failures of legacy news outlets paved Donald Trump’s path to the presidency in 2016.

Obsessive, spectacle-minded coverage from major broadcast and cable networks and print and digital publications helped push the real estate mogul and reality TV star ahead of the pack during the Republican primary, as their top executives touted the resulting boom in ratings and profits.

And while critical scrutiny of Trump’s bigotry and authoritarianism increased during the general election campaign, outlets remained wedded to a “both sides” vision of journalism which resulted in disproportionate coverage of relatively minor scandals involving Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton — particularly in the days just before the election.

The result was a narrow Trump victory, followed by four years of chaos, corruption, cruelty, conspiracy theories, mass death, proto-fascism, election subversion, and, ultimately, insurrection.

The twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president is now seeking a return to office, with a stated goal of using the federal government to exact “retribution.” He has openly toyed with the “termination” of the Constitution’s limits on presidential power, promised to unleash the FBI and Justice Department on his enemies, and said he would act as a “dictator,” albeit only on “day one” of his term.

But for much of this year, the legacy news outlets that helped usher Trump to power were complacent. Nakedly authoritarian comments from the would-be president drew relatively muted coverage, while his potentially disastrous policy proposals were often ignored. If the press’s over-coverage aided Trump’s previous ascendance, this time around he has benefited from its relative neglect.

Media Matters is naming the legacy media our Misinformer of the Year for 2023.

The press plays an essential agenda-setting role in American politics. Decisions made by news executives, editors, TV newscasters and bookers, reporters, and pundits determine which issues the public sees, reads, and hears about, and the tone with which those topics are covered.

Media Matters produced a series of studies this year assessing the news coverage of Trump by the nation’s five largest newspapers by circulation (the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post); the Big Three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC); and the three major cable news networks (CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News). While the news media have become increasingly fragmented, those outlets feature relatively large audiences and both retain an outsized influence on and reflect broader trends in the industry.

Our studies found that while many individual journalists at those networks and publications produced vital reporting on Trump’s actions and plans, the overall coverage of the outlets often did not meet the moment.

Data: Major news outlets keep downplaying Trump’s incendiary remarks and hazardous policies

Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection, in which his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election, is perhaps the single most salient aspect of his political career.

But after Trump launched his new campaign with two January rallies, 77% of cable segments, 62% of top newspaper articles, and all broadcast news segments about the campaign failed to mention that role.

After President Joe Biden announced his reelection bid in April, we found that media coverage would often highlight his age but not Trump's, even though the former president is only three years younger.

Reviewing five months of coverage in major newspapers, we found that of all the articles that mentioned the age of either candidate, all five papers mentioned Biden’s age a great deal more.

We further determined that cable news mentioned Biden’s age 4 times as often as Trump’s in a four-day period in September beginning with the release of a poll that included questions about both candidates’ ages and health.

Major outlets not only provided comparatively little coverage of Trump’s age, but they also downplayed a series of verbal gaffes and incoherent statements he made. In September and October, Trump mixed up the authoritarian leaders of Hungary and Turkey; confused his former Republican opponent Jeb Bush and Jeb’s brother, former President George W. Bush; mixed up a number of his Democratic opponents with former President Barack Obama; and made a garbled statement accusing Biden of leading the country into “World War II.”

None of those remarks were covered on broadcast news, and they received relatively light coverage from the cable networks.

We also found that Trump received relatively lax coverage for a series of unhinged, extremist comments he made over the last four months of the year.

When the former president and likely Republican nominee suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed for his criticism of Trump, the comments were ignored by the Big Three broadcast networks and Fox, and they received 21 and 41 minutes of coverage, respectively, from CNN and MSNBC.

We subsequently reviewed coverage after Trump complimented the terrorist group Hezbollah as “very smart”; accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country”; said that “liberal Jews” are voting “to destroy America”; and called for “ideological screening” of immigrants and the barring of those who don’t like “our religion.”

Only the Hezbollah remark received more than 12 minutes of coverage from a cable news network or any broadcast coverage at all (just over 1 minute of coverage combined across ABC and NBC).

Likewise, in November Trump repeatedly pledged to “root out” his political opponents, who he claimed “live like vermin within the confines of our country” and want to “destroy America,” drawing comparisons from experts on authoritarianism to the rhetoric of genocidal fascist dictators.

But the remarks were largely ignored, drawing significantly less coverage from major outlets than the outlets gave Clinton’s description of some Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” in 2016.

grf]

The legacy press did no better in covering some of Trump’s most consequential policy ideas this year.

Trump announced in August that he plans to impose a 10% tariff on all imported goods, the revenue from which his campaign team said would go toward tax cuts slanted toward the rich. Experts decried the tariff plan as “a disaster for the U.S. economy” that would raise prices for American consumers, particularly the poor and middle class, and potentially trigger “global economic chaos.”

But Trump’s tariff proposal received vanishingly little television coverage over the following month. ABC, CBS, and NBC did not cover it on their national morning, evening, or Sunday political talk shows. CNN and MSNBC each provided less than 1 minute of coverage, within a single segment, and neither addressed the potential impact for Americans, while Fox ignored the plan.

In November, Trump said that if he is elected he wants to “terminate” the Affordable Care Act, which provides health coverage to 35 million Americans and protects the coverage of many more with preexisting conditions. We found that the broadcast networks totally ignored Trump’s threat. While the cable news networks covered Trump’s threat in 35 segments, they largely ignored its potential consequences for the public.

2024 will push political journalism to the breaking point

There were signs of improvement as the year came to a close. The New York Times produced major investigations on the Trump team's radical, authoritarian plans for if he returns to power, while The Atlantic devoted an entire issue to analyzing what will occur “If Trump Wins.” Each set the agenda for the rest of the press, drawing substantial secondary coverage.

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one of the hazards of participating in racially motivated extremist activity is getting banned from U.S. military facilities — as David Fair can attest.

Fair is no longer “allowed to enter military bases,” according to a disclosure he made during chat sessions on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that caters to racist skinheads in the United States and Europe.

“I honestly don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m the leader of a white nationalist group or January 6th involvement,” Fair elaborated in a voice chat posted in the channel, which Raw Story has reviewed. “Trying to figure it out myself. I don’t know what to tell my boss. Which one’s worse?”

ALSO READ:Nazis bullied a conservative Tennessee town. Locals punched back. Trump should be worried.

Fair did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story. It is not clear how he learned about the ban or what type of work he does that might require him to visit military bases. He lives near Fort Jackson, a military installation near Columbia, S.C., that provides basic training to more than 45,000 soldiers entering the Army each year.

The Department of Defense did not respond to inquiries from Raw Story about why Fair, who is not a member of the military, was banned from military bases.

Fair leads the South Carolina-based Southern Sons Active Club, which is part of the burgeoning network of neo-Nazi groups that emphasize brotherhood and mixed-martial arts training. These “active clubs” also work to indoctrinate young men in the white supremacist conspiracy theory that white people are facing genocide.

Southern Sons Active Club also has a presence in North Carolina and Georgia.

Most of these active clubs outwardly present a more sanitized version of white nationalism by generally refraining from overt displays of Nazi symbolism, such as the swastika. They also have worked alongside the Proud Boys — a group with complicated racial politics that accepts men of color while also harboring members who embrace Nazism — and harassed drag shows and other LGBTQ events.

Fair’s group is less guarded than others in its ideological signaling: Photos distributed on its public channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram show members giving Hitler salutes.

Beyond his involvement in the active club network, part of the so-called “white nationalism 3.0 model,” Fair is a self-avowed fan of racist skinhead culture, a throwback to the 1980s and 1990s, before the 19-year-old man was born.

ALSO READ:Trump’s voice is hawking ‘gold bars’ on YouTube. But is it really Trump?

Fair’s presence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is not a secret, but there’s no evidence that he violated any laws beyond being on restricted Capitol grounds — an offense that the Department of Justice typically does not prosecute, with some rare exceptions.

Regardless of whether Fair’s presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 played a role in his getting banned from military bases, discussion of Fair’s situation among members of the Telegram chat indicates that it was a relatable predicament for other extremists.

For example, Vassilios Pistolis, a white supremacist who was formerly active with the now-defunct Traditionalist Worker Party and Atomwaffen, disclosed in the chat that he has been banned from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Pistolis was court-martialed and ultimately discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps for assaulting antiracist counter-protestors at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Non-military civilians typically have access to military bases for a range of activities including contract work and services such as deliveries and heating and air-conditioning maintenance.

The military has been slow to take action against active-duty members charged with criminal offenses for their participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection. But the Tennessee Valley Authority — a federally owned utility — banned William Beals, a union carpenter, from its facilities after learning he was present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, as exclusively reported by Raw Story.

More than two years later, the FBI arrested him and charged him with theft of U.S. property, as well as violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

Tyler Dykes, a Marine Corps veteran who was briefly involved with the Southern Sons Active Club earlier this year, was arrested in July and charged with assaulting law enforcement and other alleged violations related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

IFrame Content

*David Fair appears in the top row, second from left, in a composite photo published by Atlanta Antifascists.

Prior to his arrest by the FBI, Dykes served time in jail for crimes related to his participation in a torch march on the eve of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va.

It is not clear whether Dykes and Fair knew each other on Jan. 6, but no evidence has surfaced that Fair was with Dykes that day.

Instead, Fair walked to the Capitol with his mother, Christina Praser-Fair, according to an account she gave to WLTX News 19. “We got to the Capitol building, there was already a ton of people there,” Praser-Fair told the news station. “We were right next to the scaffolding.”

A photo included in the news report shows Fair wearing a red Trump 2020 hat and dental braces, while holding a Vietnamese American Freedom and Heritage flag and standing in front of the risers erected on the west side of the Capitol for Joe Biden’s inauguration.

A local news story shows Fair with his family at then-President Donald Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, giving his age as 12 at that time. He recently announced that he was celebrating his birthday on Telegram. Based on that metric, he would have been 16 at the time of the insurrection, and 17 when he helped found Southern Sons Active Club in the summer of 2022.

‘Act the fascist part’

During an interview with a white nationalist podcaster in January, Fair pitched an approach to talking about white power ideology to friends and neighbors — one he asserted would avoid tripping alarm bells.

“If you’re talking to a person, politics comes, up you don’t need to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m a national socialist, like you know, Hitler from Germany,’” he said. “I would just tell people, ‘Yeah, I’m a nationalist. I love my nation. I love the people in it. And I’m proud to be who I am.’ And nobody on Earth — even non-white people — they won’t get mad at hearing that.”

But to the podcast audience, he made no effort to conceal who he was.

“Act the fascist part,” Fair urged. “Don’t just say you’re a fascist. Become a fascist. Or national socialist, or pro-white, identitarian, whatever you consider yourself to be — act the part.”

Fair has evangelized for his racist beliefs off-line, too.

For example, Southern Sons Active Club has actively networked with other far-right groups.

ALSO READ:Big money for top Democrat stolen: federal records

They joined forces with the Proud Boys to protest the drag show in Florence, S.C., in September 2022.

They appeared at a flash rally outside the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., with Tennessee Active Club, which is led by Sean Kauffmann, who recently garnered notoriety for attaching himself to the mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson in Franklin, Tenn.

And members of Southern Sons Active Club collaborated with the neo-fascist group Patriot Front on stickering runs and hand-to-hand combat training, according to their Telegram channel.

Southern Sons Active Club allows its members to join other white power groups, Fair said in the podcast interview.

“You can join any group you want because this is your brotherhood, this is your family, and if you want to do the national thing, go ahead,” he said. “We’re still your brothers.” He added only one caveat: “You can get in touch with any other guy as long as it’s not some terrorist group, you know.”

But Fair’s efforts to distance Southern Sons Active Club from terrorism is belied by a message on the group’s Telegram channel recommending that followers “read the 88 precepts of David Lane.”

Lane was a member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group the Order who authored the seminal text of the modern white power movement while serving a 190-year prison sentence for his role in the 1984 murder of Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg.

ALSO READ:George Santos’ potential replacement also has financial ethics issues

Beyond pushing fitness and self-improvement, the Southern Sons Active Club channel salts in messaging with an aggressive edge, with phrases such as, “Mark your territory,” “We win by dominating physical space,” and, “Total victory or total death.”

While Southern Sons Active Club has been relatively dormant over the past eight months since its members were exposed in the Atlanta Antifa report, Fair has been talking about reviving the group.

In a message posted on the Telegram chat frequented by racist skinheads, Fair said he is “planning on traveling the entire Carolinas and Georgia on a grand tour of sorts meeting with our guys to build up more support.”

He specifically mentioned interest in convening an in-person meeting of Southern Sons Active Club members and other white supremacists in Charlotte, N.C., although he appears to have not settled on a date. Last weekend, he joined a friend in Atlanta and pledged to put up Southern Sons Active Club stickers.

In his posts on the Telegram chat for racist skinheads, Fair is open about his abuse of alcohol, and in one recent post he wrote, “Literally me,” in reaction to a meme about drinking and driving. And he presents himself as someone willing to confront people he views as his adversaries, writing in one message that he has “troll”-ed Radical Hebrew Israelites, an antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ group whose membership is predominantly Black.

The day before Fair announced that he had been banned from military bases, he said he planned to go to his local Waffle House and harass a trangender employee.

“I’m thinking maybe like just harassing the f---ing t----- or making a big scene out of it,” he said. “I don’t know. I got like five dudes on board with me, so we can probably do something funny if y’all can think of something.”

Last month, he announced in the chat at 10:14 p.m. on the Saturday after Thanksgiving that he was at Waffle House on “hour something of being drunk,” and said he was “tempted” to start a fight. More than four hours later, he announced that he “got home safe” and was “Booz cruising again.”

Fair posted a video of himself driving that referenced getting “socked in the jaw,” but it’s not clear exactly what happened during his visit to Waffle House, although he appears to have avoided any entanglements with law enforcement.

Commenting on a former Southern Sons Active Club member who apparently failed to demonstrate sufficient mettle, Fair reflected on the qualities he values in his fellow white supremacists.

“Honestly, at the current state of our scene it almost takes a criminal mind to keep going sometimes,” he said. “I don’t say criminal mind to say we are dangerous lads. But it takes a certain mindset — an ability to be ready to do anything.”

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the New York Young Republican Club recently held its annual gala in New York's financial district, and former President Donald Trump gave the keynote address with some of the global far right's most notorious political figures in attendance.

According to Talking Points Memo (TPM), the gala's attendees included not just American far-right politicians like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), but also European right-wing extremists like Austrian politician Gerald Grosz and European Parliament member Susanna Ceccardi, who is from Italy's far-right Lega party. German politician Maximilian Krah — whose party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been criticized as a "neo-Nazi party" — was also at the event.

"Donald Trump rubbing elbows with Nazi-linked groups might be surprising if Trump’s last month wasn’t defined by him parroting Hitler and Mussolini, and promising to rule as a dictator so he can rip away Americans’ freedoms and round up millions of Americans into detention camps," said Ammar Moussa, who is the rapid response director for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.

"The American people rejected Trump and his MAGA attacks on democracy in 2020, and it’s why he’s going to lose again next November," Moussa added.

Gerald Grosz was initially a member of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Anton Reinthaller — a former Nazi Party leader and SS officer. Grosz and his colleague Jorg Haider, who was the son of a Nazi stormtrooper who praised Adolf Hitler's regime, eventually joined a Freedom Party offshoot. While they all come from different countries, TPM described Grosz, Ceccardi and Krah as comrades-in-arms in movements that are "staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant" in nature.

Prior to Trump's speech, he was introduced as the "45th, 46th and 47th presidents of the United States," which alludes to Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump doubled down on his "dictator" comments during his speech, repeating that if elected to another term he would assume dictatorial powers on day one of his administration to build a border wall and "drill drill drill."

The New York Young Republican Club's flirting with global far-right figures is in line with how international political scholars have described the modern GOP. In 2019, Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris surveyed roughly 2,000 political experts around the globe on the authoritarian leanings of various modern far-right parties. She found that the American Republican Party has more in common with authoritarian, fascist-adjacent parties like Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz than with their counterparts in G7 countries like the Tories in the UK and the conservatives in Canada.

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as part of their Project 2025 agenda, Donald Trump's MAGA allies have — according to reports in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Axios — been thinking long and hard about the type of MAGA Republicans they would like to include in a second Trump Administration if he wins the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and goes on to defeat President Joe Biden in the general election. The idea of Project 2025 is to give the United States' federal government a thorough MAGA makeover and make sure that only devout, unquestioning loyalists are hired.

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan has been slamming Project 2025 as a dangerous recipe for far-right authoritarianism. During a recent broadcast, the progressive host cited "unhinged" GOP attorney Mike Davis as a troubling example. Donald Trump Jr. and "War Room" host Steve Bannon are among the MAGA Republicans who have been touting Davis as a possible candidate for U.S. attorney general during a second Trump Administration.

To show how extreme Davis is, Hasan showed clips of him on "The Benny Show" promising that as attorney general, he would "put kids in cages" and send political opponents to "the gulag." On October 1, 2023, Davis tweeted, "The violent Black underclass is a danger to America…. We must resume the mass incarceration of these thugs. In the meantime, Americans must arm up. These monsters will kill."

Hasan told viewers, "Mike Davis is on their radar not in spite of, but because of, his unhinged rhetoric…. Mike Davis is something that the Trump Administration lacked the last time around: a skilled, even competent, veteran of Beltway legal politics and right-wing causes — one who seems keen to transform Trump's darkest fascist impulses into an actual policy agenda…. Mike Davis is super-authoritarian and as we've discussed, super competent. That makes him super dangerous."

Hasan added, however, that Davis is only one of the many "authoritarians" Trump and his loyalists would like to hire. The MSNBC host noted that according to Axios, they are hoping to install, in the federal government, a "pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents."

READ MORE:Revealed: Trump's Project 2025 agenda aims for 'total control' of the federal government

*Watch the full video below or at this link.

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Kash Patel, who was a counterterrorism official on former President Donald Trump's National Security Council, made a pledge to lead a "bench" of "all-America patriots" to prosecute journalists if his former boss wins a second term in the White House.

"We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media," Patel said in a recent appearance on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's podcast. "Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out."

When the New York Times reached out to Patel to clarify his remarks, his spokeswoman, Erica Knight, sent the Times a statement from Patel: "When President Trump takes office in 2025, we will prosecute anyone that broke the law and end the weaponized, two tier system of justice."

Patel's remarks about prosecuting journalists are in line with the former president's statements about media networks critical of his policies. In a November post to his Truth Social account, Trump said the "government should come down hard" on MSNBC and "make them pay" for the network's reporting on the ex-president.

"MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves, and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE," Trump wrote. "Brian Roberts, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years. It is the world’s biggest political contribution to the Radical Left Democrats who, by the way, are destroying our Country."

Trump has routinely targeted the media, and has referred to journalists as the "enemy of the people" since 2018. That same year, Florida man Cesar Sayoc, who was described as a "Donald Trump superfan," sent 16 pipe bombs to CNN's offices along with multiple prominent Democrats. He was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In addition to the media, Trump himself has vowed to weaponize the machinery of the federal government against his political enemies if given a second term. The Times reported that Trump particularly wants to direct the Department of Justice to prosecute opponents like President Joe Biden, even promising to appoint a special prosecutor to hound both the president and his family.

2x Kash Patel, who was a counterterrorism official on former President Donald Trump's National Security Council, made a pledge to lead a "bench" of "all-America patriots" to prosecute journalists if his former boss wins a second term in the White House.}:

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Right-wing media lavish praise on Argentina’s newly elected far-right president | Media Matters for America

argentine President-elect Javier Milei is becoming a right-wing media darling in the U.S. due to his austere proposed economic policies and conservative ideology. Right-wing media figures have reacted to Milei’s electoral success by praising him, comparing him to former President Donald Trump, and attacking mainstream media for their critical reporting.}:

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'I’m your macho leader': Expert explains what Trump’s 'contempt for the rule of law' shows - Alternet.org

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Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.

And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.

Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But it is not just government officials whom Trump suggests be targeted for extrajudicial killings. Mere shoplifters should be killed too. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving,” Trump said to cheers at the California Republican Party convention in September.

Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

More than crazy bluster

This rhetoric may seem like crazy bluster, which is no doubt why many people appear prepared to ignore it. But put in its historical context, what Trump is doing is echoing views that are part of a long tradition of illiberal and outright fascist thought. For fascists have always seen the use of violence as a virtue, not a vice.

First, this is the natural result of the way that fascist communities define themselves. According to Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and for a time the official legal theorist of the party under Adolf Hitler, one builds and maintains a community by identifying and vilifying its enemies. And in this kind of highly polarized environment, the threat of violence always hangs in the air.

Second, among fascists, machismo is much admired. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose own outrageous rhetoric has also encouraged violent behavior by his supporters, simply “beamed” when Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him for his masculinity.

Trump often acts as a sycophant for Putin too, and machismo also is a big part of Trump’s own public persona.

Third, fascists are obsessed with purity. They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs.

But in the real world, people are too intermixed for this to occur naturally. True purity of community is an aspiration that can be made real only through violence and subjugation. Hence the Holocaust,genocide and ethnic cleansing, and other more limited attacks on minority and immigrant populations.

Violence as noble and intoxicating

Fascists, then, see violence as noble and intoxicating. For example, Julius Evola, a far-right intellectual active in Italy from 1920 to 1970 and the author, among other things, of “Fascism Viewed from the Right” and “A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth,” writes that violence “offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero that sleeps within him.”

Today, Evola is a favorite of the alt-right, and he suggests that a hero’s death is preferable to a life built on liberal compromise. “The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero,” Evola writes, “even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.”

The ultraconservative Catholic authoritarian and opponent of the French Revolution Joseph de Maistre, who is recognized as one of the intellectual forefathers of fascism, goes even further.

“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death,” Maistre writes. Indeed, without an executioner, the man who kills other men, Maistre claims society could not exist. For violence is necessary to satisfy “men’s natural desire to be destructive,” he writes; it leaves them feeling “exalted and fulfilled.”

Patriot Front – labeled a ‘white supremacist group’ by the Anti-Defamation League – marches in Washington, D.C., in May 2023.

Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Social disruption and destruction

These comments make clear that fascists see violence as something to be used for more than just personal retribution and intimidation. It is to be used to create wider social disruption and destruction. Not only are individuals to be subject to attack, but institutions and norms as well.

Consider “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” a work by two amateur historians popular on the far right.

The book is actually a restatement of Evola’s theory of historical regression, set forth in his “Revolt against the Modern World.”

The idea is that history moves in cycles, the first one being the best and each one thereafter representing a further decline. The fourth cycle is the worst, and it ends only when all existing social institutions are destroyed. This, in turn, is an application of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that “one can build only in a space which has been previously razed to the ground.”

Then history will reset and cycle once again.

Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon admires these ideas so much he made a movie about them.

Trump appears to embrace these ideas too. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great,” he says.

Viewed in this context, not taking Trump’s violent rhetoric more seriously seems dangerous indeed.

Mark R. Reiff, Research Affiliate in Legal and Political Philosophy, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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as an ever-greater portion of the nation’s total wealth goes to the top, it’s hardly surprising that ever more of that wealth is corrupting American politics.

In the 2020 presidential election cycle, more than $14 billion went to federal candidates, party committees, and Super PACs — double the $7 billion doled out in the 2016 cycle.

Total giving in 2024 is bound to be much higher.

Most of that money is not supporting American democracy. Increasingly, it is supporting Donald Trump and his anti-democracy allies.

There is a certain logic to this.

As more and more wealth accumulates at the top, the moneyed interests fear that democratic majorities will take it away through higher taxes, stricter regulations (on everything from trade to climate change), enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, pro-union initiatives, and price controls.

So they’re sinking ever more of their wealth into anti-democracy candidates.

Donald Trump is going full fascist these days, and gaining the backing of prominent billionaires.

On Veterans Day, Trump pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” whom he accused of doing anything “to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.” (Notably, he read these words from a teleprompter, meaning that they were intentional rather than part of another impromptu Trump rant.)

Days before, Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” The New York Times reports that he’s planning to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

Trump has publicly vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “ go after” President Joe Biden and his family, and has told advisers and friends that he wants the Justice Department to investigate officials who have criticized his time in office.

This is, quite simply, full-throated neofascism.

Who’s bankrolling all this? While Trump’s base is making small contributions, the big money is coming from some of the richest people in America.

During the first half of the year, multiple billionaires donated to the Trump-aligned Make America Great Again Inc. Super PAC.

Phil Ruffin (net worth $3.4 billion), the 88-year-old casino and hotel mogul, has given multiple $1 million donations.

Charles Kushner (family net worth $1.8 billion), the real estate mogul and father of Jared, who received a late-term pardon from Trump in December 2020, contributed $1 million in June.

Robert “Woody” Johnson (net worth $3.7 billion), Trump’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom and co-owner of the New York Jets, donated $1 million to the MAGA PAC in April.

And so on.

But Trump is not the only extremist pulling in big dollars. Nikki Haley — who appears moderate only relative to Trump’s blatant neofascism — proclaimed in her campaign launch that President Biden is promoting a “socialist” agenda.

During her two years as U.N. ambassador under Trump, Haley was a strong proponent of his so-called “zero tolerance” policy, under which thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents and guardians. She supported Trump’s decision to pull out of the U.N. Human Rights Council and to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

Though she briefly criticized Trump for inciting the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Haley soon defended Trump and called on Democratic lawmakers to “give the man a break” when they impeached him for a second time.

Haley recently told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that while Trump’s floating the idea of executing retired General Mark Milley might be “ irresponsible,” it does not disqualify him from running for the White House again.

Haley’s billionaire supporters include Stanley Druckenmiller, Eric Levine, and Republican megadonor Ken Griffin.

Notably, Haley has also gained the support of JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, who’s about as close as anyone in America comes to being a spokesperson for the business establishment. Dimon admires Haley’s recognition of the role that “business and government can play in driving growth by working together.”

The moneyed interests have been placing big bets on other Trumpist Republicans.

Peter Thiel, the multibillionaire tech financier who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” contributed more than $35 million to 16 federal-level Republican candidates in the 2022 campaign cycle, making him the 10th largest individual donor to either party.

Twelve of Thiel’s candidates won, including Ohio’s now Senator J.D. Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “ more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is creating a new fundraising committee that will be soliciting contributions of up to $586,200 a pop.

Elon Musk is not a major financial contributor to Trump nor other anti-democracy candidates, but his power over one of the most influential megaphones in America gives him inordinate clout — which he is using to further the neofascist cause.

Witness Musk’s solicitude of Trump, his endorsement of antisemitic posts, his embrace of Tucker Carlson and white replacement theory, and his avowed skepticism toward democracy.

Democracy is compatible with capitalism only if democracy is in the driver’s seat, so it can rein in capitalism’s excesses.

But if capitalism and its moneyed interests are in charge, those excesses grow to the point where they are able to extinguish democracy and ride roughshod over the common good.

Hence the reason Trump’s neofascism, and the complicity of today’s Republican Party with it, are attracting the backing of some of the richest people in America.

What’s the alternative? A loud pro-democracy movement that fights against concentrated wealth at the top, enormous CEO pay packages, a politically powerful financial sector, and tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations.

And fights for higher taxes on the top (including a wealth tax) to finance Medicare for all, affordable housing, and accessible child care and elder care.

The willingness to make this a fight — to name the moneyed interests backing neofascism, explain why they’re doing this, and mobilize and energize America against their agenda and in favor of democracy — is critical to winning the 2024 election and preserving and rebuilding American democracy.

Biden and the Democrats must take this on, loudly and clearly. (Incidentally, Biden’s age — Happy 81st, Joe! — would be far less of an issue if he showed the grit and guts to do this.)

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'Lawless and corrupt': Expert lays out how Trump’s plan is 'straight out of the history of authoritarianism' - Alternet.org

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one of the few foreign correspondents to be granted personal access to Adolph Hitler and his inner circle in the dark winter of 1933 was Welsh journalist Garreth Jones. Assigned by his home paper, the Western Mail,to cover Hitler’s push to absolute power, Jones accompanied the newly appointed chancellor and his entourage to Frankfurt for a massive political rally that was held on March 2 of 1933.

*This article originally appeared on Truthdig.

Jones’ eyewitness account of the event is bone-chilling because it looks so much like what we are seeing today at Trump rallies.

“For eight hours, the biggest hall in Germany has been packed with 25,000 people for whom Hitler is the savior of his nation,” Jones began his story. “They are waiting, tense with national fervor…I have never seen such a mass of people; such a display of flags up to the top of the high roof, such deafening roars. It is primitive, mass worship.”

Then Hitler took the stage to a “roar of applause and the thumping and the blare of a military band and the thud of marching feet.” Hitler, Jones observed, “is … a master in repeating [his] leitmotiv in many varied forms, and the leitmotiv is: ‘The republican regime in Germany has betrayed you. Our day of retribution has come.’”

As a form of political behavior, discourse and ideology, Trump and the MAGA movement are clearly fascist.

The rally closed with Hitler’s pledge to “complete the work which I began fourteen years ago as an unknown soldier, for which I have struggled as leader of the party and for which I stand today as Chancellor of Germany. We shall do our duty.”

“Again,” Jones wrote, “the hall resounds.”

Three weeks later, Hitler secured passage of the Enabling Act, bringing the Weimar Republic effectively to an end.

Flash forward some 90 years and you can hear echoes of Hitler’s Frankfurt address in the persistent messaging of Donald Trump. Speaking at the ultra-right Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 14^th annual “Road to the Majority” conference in Washington, D.C. on June 24, the former president proclaimed:

In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.

Trump delivered a similar message earlier in June, telling an audience of enraptured supporters in Columbus, Georgia, that he was being persecuted by federal and state prosecutors. He insisted that the “deep state” was also out to get those who followed him. “In the end,” Trump complained, “they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.” This was the usual stuff of Trumpian spectacle. In a rambling tirade delivered on Veterans Day in New Hampshire, Trump vowed to “root out…the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Trump’s fixation on Hitlerian imagery, memes and tropes is not an accident. The orange-haired demagogue has had a longstanding fascination with Hitler. According to a 1990 Vanity Fair article, Trump’s first wife Ivana, who died last year, told her divorce attorney that the former president kept a compilation of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender remarked on Trump’s interest in Hitler in his book on the 2020 presidential campaign, “Finally We Did Win This Election.” Bender writes that Trump told his then-chief of staff Gen. John Kelly during a 2018 trip to Europe that “Hitler did a lot of good things,” particularly for the German economy. (Trump vehemently denied Bender’s account.)

The cult-like bond between the movement leader and his most ardent followers, a bond characterized by pledges of mutual aid, threats of revenge and shared delusions of victimization, is one of the bedrock features of fascism. This was graphically illustrated by the ascent to power of the two pillars of 20 ^th-century fascism, Hitler and Bennito Mussolini, whose personal style Trump is often said to emulate.

“Mussolini put his hands on his hips, thrust his chest, jutted his lower jaw,” Jonathan Blitzer wrote in a 2016 New Yorker article that profiled the work of New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the fore most authorities on fascism. “It’s all about showing that he cannot be contained,” Ben-Ghiat told Blitzer. “It was the same with Mussolini.”

“I’ve been studying cult leaders for a hundred years’ worth of them,” said Ben-Ghiat in an appearance on Democracy Now last June. Trump “has all the signs. He is not a conventional politician of either the Democratic or Republican [Party]… He is a cult leader. And the GOP has long been…submissive to him. He put them under an authoritarian discipline, and then he made them complicit. And this is what corrupt, violent authoritarians do. They make you part of their crimes.”

As I have written before in this column, fascism is an emotionally loaded and often misapplied term. But if understood correctly, it can never be dismissed as a vestige of the past. As a form of political behavior, discourse and ideology, Trump and the MAGA movement are clearly fascist. There is no longer room for debate.

Fascism has deep roots in the United States, from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, to the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues, and, fast-forward almost a century, the election of Trump in 2016.

There’s a long-running class factor in the current of American fascism. University of London professor Sarah Churchwell’s June 2020 essay in the New York Review of Books exactly nails it when she quotes rabbi Stephen Wise: “The America of power and wealth is an America which needs fascism.”

Churchwell’s essay, fittingly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here,” offers a working definition of fascism. She notes that while fascist movements differ from nation to nation, they are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:

{“[N]ostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain ‘bloodlines’ over others.”*}:

If he is reelected next year, Trump could make the January 6 coup attempt look mild. The Washington Post and Politico have reported that Trump and his allies on the extreme right hope to transform the federal government into a virtual presidential dictatorship. Trump and his allies, states Politico, are “collecting the ingredients and refining the recipe for an authoritarian regime.”

The fear is that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to deploy the military. This vision of horror includes Trump in the Oval Office using his immense power to quash civil unrest and dismantle civil service protections for government workers in order to secure their loyalty. And all this while weaponizing the Justice Department to do his bidding.

The New York Times warns that a second Trump term will be especially dire for undocumented immigrants, with mass arrests and the construction of detention camps on a scale not seen since the racist “Operation Wetback” of the Eisenhower era. The Times also reported that Trump plans to cancel the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Fascism thrives in moments of widespread social anxiety and moral panic, when large segments of the population are persuaded that liberal democracy no longer serves their interests. We are living in such a moment now. The urgency we face cannot be understated.

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MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): Speaking of dictators, the Democrats – they've got a new strategy for taking down Donald Trump. Well, they have a strategy for taking down Donald – the new strategy is the same as the old strategy. It's the strategy that they have been using the entire time to finally take down Donald Trump, and it is to compare him to a fascist dictator.

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KNOWLES: And so, what's the response? What do conservatives say to this?

I think 10 or 15 years ago, what conservatives would have said is, no, we're not fascists. No, no. We actually – you just don't understand. We support smaller government. And you – and then what that argument – what that rejoinder turned into over time was, actually, Democrats, when you really think about it, you're the real fascists because, you see, you want to wield government power more than we do. So, you're just totally misunderstanding this whole situation because if anyone -- I'm not saying anyone's a fascist here, but if anyone's going to be like a fascist, it's you, not us.

And now do you know what the answer is? Do you know what I think -- at least this is my conservative answer to Joe Scarborough or any other Democrat who knows nothing about political philosophy, who knows, certainly, nothing about fascism, who knows nothing about the American political order as it once was and could be again, my answer is, OK. Whatever, bro. Sure. No, but you're a fascist, you're just like Mussolini. OK. That's fine. I got a little more hair than Mussolini. I don't know. My jaw is not quite as wide, but sure. Fine. OK. Why not? Why not?

Fascism doesn't mean anything anymore. It once, actually, did mean something. And unlike Joe Scarborough or any Democrat, really, at all at the national level, I've read the founding documents of fascism. For goodness sakes, my double major was in Italian literature. There isn't that much to read if you study Italian literature. It's Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the fascists. The fascist poets and the theorists and the aesthetic philosophers, and it's people like Marinetti, and Alceste de Ambris, and Giovanni Gentile, and Mussolini and then a bunch of poets in the 20th century. So, yes, I've read all the documents. I'm not a fascist. I don't agree with the premises of fascism. Fascism is much, much more progressive than anything that I believe in. But, sure, you're gonna call me that? Alright. Whatever.

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Rachel Maddow: Trump’s unhinged courtroom 'rambling' was designed to undermine 'the whole legal system' - Alternet.org

fascism

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Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.

And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.

Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But it is not just government officials whom Trump suggests be targeted for extrajudicial killings. Mere shoplifters should be killed too. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving,” Trump said to cheers at the California Republican Party convention in September.

Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

More than crazy bluster

This rhetoric may seem like crazy bluster, which is no doubt why many people appear prepared to ignore it. But put in its historical context, what Trump is doing is echoing views that are part of a long tradition of illiberal and outright fascist thought. For fascists have always seen the use of violence as a virtue, not a vice.

First, this is the natural result of the way that fascist communities define themselves. According to Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and for a time the official legal theorist of the party under Adolf Hitler, one builds and maintains a community by identifying and vilifying its enemies. And in this kind of highly polarized environment, the threat of violence always hangs in the air.

Second, among fascists, machismo is much admired. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose own outrageous rhetoric has also encouraged violent behavior by his supporters, simply “beamed” when Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him for his masculinity.

Trump often acts as a sycophant for Putin too, and machismo also is a big part of Trump’s own public persona.

Third, fascists are obsessed with purity. They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs.

But in the real world, people are too intermixed for this to occur naturally. True purity of community is an aspiration that can be made real only through violence and subjugation. Hence the Holocaust,genocide and ethnic cleansing, and other more limited attacks on minority and immigrant populations.

Violence as noble and intoxicating

Fascists, then, see violence as noble and intoxicating. For example, Julius Evola, a far-right intellectual active in Italy from 1920 to 1970 and the author, among other things, of “Fascism Viewed from the Right” and “A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth,” writes that violence “offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero that sleeps within him.”

Today, Evola is a favorite of the alt-right, and he suggests that a hero’s death is preferable to a life built on liberal compromise. “The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero,” Evola writes, “even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.”

The ultraconservative Catholic authoritarian and opponent of the French Revolution Joseph de Maistre, who is recognized as one of the intellectual forefathers of fascism, goes even further.

“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death,” Maistre writes. Indeed, without an executioner, the man who kills other men, Maistre claims society could not exist. For violence is necessary to satisfy “men’s natural desire to be destructive,” he writes; it leaves them feeling “exalted and fulfilled.”

Patriot Front – labeled a ‘white supremacist group’ by the Anti-Defamation League – marches in Washington, D.C., in May 2023.

Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Social disruption and destruction

These comments make clear that fascists see violence as something to be used for more than just personal retribution and intimidation. It is to be used to create wider social disruption and destruction. Not only are individuals to be subject to attack, but institutions and norms as well.

Consider “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” a work by two amateur historians popular on the far right.

The book is actually a restatement of Evola’s theory of historical regression, set forth in his “Revolt against the Modern World.”

The idea is that history moves in cycles, the first one being the best and each one thereafter representing a further decline. The fourth cycle is the worst, and it ends only when all existing social institutions are destroyed. This, in turn, is an application of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that “one can build only in a space which has been previously razed to the ground.”

Then history will reset and cycle once again.

Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon admires these ideas so much he made a movie about them.

Trump appears to embrace these ideas too. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great,” he says.

Viewed in this context, not taking Trump’s violent rhetoric more seriously seems dangerous indeed.

Mark R. Reiff, Research Affiliate in Legal and Political Philosophy, *University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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a British journalist and academic is warning that because the Republican Party and its members are cementing belief in Trump's big lie about the 2020 election in its national identity, democracy is at risk.

In an essay for the Guardian, Peter Pomerantsev — a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University — opined that the recent election of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) as the next Speaker of the House is a sign that the GOP is embracing election denialism as part of its core identity. Pomerantsev added that adherence to lies is a typical tactic of some of the world's most authoritarian governments.

"Agreeing to Trump’s claims about the rigged election is the absurdity you have to pledge allegiance to in order to show you belong to the tribe. It ensures your fealty by making you complicit," Pomeratnsev wrote. "For anyone who has lived in authoritarian regimes, it’s a familiar sight."

To illustrate this point, Pomerantsev noted that even though Johnson had unanimous support from his caucus in the speaker's race, many Republicans "have admitted both publicly and privately that the elections were, in fact, not falsified."

"Yet when journalists faced a gaggle of Republican congressmen and questioned Johnson’s record on this blatant lie, his colleagues jeered and he mockingly said: “Next question” – as if the facts were irrelevant here," Pomerantsev wrote. "And in a sense, they are."

Pomerantsev's essay elaborated that because Republicans have to believe in a claim they privately know is false in order to maintain power, right-wing media must follow suit in order to sate the tribalist nature of their audience. Because of this, he argues, "it will be hard to fact check our way out of this situation."

"The issue can’t simply be resolved by “trusted” sources, even those on the far right, who can communicate the truth about the election to Trump supporters. Instead, sources only become trusted if they agree to the lie," he wrote. "Pledging loyalty to the 'big lie' is more about identity than knowledge – and to fight it entails understanding the need for belonging and meaning it fulfills."

READ MORE:'Extraordinarily deplorable': Analyst slams GOP over 'Kraken level Big Lie' speaker choice*

"Authoritarian propaganda can give the illusion of status and at its extremes a sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency," he added.

Click here to read Pomerantsev's essay in full.

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The fascist who doesn’t want America to think

'A harasser and an abuser': Donald Trump seethes at special counsel Jack Smith

Robert ReichAugust 27, 2023

I want to talk about symbols, images, and fascism.

Here is Trump’s mug shot from his arraignment yesterday in Georgia. It’s a look of defiance — which I’m sure he practiced repeatedly beforehand — intended to make his supporters and his Republican base feel defiant, too.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is Trump’s thousand-word response to Wednesday night’s Republican debate, which he declined to attend.

He timed his arraignment in Georgia for yesterday so that it — and this photo — would dominate Thursday’s and Friday’s news, rather than anything or anyone emerging from the debate.

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But a defiant photograph isn’t “news.” It’s a symbol, an image. Which is exactly what Donald Trump is. He has no political platform, no specific policy agenda, no new ideas,and no plan for what he’ll do if he gets a second term.

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He exists as a symbol for the anger, discontent, bigotry, and vindictiveness he has unleashed in America.

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He is as close as America has come to a fascist leader, who doesn’t want his followers to think or analyze. He wants them only to feel.

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Trump’s lackeys fell in line, expressing the defiance Trump projected in his mug shot.

On Newsmax, Sarah Palin called for civil war.

Fox’s Laura Ingraham told viewers that Trump’s arrest was proof that government officials are trying to “take them out.”

Fox’s Sean Hannity said the Department of Justice will target Republicans “until there’s nothing left of the party.”

All brainless bile.

Last Thursday, Trump complained that Fox News “purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they’re not. Just like 2016 all over again … And then they want me to debate!”

Of course he’s angry. For the man who’s all symbol and image and without substance, a photo like the following conveys a brainless buffoon. It must drive him crazy.

But Trump is not a brainless buffoon. He’s a cunning marketer, a diabolic manipulator of the public, a sly producer of his own daily reality show. His lead in the GOP’s presidential sweepstakes has grown. He will almost certainly be the Republican candidate for president next year — even if he’s in jail.

How to debate a symbol? How to take on an image? How should Biden and the Democrats, and everyone who cares deeply about this country, respond to a demagogue who obsesses over what he projects rather than what he stands for? How to deal with a fascist who doesn’t want followers to think but only to feel rage?

Expose him for who he is.

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Worldwide fascism is being accelerated by the one thing few people want to talk about

Thom Hartmann

August 22, 2023

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers.

The government of the Netherlands fell this summer. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change. If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.

The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.

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The fall of that year saw unusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.

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On December 17 of that year a street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.

The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.

Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.

Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.

Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.

Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.

He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt — that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.

Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians.

It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.

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Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government. In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.

As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:

“By the end of 2016, nearly5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores,undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”

This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungary with his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.

The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.

When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.

While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”

Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.

Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.

Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).

The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:

“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …

“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”

So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.

But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.

Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.

As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip.

It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.

In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.

That will also require radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America — particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.

We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.

To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task.

But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.

We are quite literally out of time.

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https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-2664059523/  mary trump fascist

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https://www.alternet.org/is-trump-a-fascist-2663496110/

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'Fascist' and 'tyrant': DeSantis blasted for ousting another elected Democratic state attorney

David BadashandThe New Civil Rights MovementAugust 09, 2023

Editor’s note: This article has been corrected. Mr. Warren is not Black.

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis Wednesday morning, for the second time, suspended an elected Democratic State Attorney and replaced them with an appointee of his own choosing.

DeSantis, who is also running for president, says he is suspending Florida State Attorney Monique Worrell “for neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime in her jurisdiction.”

“I am appointing Judge Andrew Bain to step in and take over the duties of the State Attorney’s Office in the 9th Circuit,” DeSantis announced on social media. “The people of Central Florida deserve a State Attorney that will prosecute criminals and keep our communities safe.”

Florida State Attorney Monique Worrell won her office in 2020. Her term runs for four years. Judge Bain, a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, was appointed to the bench by Gov. DeSantis in 2020.

READ MORE: Trump Spins Wild Attack Against Fulton County DA Fani Willis Ahead of Possible Indictment

One year ago, almost to the day, Governor DeSantis suspended from office Andrew Warren, another Democratic elected State Attorney, also for alleged “neglect of duty.”

The New York Times on Wednesday called Gov. DeSantis’ removal of the state attorneys a “drastic and exceedingly rare step.”

“Critics, and even a federal judge,” The Times reported, “decried Mr. DeSantis’s ouster of Mr. Warren as politically motivated. But Mr. Warren remains out of office — and Mr. DeSantis mentions his removal in just about every campaign stump speech.”

Critics are again blasting DeSantis.

“This is literally just a dictator overruling the people, kicking out a duly elected official he doesn’t agree with and putting in his own pawn. This shouldn’t happen in America. And the guy who did it shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House,” said David Rothkopf, a noted foreign policy, national security and political affairs expert and commentator.

U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, Democrat of Florida, blasted Gov. DeSantis as a “Fascist” who “hates democracy.”

“Struggling to raise money for his failing campaign and trailing by 40 points in the polls, Ron DeSantis removes a Black woman, Monique Worrell, from her duly elected office in Florida in a desperate, antidemocratic ploy to win MAGA voters,” observed attorney, former White House aide, author, and political commentator Keith Boykin.

READ MORE: Trump Disparages America’s Transgender Service Members at Rally: ‘We Had It Banned’

“This is absolutely disgusting,” wrote Florida state Democratic Rep. Anna V. Eskamani. “State Attorney Monique Worrell is a duly elected official and the only Black woman serving as State Attorney in Florida right now. Her removal is a complete slap in the face to Orange and Osceola County residents and another example of Governor DeSantis eroding our local control and democracy. This politically motivated action by the Governor in a predominantly democratic part of the state should alarm everyone. DeSantis is extreme, unfit to serve, and must be held accountable.”

U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, slammed the Florida governor.

“Ron DeSantis not only punishes corporations, like Disney, for advancing causes, like LGBTQ rights, that he disfavors. He also removes from office duly elected officials who dare criticize the imperial Ron DeSantis. The latest victim is a Florida State Attorney, Monique Worrell, a black woman elected by the people, only to be removed by a tyrant.”

“The self-proclaimed small-government conservatives are actually authoritarians who are all too willing to use big-government power to enforce cancel culture against their political opponents,” Torres added. “There’s a word for this: hypocrisy.”

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'One-party rule' has made 'radicalized' Tennessee Republicans act like far-right authoritarians: report

Alex Henderson July 18, 2023

Republicans in the Tennessee State Legislature sparked a national outcry earlier this year when they voted to expel two Democratic lawmakers, Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson, in response to their participation in a gun control protest. A third Democrat, Gloria Johnson, escaped expulsion during a vote. While Johnson is white, Jones and Pearson are both Black.

The Tennessee Republicans who voted for expulsion had no interest in debating Jones and Pearson on the merits of gun control. They simply wanted to see them removed from office.

Journalist Anne Applebaum takes an in-depth — and very unfavorable — look at Tennessee's political environmentin an essay/think piece published by The Atlantic on July 18. Tennessee, she laments, has become a one-party state ruled by far-right ideologues she compares to authoritarians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

READ MORE: 'Miscarriage of justice': Metro Nashville council reappoints Justin Jones

Technically, Orbán and Erdogan are not dictators. They don't enjoy dictator-for-life status like Spain's Gen. Francisco Franco, a.k.a. El Generalísimo, or Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and they were reelected. But they have seriously undermined their countries' systems of checks and balances, which, Applebaum argues, is also what MAGA Republicans have been doing in Tennessee.

"Just as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán fights with opposition-controlled Budapest — and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fights with Istanbul, and Poland's Jarosław Kaczyński fights with Warsaw — so do Tennessee Republicans fight with opposition-controlled Nashville," Applebaum observes. But ultimately, she says, Tennessee now has "one-party rule," not serious debates. And the state's MAGA Republicans believe they are governing on behalf of God when they push "restrictive voting laws" or try to "shut down debate."

"As in Hungary or Poland or as in Venezuela," Applebaum warns, "the experience of radicalism can make people more radical. Total control of a political system can make the victors not more magnanimous, but more frustrated, not least because they learn that total control still doesn't deliver what they think it should. No county commission or state legislature can possibly meet the demands of a quasi-religious movement that believes it has God on its side and that its opponents herald the apocalypse."

Applebaum discussed her Atlantic essay during a July 18 appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

READ MORE: Tennessee lawmaker: 'Partisan' GOP efforts to oust him were a 'gross miscalculation'

The journalist told host Mika Brzezinski, "One of the effects of having a supermajority, which the Republicans have in Tennessee, is that they don't really have to listen to anybody. They don't have to listen to the public. They don't have to listen to the Democrats. They don't have to listen to political opponents…. Because they're there based on a tiny group of partisans who show up to vote. And the lesson, again, is that when you have that kind of control, it doesn't make you nicer…. It's becoming more and more difficult for Democrats to be heard in the (Tennessee State) Legislature and more broadly."

READ MORE: Tennessee pride celebrations showcase queer joy amid neo-Nazi threats and legal attacks

Watch the video below or at this link.

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on July 4, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt celebrated American Independence Day with a radio address that praised democracy while warning against the dangers of authoritarianism. Dictatorships were plentiful at the time, from Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini, a.k.a. Il Duce, in Italy to Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union. Gen. Francisco Franco had prevailed in the Spanish Civil War, setting up a fascist regime in Madrid.

Only five months after FDR's Independence Day 1941 speech, Pearl Harbor was attacked.

The conservative website The Bulwark honored FDR's address 82 years later by publishing it in article form on July 4, 2023. And by doing so, the conservative website is sending out a warning that democracy is still under attack.

READ MORE:The question is no longer whether Trump’s MAGA movement is fascist — but can we defeat it?

FDR told listeners, "In 1776, we waged war in behalf of the great principle that government should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed — in other words, representation chosen in free elections. In the century and a half that followed, this cause of human freedom swept across the world. But now, in our generation — in the past few years — a new resistance, in the form of several new practices of tyranny, has been making such headway that the fundamentals of 1776 are being struck down abroad. And definitely, they are threatened here."

The architect of the New Deal was referring to the authoritarians of 1941. But FDR's warning could easily apply to the 2023, which finds democracy under attack in parts of Europe, Asia and Latin American as well as in the U.S. The Bulwark, in fact, has published countless articles describing ongoing efforts by the MAGA movement to undermine U.S. democracy — and noting MAGA's affinity for authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

"It is simple — I could almost say simpleminded — for us Americans to wave the flag, to reassert our belief in the cause of freedom, and to let it go at that," FDR said during his address. "Yet, all of us who lie awake at night — all of us who study and study again — know full well that in these days, we cannot save freedom with pitchforks and muskets alone, after a dictator combination has gained control of the rest of the world. We know that we cannot save freedom in our own midst, in our own land, if all around us — our neighbor nations — have lost their freedom…. I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship."

READ MORE: CPAC official melts down over Joe Biden's 'semi-fascist' label despite its embrace of Viktor Orbán

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/republicans-united-states-christian-nation/

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Is the Republican Party fascist? An expert explains the 7 themes that dominate fascism movements

Kevin Matthews and History News NetworkJanuary 11, 2021

Writing in the Washington Post four years ago, journalist Michael Kinsley gave this blunt assessment of the man about to become president:

"Donald Trump," Kinsley wrote, "is a fascist."

Four years later, it's fair to ask: Is the Republican Party fascist?

It's an incendiary question. It's also a serious one. Even after the assault on the U.S. Capitol, eight Senate Republicans and 138 Republican members of the House of Representatives still voted to overturn a free and fair presidential election. It is just the latest example of a party that is well to the right of most conservative parties in the democratic world.

That alone wouldn't make the Grand Old Party fascist. The word itself is hard to characterize. As one of Adolf Hitler's biographers has put it, "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall."

But it's also real, as I learned working for an English-language newspaper in Rome in the mid-1980s. There, I attended a neo-fascist rally in the Piazza del Popolo complete with searchlights and elderly men, all wearing the same berets, a sign, my interpreter told me, that they once belonged to Benito Mussolini's infamous Blackshirts.

While no two fascist movements are entirely alike, during fascism's heyday in the 1920s and 30s, they shared several common themes. All of those themes are present in today's Republican Party.

Fascists are anti-democratic

All inter-war fascist movements took part in elections with one goal in mind: to destroy democracy and create a one-party state.

That's happening today in Poland, in Hungary, in Turkey.

Here, it is the idea that only Republicans can legitimately win at the ballot box. While this goes to the heart of the attempt to overturn November's presidential election, the claim isn't new.

The same was said of Barack Obama's elections (he wasn't really born in this country) and Bill Clinton's victories (he only won because of Ross Perot's third-party candidacies). If the elections aren't legitimate, neither are the presidencies. The same strategy will be used to undermine Joe Biden.

More than that, Republicans believe only they deserve to win. As far back as 1984, Ronald Reagan declared the GOP is "America's party.''

Such thinking leads in one direction. If Republicans are "America's party" then Democrats are the "anti-America party." From there it's a small step to believing that only Republicans can legitimately win at the ballot box, that Democrats only win by cheating. If saving the country from such a party means resorting to strategies like voter suppression — or violence — so be it.

Never mind that this turns the American experiment in self-government on its head. If democracy means anything, it means your side sometimes loses.

That simple fact ought to be clear to every American. Yet it, and Wednesday's attempted insurrection, did not stop Congressional Republican diehards from voting to reject the electoral votes of several states for no reason other than the fact that they didn't like the outcome of the presidential race.

Fascists attract followers with the "big lie"

For Mussolini the big lie was the "mutilated victory" after World War I, a stain that would be wiped out by establishing an Italian empire in the Mediterranean.

For Adolf Hitler the big lie was the "stab-in-the-back," that the "November criminals" caused Germany's defeat in the same war, a stain that would be wiped out by getting rid of the Weimar Republic.

For Trump one big lie isn't enough. He has two of them.

Trump's first big lie was what he called "American carnage," a fantasy America overrun by crime, drugs and illegal immigrants.

Whether the crisis is real or not is beside the point. The national rebirth, the liberation will be achieved by one man: the party's leader. He, and he alone will restore the nation to greatness. Or, as Trump declared: "I alone can fix it."

Trump's second big lie is that he won a landslide in the 2020 election — a victory that a new batch of "November criminals" has conspired to deny him and his followers. That was the message of his "Save America" rally on Wednesday, which immediately preceded the attack on Congress.

However, this comparison involves more than individuals. Neither Mussolini nor Hitler could have come to power without the help of established conservative politicians. Both men were tolerated because they brought with them large numbers of voters for whom these older parties had lost any appeal. Once in office, these politicians reasoned, the fascist leader wouldn't know what to do. He would be their prisoner. Meantime, they could draw from his well of new voters to hold onto power. As one right-wing leader said of Hitler: "We are hiring him."

The bargain made by Italian and then German, conservatives was clear: They chose the fascist option. They knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.

That same reasoning led Republicans like Mitch McConnell to back Trump's bid for the White House. The "adults in the room" would keep him in line. They didn't, and they couldn't.

Even with Trump headed out the door, the same cynicism explains why congressional Republicans jumped on board the effort to reject Biden's legitimate victory — and why some stayed on board even as a pro-Trump mob forced them to shelter in place and then flee the House and Senate chambers. Since more than a few of them have their own presidential ambitions, they don't really want to keep Trump in the White House. They do want to keep his voters, so they can replace him. That is why Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley chose to stick with their protest of the Electoral College vote.

To be fair, some Republicans have stood up to Trump's subversion of democracy. Unsurprisingly, however, their numbers grow the further away they are from the center of national power. While local elections officials bravely carried out their responsibilities, while state officials refused to "find" votes that would tip the results in Trump's favor, some Congressional Republicans also refused to go along with this blatant power grab. Most striking was the decision of former Republican defense secretaries who joined their Democratic counterparts to warn against use of the U.S. military to thwart the will of the American people.

Yet, these examples at the federal level have been few and some are "profiles in courage" only for the most opportunistic of reasons in the Republican civil war that is sure to come.

Fascists celebrate violence

Mussolini was handed power in Italy thanks to the violence and general chaos brought on by his paramilitary Blackshirts. Hitler's stormtroopers used the same tactics in Germany.

The Proud Boys, along with other right-wing groups pledged to back Trump, have not yet become the equivalent of the Squadristi or the Sturmabteilung. And Trump boasting that he would like to "punch" protestors at his rallies may have once seemed like little more than preening.

But these appeals to violence are dangerous. Republicans have done nothing, practically speaking, to stand up to them, even as the level of violence around Trump rallies escalated.

There is an equally disturbing parallel development. As violence spiraled out of control in early 1920s Italy, the police and army moved toward collusion with the Blackshirts in their battles with opponents.

Here, most local and state police officers faithfully carry out their duties every day, not knowing if they will come home that night. Some don't. Capitol Hill Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, died at the hands of Trump supporters while he defended this nation's elected leaders.

Yet around the country, others in law enforcement have shown an affinity for right-wing groups, particularly a shared antipathy toward equal justice protestors. More troubling are reports of growing infiltration of police agencies by the far right.

Whether because of this embrace or because they misperceive the threat, local and state law enforcement authorities seldom have taken action against right-wing paramilitaries, even in the notorious invasion of Michigan's statehouse last year. Escalating provocations went unchecked. The contrast between that and the treatment meted out to often peaceful demonstrators is too obvious to ignore, and was crystallized by the ineffectual preparation for and response to Wednesday's assault — which, it bears repeating, was a violent attempt to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional duty.

Fascists reject established values and objective facts

Fascists dismiss notions like rationalism, egalitarianism, and scientific enquiry — in short, a fact-based world.

The examples of Trump breaking norms and rejecting reality when it suits him are so numerous that there's no point rehearsing them. What's surprising is that anyone has been surprised at how the rest of the GOP was so quick to parrot what Trump aide Kellyanne Conway infamously called "alternative facts."

The rot was evident in the earlier George W. Bush administration, when an aide told writer Ron Suskind that Republicans no longer inhabit the "reality-based community."

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," this aide told Suskind in 2002, "and when we act, we create our own reality."

The problem with this thinking, of course, is that reality — whether it's global warming, or a pandemic, or the results of an election — cannot be wished away.

Fascists have no time for women's rights

Women are crucial to the fascist ideal as wives of virile fascist men and as the bearers of the next generation of fascist boys and girls. But as for equality between the sexes? Forget it.

Fascist states in the 1920s and 1930s classified single women as second-class citizens. Married couples were pressured to have large families; married couples without children had to pay a tax penalty. Mussolini's Italy outlawed contraception, and both his regime and Hitler's banned abortion. Nazis called the operation "racial treason."

Of course, not all abortion opponents are fascists. But all fascists oppose abortion.

The point, again, is that, with the exception of Poland's Law and Justice party, today's GOP is an extremist outlier when it comes to the issue of women's rights among western conservative parties. The same is true of both Law & Justice and the Republicans when it comes to LGBTQ rights.

Fascists abandon their mass of followers once in power

Although fascists build their movements on the backs of middle- and working-class voters, they're quick to abandon them in favor of alliances with the nation's elites: business leaders, bankers, etc. They will still pay lip service to their base; the demands of their new friends, though, come first.

Mussolini attracted support from industrialists such as the auto giant Fiat, and the tire manufacturer Pirelli. The chemical giant I.G. Farben and other German industrialists quickly fell in line shortly after Hitler came to power. In return, both men guaranteed a workforce unprotected by labor unions and one that could be harshly disciplined.

Republicans are long practiced at claiming to champion "Main Street" while their policies overwhelmingly benefit Wall Street, often to the detriment of the "real Americans" they claim to represent.

The 2017 tax cut, the only substantive legislative achievement of Trump's presidency, is a case in point. Just a year earlier, he had promised to cut the taxes of working Americans at the expense of the wealthy. What Americans got was the biggest corporate tax cut in their history at the price of an additional $1.5 trillion of debt over 10 years.

Fascists thrive in a power vacuum

No fascist movement achieves power without help from its opponents. During the inter-war years, men and women were drawn to the fascists once they decided that politicians were more interested in their own petty squabbles. They were either unable or, worse, unwilling to solve the threats plaguing their lives of ordinary people, climaxing with the Great Depression.

The pull of the far right is evident, today, and so are many of the same problems: joblessness; a widening gap between rich and poor; crime; racial and ethnic tensions; poor health care and educational opportunities; threats from across the globe (then, the march to another world war; now, a pandemic).

Republicans could work with the incoming Biden administration to deal with these crises and restore faith in American democracy. Instead, they seem bent on further undermining that faith, thinking it will set them up to grab power later on.

Before this past week, too many in the GOP seemed too willing to choose the fascist option. Now they have seen what it looks like and where it leads. The question Republicans must answer is simple: Will they choose fascism anyway?

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NO LNX

ne day when I was about six, I was walking with my dad in New York City. We noticed that someone had stuck little folded squares of paper under the windshield wipers of the cars parked on the street beside us. My father picked one up and read it. I saw his face grow dark with anger.

“What is it, Papa?”

“It’s a message from people who think that all Jews should be killed.”

This would have been in the late 1950s, a time when the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews in Europe was still fresh in the American consciousness. Not, you might have thought, a good season for sowing murderous antisemitism in lower Manhattan. Already aware that, being the daughter of a Jewish father and gentile mother, I was myself a demi-semite, I was worried. I knew that these people wanted to kill my father, but with a typical child-centered focus, I really wanted to know whether the gentile half of my heredity would protect me in the event of a new Holocaust.

“Would they kill me, too?” I asked.

Yes, he told me, they would if they could. But he then reassured me that such people would never actually have the power to do what they wanted to. It couldn’t happen here.

I must admit that I’m grateful my father died before Donald Trump became president, before tiki-torch-bearing Nazi wannabes seeking to “Unite the Right” marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” before one of them drove his car into a crowd of counterdemonstrators, killing Heather Heyer, and before President Trump responded to the whole event by declaring that “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

Are Queer People the New Jews?

Maybe the grubby little group behind the tracts my father and I saw that day in New York would have let me live. Maybe not. In those days home-grown fascists were rare and so didn’t have that kind of power.

Now, however, there’s a new extermination campaign stalking this country that would definitely include me among its targets: the right-wing Republican crusade against “sexual predators” and “groomers,” by which they mean LGBTQI+ people. (I’m going to keep things simple here by just writing “LGBT” or “queer” to indicate this varied collection of Americans who are presently a prime target of the right wing in this country.)

You may think “extermination campaign” is an extreme way to describe the set of public pronouncements, laws, and regulations addressing the existence of queer people here. Sadly, I disagree. Ambitious would-be Republican presidential candidates across the country, from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to the less-known governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, are using anti-queer legislation to bolster their primary campaigns. For Florida, it started in July 2022 with DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education act (better known as his “Don’t Say Gay” law), which mandated that, in the state’s public schools,

“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

In April 2023, DeSantis doubled down, signing a new law that extended the ban all the way up through high school. Florida teachers at every level now run the very real risk of losing their jobs and credentials if they violate the new law. And queer kids, who are already at elevated risk of depression and suicide, have been deprived of the kind of affirming space that, research shows, greatly reduces those possibilities.

Is Florida an outlier? Not really. Other states have followed its lead in restricting mentions of sexual orientation or gender identity in their public schools. By February of this year, 42 such bills had been introduced in a total of 22 states and are creating a wave of LGBT refugees.

But the attacks against queer people go well beyond banning any discussion of gayness in public schools. We’re also witnessing a national campaign against trans and non-binary people that, in effect, aims to eliminate such human beings altogether, whether by denying their very existence or denying them the medical care they need. This campaign began with a focus on trans youth but has since widened to include trans and non-binary people of all ages.

Misgendering: As of 2023, seven states have laws allowing (or requiring) public school teachers to refuse to use the preferred pronouns of students if they don’t match their official sex. This behavior is called “misgendering” and it’s more than a violation of common courtesy. It’s a denial of another person’s being, their actual existence, and can have a lethal effect. Such repudiation of trans and non-binary young people significantly increases their chances of committing suicide.

It also increases the chances that their non-queer peers will come to view them with the kind of disrespect and even contempt that could also prove lethal and certainly increases their chances of becoming targets of violence. In 2022, for example, CBS News reported that “the number of trans people who were murdered in the U.S. nearly doubled between 2017 and 2021.” It’s no accident that this increase correlates with an increase in high-profile political and legal attacks on trans people. Sadly, but not surprisingly, race hatred has also played a role in many of these deaths. While Blacks represent about 13% of trans and non-binary people, they accounted for almost three-quarters of those murder victims.

Medical care: Laws allowing or even requiring misgendering in classrooms are, however, only the beginning. Next up? Denying trans kids, and ultimately trans adults, medical care. As of June 1st of this year, according to the national LGBT rights organization Human Rights Campaign, 20 states already ban gender-affirmative medical care for trans youth up to age 18. Another seven states now have such bans under consideration.

What is “gender affirmative” medical care? According to the World Health Organization, it “can include any single or combination of a number of social, psychological, behavioral, or medical (including hormonal treatment or surgery) interventions designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity.” In other words, it’s the kind of attention needed by people whose gender identity does not align in some way with the sex they were assigned at birth.

What does it mean to deprive a trans person of such care? It can, in fact, prove to be a death sentence.

It may be difficult to imagine this if you yourself aren’t living with gender dysphoria (a constant disorienting and debilitating alienation from one’s own body). What studies show is that proper healthcare reduces suicidal thoughts and attempts, along with other kinds of psychological distress. Furthermore, people who begin to receive such care in adolescence are less likely to be depressed, suicidal, or involved in harmful drug use later in life. As Dr. Deanna Adkins, director of the Duke Child and Adolescent Gender Care Clinic at Duke University Hospital, notes, young people who receive the gender-affirming care they need “are happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Their schoolwork often improves, their safety often improves.” And, she says, “Saving their lives is a big deal.”

Denial of life-saving care may start with young people. But the real future right-wing agenda is to deny such health care to everyone who needs it, whatever their ages. In April 2023, the New York Times reported that Florida and six other states had already banned Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care. Missouri has simply banned most such care outright, no matter who’s paying for it.

And the attacks on queer people just keep coming. In May 2023, the Human Rights Campaign listed anti-queer bills introduced and passed in this year alone:

“• Over 520 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in state legislatures, a record;

“• Over 220 bills specifically target transgender and non-binary people, also a record; and

“• A record 74 anti-LGBTQ laws have been enacted so far this year, including:

“• Laws banning gender affirming care for transgender youth: 16

“• Laws requiring or allowing misgendering of transgender students: 7

“• Laws targeting drag performances: 2

“• Laws creating a license to discriminate: 3

“• Laws censoring school curricula, including books: 13″

We’re not paranoid. They really do want us to disappear.

Anti-Gay Campaigns in Africa: Made in the USA

Though they’re starting to say the quiet part out loud, even in this country, they’ve been so much less careful in Africa for decades now.

It’s not all that uncommon today for right-wing Christians in the United States to publicly demand that LGBT people be put to death. As recently as Pride month (June) of last year, in a sermon that went viral on Tik-Tok, Pastor Joe Jones of Shield of Faith Baptist Church in Boise, Idaho, called for all gay people to be executed. Local NBC and CBS TV stations, along with some national affiliates, saw fit to amplify Jones’s demand to “put them to death. Put all queers to death” by interviewing him in prime time.

In keeping with right-wing propaganda that treats queer people as child predators, Jones sees killing gays as the key to preventing the sexual abuse of children. “When they die,” he said, “that stops the pedophilia. It’s a very, very simple process.” (The reality is that most sexual abuse of children involves male perpetrators and girl victims and happens inside families.)

Though American “Christians” like Jones may be years away, if ever, from instituting the death penalty for queer people here, they have already been far more successful in Africa. On May 29th, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed perhaps the world’s harshest anti-LGBT law, criminalizing all homosexual activity, providing the death penalty for “serial offenders,” and according to the Reuters news agency, for the “transmission of a terminal illness like HIV/AIDS through gay sex.” It also “decrees a 20-year sentence for ‘promoting’ homosexuality.”

While Uganda’s new anti-gay law may be the most extreme on the continent, more than 30 other African countries already outlaw homosexuality to varying degrees.

It’s a little-known fact that right-wing and Christian nationalist churches from the United States have played a major role in formulating and promoting such laws. Since at least the early 2000s, those churches have poured millions of dollars into anti-gay organizing in Africa. According to Open Democracy, more than 20 U.S. evangelical groups have been involved in efforts to criminalize homosexuality there:

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“The Fellowship Foundation, a secretive U.S. religious group whose Ugandan associate, David Bahati, wrote Uganda’s infamous ‘Kill the Gays’ bill, is the biggest spender in Africa. Between 2008 and 2018, this group sent more than $20m to Uganda alone.”

Such groups often employ the language of anticolonialism to advance their cause, treating homosexuality as a “western” import to Africa. Despite such rhetoric, however, quite a few of them are actually motivated by racist as well as anti-gay beliefs. “Of the groups that are active in Africa,” says Open Democracy, “ten are members of the World Congress of Families (WCF), which has been linked to white supremacists in the U.S. and Europe.”

Is MAGA Really Fascism? And Does It Matter?

Back in the late 1980s, I published an article entitled “What Is Fascism — And Why Do Women Need to Know?” in Lesbian Contradiction, a paper I used to edit with three other women. It was at the height of the presidency of Ronald Reagan and I was already worried about dangerous currents in the Republican party, ones that today have swelled into a full-scale riptide to the right. There’s a lot that’s dated in the piece, but the definition I offered for that much-used (and misused) bit of political terminology still stands:

“The term it­self was invented by Benito Mussolini, the premier of Italy from 1922 to 1945, and refers to the ‘fasces,’ the bundle of rods which symbolized the power of the Roman emperors. Today, I would define fascism as an ideology, movement, or government with several identifying characteristics:

“• Authoritarianism and a fanatical respect for leaders. Fas­cism is explicitly anti-democratic. It emerges in times of social flux or instability and of chaotic and worsening economic situations.

“• Subordination of the individual to the state or to the “race.” This subordination often has a spiritual im­plication: people are offered an opportunity to transcend their own sense of insignificance through participation in a powerful movement of the chosen.

“• Appeal to a mythical imperial glory of the past. That past may be quite ancient, as in Mussolini’s evoca­tions of the Roman Empire. Or it might be as recent as the United States of the 1950s.

“• Biological determinism. Fascism involves a belief in absolute biological differences between the sexes and among different races.

“• Genuine popularity. The scariest thing to me about real fascism is that it has always been a truly pop­ular movement. Even when it is a relatively minor force, fascism can be a mass movement without being a majority movement.”

“Having laid out these basic elements,” I added, one “real strength of fascism lies in its ex­traordinary ideological elasticity,” which allows it to embrace a wide variety of economic positions from libertarian to socialist and approaches to foreign policy that range from isolationism to imperialism. I think this, too, remains true today.

What I failed to emphasize then — perhaps because I thought it went without saying (but it certainly needs to be said today) — is that fascism is almost by definition deadly.It needs enemies on whom it can focus the steaming rage of its adherents and it is quite content for that rage to lead to literal extermination campaigns.

The creation of such enemies invariably involves a process of rhetorical dehumanization. In fascist propaganda, target groups cease to be actual people, becoming instead vermin, viruses, human garbage, communists, Marxists, terrorists, or in the case of the present attacks on LGBT people, pedophiles and groomers. As fascist movements develop, they bring underground streams of hatred into the light of “legitimate” political discourse.

All those decades ago, I suggested that the Christian fundamentalists represented an incipient fascist force. I think it’s fair to say that today’s Make America Great Again crew has inherited that mantle, successfully incorporating right-wing Christianity into a larger proto-fascist movement. All the elements of classic fascism now lurk there: adulation of the leader, subordination of the individual to the larger movement, an appeal to mythical past glories, a not-so-subtle embrace of white supremacy, and discomfort with anything or anyone threatening the “natural” order of men and women. You have only to watch a video of a Trump rally to see that his is a mass (even if not a majority) movement.

Why should it matter whether Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the Republican Party he’s largely taken over represent a kind of fascism? The answer: because the logic of fascism leads so inexorably to the politics of extermination. Describing his MAGA movement as fascism makes it easier to recognize the existential threat it truly represents — not only to a democratic society but to specific groups of human beings within it.

I know it may sound alarmist, but I think it’s true: proto-fascist forces in this country have shown that they are increasingly willing to exterminate queer people, if that’s what it takes to gain and hold onto power. If I’m right, that means all Americans, queer or not, now face an existential threat.

For those who don’t happen to fall into one of MAGA’s target groups, let me close by paraphrasing Donald Trump: in the end, they’re coming after you. We’re just standing in the way.

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an 6 23

see macho male

According to Reich, Trump and the GOP have embraced the following:

:{:{}:

}:

Rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman depends on galvanizing popular rage.

:{:{}:

}:

Popular rage draws on a nationalism based on a supposed superior race or ethnicity.

:{:{}:

}:

That superior race or ethnicity is justified by social Darwinist strength and violence, as exemplified by heroic warriors.

:{:{}:

}:

Strength, violence and the heroic warrior are centered on male power.

Those tenets, Reich concluded, "are not the elements of authoritarianism. They are the essential elements of fascism."

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gop

https://www.rawstory.com/:{5-elements-of-fascism/}:

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fitton trying to get names targets doj fbi retaliate purge

https://www.alternet.org/trump-fani-willis-2660722042/

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https://www.alternet.org/erdogan-eradicate-judiciary-free-press/

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omg

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/critical-race-theory-2659941137/

twenty or 30 years ago, most consumers of right-wing media didn't know what critical race theory (CRT) was. Many liberals and progressives, for that matter, were unfamiliar with CRT — a college-level African-American studies discipline that, in essence, argues that racism of the past affects present-day institutions.

But in recent years, CRT has become a major boogieman in right-wing media and among MAGA Republicans. MAGA pundits and politicians, according to their liberal critics, have weaponized the term CRT and used it to attack any book or article that makes them uncomfortable — be it "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" or Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."

Scholar Stanley Kurtz is among the right-wing figures who has been railing against CRT, but his efforts go beyond trying to keep books out of public schools.

READ MORE: Why Texas Republicans’ crusade against 'woke civics' does students a huge disservice: report

Reporter Asher Lehrer-Small, in an article published by The 74 on May 2, emphasizes that Kurtz has "spearheaded a quiet but influential campaign to cleanse classrooms of what he calls 'woke civics.'" According to Lehrer-Small, Kurtz's "advocacy in Texas led to the 2021 passage of an unprecedented state law banning assignments that involve 'direct communication' between students and their federal, state or local lawmakers."

The reporter notes, "At the core of Kurtz's activism is a central idea: that hands-on civics lessons, such as students writing to their legislators, will lead to 'school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions'…. Accurate or not, Kurtz's depiction of 'woke civics' is now being felt in America's classrooms."

Lehrer-Small adds, "When the scholar penned his model legislation in 2021, which said students should be banned from receiving class credit for 'lobbying' or 'advocacy' at the federal, state or local level, lawmakers and advocates across the country pounced."

:{:{}:

}:

The reporter notes some specific examples of Kurtz's influence. In 2022, for instance, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware and GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, according to Lehrer-Smalls, proposed a bipartisan bill that called for increasing grants for civics education. But the bill was "stopped in tracks" when Kurtz labeled it CRT. AndFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis "mimicked" Kurtz's messaging by claiming that the bill would "award grants to indoctrinate students with ideologies like critical race theory."

READ MORE: 'Censorial filters are unconstitutional': DeSantis' aim to control FL colleges' academic freedom worsens

Read Asher Lehrer-Small's full report for The 74 at this link. https://www.the74million.org/article/the-conservative-scholar-who-convinced-gop-lawmakers-civics-conceals-crt/

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writing for the Arkansas Times, Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar trashed thestate's new "MAGA" governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, once former President Donald Trump's press secretary, and the GOP-dominated state legislature, saying that they "stomped on the poor" and disadvantaged groups without solving any real problems for their constituents.

"Supercharged by a mountain of MAGA money and an even bigger ego, Gov. Sarah Sanders called all the shots," they wrote. "The supermajority Republican legislature raced to do her bidding. Their rubber stamp on all of Sanders’ priorities (vouchers, prison expansion, tax cuts) marked a vast departure from the last administration, when Asa Hutchinson’s pro-gun, pro-life record failed to impress an increasingly insane right-wing extremist legislative branch.Where Hutchinson recoiled from drama, Sanders pursued it, eager to throw Trumpian blows of staggering cruelty if it landed her on Fox News. Her foot soldiers didn’t seem to mind Sanders’ obvious bid to get out of Arkansas and back on the national stage as soon as possible. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did. Republican lawmakers knew to expect a primary challenger to knock them out of office if they dared veer out of lockstep."

"Saying it’s the worst session ever feels trite, too flip to capture the brutality heaped on all but the wealthiest and most insulated," they continued. "Not only did lawmakers do nothing to protect Arkansans from our chart-topping gun death rates, they voted instead to protect the gun companies from us. A new law passed this session bars state entities from investing with firms that eschew the industry profiting off our homicide epidemic. Protecting children got lots of lip service, but no real action. Requiring proof of age and identity to get a social media account or view online porn, laws passed allegedly to protect kids, will be a boon for identity theft but won’t likely shield many innocent eyes. Threatening librarians with jail time if they allow young people to view or check out books about sex is not only adirect assault on free speech, but also a surefire way to maintain Arkansas’s spot as the state with the most teen pregnancies."

Through all of this, they noted, the state also rolled back child labor laws and refused to compromise on one of the most extreme abortion bans in the entire country — while planning to erect a "monument to the unborn" with taxpayer money.

Sanders has faced personal embarrassment throughout the session; previous reporting detailed how a job application to the state required people to describe something they admired about her, which was quickly walked back as soon as it was reported.

"Arkansas’s wealthy and its businesses are safer than ever, having easily secured tax cuts by simply pointing fingers at transgender children and woke librarians, then grabbing the cash when no one was looking," they concluded. "Most of us didn’t get much of anything beyond the insult that the schools we send our children to — schools that anchor our communities — are hotbeds of inadequacy and indoctrination that anyone with the means should flee at their first opportunity. Is this really what Arkansas voted for?"

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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sometimes retaliation FAILs even backfires

// tucker

an 4 23

no lnx vid etc

'The worst case of blackface': Matt Walsh's racist attack on Justin Pearson

Brandon Gage April 12, 2023

Right-wing Daily Wire host Matt Walsh called Tennessee State Representative Justin Pearson (D-86th District) a "gutless fraud" and accused Pearson of "doing blackface" as Nashville officials were voting to reinstate him to his office on Wednesday afternoon.

Pearson and State Representative Justin Jones (D-52nd District) – both of whom are Black – were expelled from the chamber last week by Republicans because they protested the GOP's lack of action to prevent gun violence following the deadly mass shooting at the Covenant School in late March.

A third legislator, State Representative Gloria Johnson (D-90th District), who is white, was spared. Jones was reinstated on Tuesday.

READ MORE: 'Miscarriage of justice': Metro Nashville council reappoints Justin Jones

On Easter Sunday, Pearson delivered a Resurrection-themed sermon at the Church of the River in Memphis in which he blasted his right-wing colleagues for their unprecedented assault on the democratic process.

"The Republican-led supermajority of the Tennessee assembly sought to have a political lynching of three of its members because we spoke out of turn against the status quo of the government after the tragic deaths of six people at the Covenant school in Nashville," Pearson said. "The movement for democracy lives or dies in Memphis. The movement to end gun violence lives or dies in Memphis. We’ve seen those who want to kill the movement in the Republican-led supermajority."

Pearson compared Governor Bill Lee to Pontius Pilate, the biblical Roman official who condemned Jesus Christ to crucifixion.

"Because we walked to the well of the house out of turn, resolutions were unjustly and undemocratically filed against us on these trumped-up charges," Pearson stated. "Because we spoke out against the empire of the NRA of the gun lobbyists; because we demanded an end to gun violence, an end to the proliferation of weapons on our streets, an end to the funerals we attend day after day and week after week and month after month and year after year — because we did that, the Republican-led General Assembly with the support of folks even in this district like Mark White, from our own community, thought it better to get rid of our democratic representation in District 86 than to actually solve the problem."

READ MORE: Tennessee lawmaker: 'Partisan' GOP efforts to oust him were a 'gross miscalculation'

Pearson also penned a blistering CNN editorial on Wednesday in which he admonished Republicans for their "gross miscalculation" in having him removed.

"The spectacle was a gross miscalculation by Republicans in the chamber," Pearson argued. "It turns out that most Americans care deeply about democracy. Most people care about equality and progress. And over two-thirds of Americans — including four out of 10 Republicans — support the kind of common-sense gun safety laws that Rep. Jones, Rep. Johnson and I were protesting in favor of, in the wake of the senseless March 27 Covenant School massacre."

Pearson's powerful oratory triggered a vengeful reaction from Walsh, who launched a racist attack against Pearson:

You know, he doesn't, he, he doesn't really sound like a 1960s civil rights figure, which is what he is trying to sound like and look like. Uh, he sounds like he's doing a parody of one. You know, this is, this is the worst case of blackface that we've seen since Justin Trudeau, except that Pearson's actually Black and he's still doing blackface. Nevertheless, he, he is performing and we know he is performing because now we know what he sounded like before theperformance. It's not at all a convincing performance, of course, in fact, I didn't think I'd see a performance less convincing than Bill and Mulvaney's portrayal of womanhood until Pearson came along. Pearson's really given him a run for his money. This is what the left promotes and encourages – empty performance taken to comical, almost surreal extremes. You know, they give us heroes and leaders who are cartoons. Who are hollow and paper thin, who are, it always turns out conniving, cowards, gutless frauds, andself-aggrandizing performance artists.

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: Judges axe Tennessee GOP's halving of Nashville Metropolitan Council: report

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indictment makes trump's fascism ever clearer (see also jordan attack on bragg)

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/white-nationalist-nick-fuentes-says-trumps-arrest-is-why-you-need-fascism/

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aha social media thus amp ?! , but trump rally is call and response?  dream logic // magical thinking?

https://www.alternet.org/gop-voters-2659695517/

an 3 23

no lnx

author Jeff Sharlet has spent years interviewing conservatives and found many unassuming Americans are ready and eager for violence against their political enemies.

Sharlet's latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the result of more than a dozen years of reporting on the religious right, compiling numerous interviews conducted throughout the Midwest and Great Plains, and he's more worried than ever about the possibility of civil war, reported The Guardian.

"I’ve been writing about the right for a long time," he told the newspaper. "I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is."

He cited a "nice-looking" family he met near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who seemed like "ordinary" conservatives, as the newspaper described them, but harbored bloodthirsty fantasies rooted in extreme conservative politics.

"[The father said] he had a 'Let’s go Brandon' sticker because he didn’t want to swear around his son," Sharlet said. "They’re a middle-class dad and mom. They were always gun people, but not a lot of guns. Now they’re up to 36, now they are arming up. The father had always been anti-abortion. But now it was like a dream had moved into his and his wife’s mind. He described, in incredibly violent detail, the process of abortion. Then he described, in incredibly violent detail, the punishment he thought he and others were going to give to abortion doctors. They were ready for executions."

The current political moment was rooted in a decades-old struggle against fascism, and Sharlet said Donald Trump, intentionally or instinctively, used its "dream logic" to spellbind his followers, who fill in the unfinished thoughts in his pronouncements with their own beliefs -- and that creates the illusion that he's speaking their truth into existence.

"The free association that happens at Trump’s rallies, the ways people make connections that make no sense – it has dream logic," Sharlet said. "One minute, a scary man is crawling into the window to rape your wife, and then the next minute we’re laughing at windmills, and then the next minute we’re sad for the birds that were killed by windmills. And then, in the next minute, we’re yelling, 'Lock her up.'"

"This is dream logic, and there’s vanity in it, right?" Sharlet added. “'I will interpret what they’re saying and I will bend it.'It’s the vanity of the base, the vanity of the mob, the aggregate grotesque imagination of power. It becomes a spinning whirlpool that pulls more and more people in. These are people for whom reality is not enough."

:{:{}:

The illusion that's created for Trump and his followers feels interactive and very real to them, Sharlet said, and that's where the twice-impeached former president gains his power.

"This is why the right feels they are more democratic than the left," he said. "The intellectual rightwingers are like, 'F*ck democracy, we don’t need it.' But the everyday people, they’re like, 'This is the most democratic I’ve ever felt. I am not only receiving – I receive, I interpret and then I transmit back.'"}:

:{:{Sharlet sees a similar dynamic at work within the anti-abortion movement, which the left sees as an effort to control women's bodies, but the right sees as a cause so righteous that violence is necessary.}:

"Yes, the project is misogynist to the core," he said. "But it is not experienced as such by many on the right. Once you make that move, that we’re talking about children, what kind of person are you if you don’t want to save that child?"}:

"It’s astonishing there hasn’t been more violence," Sharlet added. "I think we’ve had a shield from that violence for a long time and now that shield … I sound like Jerry Falwell saying the hand of God is being removed from America."

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fascism?  legis ~ courts

3 23

https://www.alternet.org/brian-kemp-republicans/

FL desantis , GA legis law to remove DA's ?! spkr? sponsor fake elector scheme??!

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lil bit fashy? an raw 3 23

Texas-based gathering of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society saw members pushing "radical new theories" about election laws — and possibly secession from the United States, reported POLITICO on Friday.

The Federalist Society -- which is best known for training an army of conservative lawyers for jobs on the federal bench, where they have undermined everything from abortion rights to labor laws to the basic ability of the civil service to pass rules -- was long a champion of "judicial restraint," as it was founded in an era when the judiciary was far more liberal than it is today.

Now, wrote, Ian Ward, their gathering for the National Student Symposium in Austin — an event that brought out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to give a speech, the tables have turned — and it's "alarmingly clear" that attendees are more interested in using judicial power to overrule liberal democracy itself.

"'Democracy is what philosophers call an ‘essentially contested concept,’' said Daniel Lowenstein, a professor of law emeritus at UCLA and an expert in election law, during a panel on Friday evening. 'Differences that seem on their surface to concern the meaning of the word ‘democracy’,' he added, are actually struggles to advance particular and controversial political ideas,'" said the report. "What democracy does not mean, Lowenstein argued, was 'plebiscitary democracy,' or simple rule by democratic majorities. Citing the Federalist Papers — the namesake of the Federalist Society — Lowenstein suggested that governance based on simple mathematical majorities would enable 'tyrannical domination of the minority by the majority.'"

This rhetoric, explicitly rejecting the idea of the U.S. as a democracy, has grown more common in GOP circles, even being pushed by some Republican senators — and it obscures the fact that the U.S. electoral system is in fact the reverse, with the Senate's structure in particular letting a small minority dominate the majority.

Some attendees didn't stop at rejecting democracy, but rejected the idea of the United States as a country.

"Later on in the same panel, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, diagnosed the apparent threats facing American democracy today — political violence, abuses of governmental power, and attempted election subversion, to name a few — as symptoms of a deeper malaise," and threw in a jab at transgender rights, saying, “At this point in our society, we can’t even agree whether somebody is a man or a woman.” "Alicea advised the attendees to embrace conversion rather than coercion, but in the question-and-answer session after the panel, an audience member proposed a third option: a full-scale national divorce, of the sort recently proposed by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia."

In recent years, President Joe Biden has responded to the new flood of Federalist Society affiliated judges former President Donald Trump installed — who recently defeated a proposed ethics rule limiting their affiliation with the group while on the bench — by appointing another wave of more civil-rights oriented jurists in record numbers at a record pace.

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no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/autocrat-desantis-analyst-danger-democracy/

'Heartless aspiring autocrat': MSNBC legal analyst cautions Ron DeSantis is a 'danger to democracy'

Maya Boddie March 12, 2023

MSNBC political and legal analyst Glenn Kirschner is warning Americans Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' threat to democracy, Newsweek reports.

In response to author Brynn Tannehill's Twitter thread outlining the ways DeSantis exudes fascism, Kirschner tweeted, "Great thread here about the danger to democracy posed by DeSantis. Plus, when I saw him say, with a stupid smirk on his face, that, just for fun he, 'sent 50 illegals to Martha's Vineyard,' it reinforced that he's an inhumane man. Let's defeat this heartless aspiring autocrat."

In her thread, Tannehill was responding to The Brookings Institution senior fellow Shadi Hamid's assertion DeSantis does not pose as massive a threat to democracy as his potential GOP nominee rival, former President Donal Trump.

READ MORE: Trump beaten by DeSantis in new poll - here's where

Hamid wrote on March 1, "It's remarkable to me that there's a single sentient being who believes that DeSantis would be just as bad or even worse than Trump. And anyone who calls DeSantis a 'fascist' should be run out of the room."

The author tweeted in response, "This is such an incredibly bad take, and it is completely contemptuous of those people who actually spent their post graduate education studying how democracies collapse. I wrote at TNR about this, but I will summarize here why smart people can believe DeSantis is worse."

Newsweek reports:

Throughout the extensive thread, Tannehill made the common argument against DeSantis that he is a more competent politician than Trump who could more effectively implement undemocratic policies. She dismissed Trump as "an authoritarian figure who limits the amount of destruction he can cause via his own incompetence," and said that DeSantis "understands how the levers of power work, and he knows how to put the right people in the right places to get exactly the results he wants."

The former senior defense analyst wrote, "We can see in Florida how book bans have played out. How health care bans for women and trans people are going down. There's proposals to force people to misgender trans students and teachers, and ban the Democratic Party in FL."

READ MORE: Jeb Bush's endorsement of DeSantis just backfired big time

The Berkeley Beacon reports:

DeSantis claims to be a role model for free speech and expression, however, he has leveraged state authority to actively retaliate against private companies for speaking out against his 'Parental Rights in Education Bill,' also known as the 'Don't Say, Gay Bill.' In April 2022, DeSantis signed a bill revoking The Walt Disney Company's control over its own self-governed special district within the state, putting an end to the benefits Disney has enjoyed for 55 years.

:{:{}:

}:

Furthermore, regarding the possible presidential hopeful's authoritarian ways, Tannehill said, "He's effectively used the power of the government to bring corporations to heel the way Putin reins in oligarchs. He's getting laws passed that make it difficult or impossible for people to criticize him by tearing down NYT v. Sullivan. This is authoritarianism 101 stuff."

READ MORE: IL Gov. blasts DeSantis and other 'demagogues who are pushing censorship'

Newsweek's full report is available at this link. The Berkeley Beacon's full report is here.

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an 3 23

https://www.alternet.org/ron-desantis-2659533898/

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1316

no lnx

How DeSantis declared war on the last century’s 'most important 1st Amendment decision': legal analyst

Alex Henderson March 08, 2023

Gov. Ron DeSantis and his MAGA Republican allies in the Florida State Legislature have made no secret of their disdain for the mainstream media. During a roundtable discussion that he hosted in February, DeSantis argued that it should be easier to sue journalists for defamation. And a Republican ally, Florida State Rep. Alex Andrade, later proposed a bill that would do exactly that: Florida House Bill 951.

:{:{}:

}:

Andrade's bill would be a blatant violation of New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision that set a tough standard for proving defamation. Under Sullivan, defamation must involve "actual malice," which is very difficult to prove. Dominion Voting Systems is trying to show "actual malice" in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against right-wing Fox News, and ironically, the voting technology company would have an easier time proving its case if the High Court overturned Sullivan and agreed with Andrade's bill. Andrade and DeSantis believe that Sullivan was wrongly decided.

Meanwhile, Florida State Sen. Jason Brodeur (another Republican DeSantis ally) has proposed a bill that would require bloggers who write about state officials to register with the state government and file regular reports on their activities. Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) has slammed the Brodeur-sponsored Florida Senate Bill 1316 as unconstitutional, tweeting, "The idea that bloggers criticizing a politician should register with the government is insane. It is an embarrassment that it is a Republican state legislator in Florida who introduced a bill to that effect. He should withdraw it immediately."

READ MORE: Civil libertarians slam Ron DeSantis’ 'brazen and blatantly unconstitutional' war on press freedom

In a scathing op-ed published by The Guardian on March 7, journalist Trevor Timm — executive director and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation — warns that DeSantis and his allies have declared an all-out war on the U.S. Constitution's 1st Amendment. And Timm is as critical of Andrade's bill as he is of Brodeur's.

"Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, and his cronies, not content with destroying free speech in public schools, have set for themselves a new target: destroying press freedom and every Floridian's right to criticize public officials," Timm argues. "Along the way, they aim to overturn the most important 1st Amendment U.S. Supreme Court decision of the 20th Century."

The decision that Timm is referring to is, of course, New York Times v. Sullivan. Timm notes that DeSantis and his allies are hoping to "weaken the 'actual malice' standard from Sullivan, to make it easier for public officials to sue newspapers or critics."

"Now, can states just pass laws that blatantly ignore Supreme Court precedent? Of course not," Timm explains. "Any responsible judge would strike this down as unconstitutional right away. But DeSantis may be hoping for a friendly appeals court ruling from a Trump-appointed judge or Supreme Court showdown to revisit the Sullivan ruling — following the same decades-long Republican strategy that finally overturned Roe v. Wade. And in the meantime, DeSantis can burnish his anti-media bona fides for his presidential run, and Republican legislatures around the country can use the opportunity to copy the bill or one-up him."

READ MORE: FL GOP bill would 'allow government officials to harass and bankrupt' opposers with defamation lawsuits

Timm points out that "many legal scholars consider" Sullivan the greatest 1st Amendment victory of "the last century" — a victory that DeSantis and his allies would like to roll back.

"It is one of the primary reasons newspapers in the U.S. can aggressively report on public officials and powerful wealthy individuals without the constant fear that they are going to be sued out of existence," Timm observes. "And up until a few years ago, when Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch started criticizing it, everyone assumed it was settled law."

Timm compares Brodeur's blogger bill to a draconian law that was passed under President Vladimir Putin in Russia in 2014.

"The proposed law, authored by state legislator Jason Brodeur, would — I kid you not — compel 'bloggers' who criticize the governor, other officers of the executive branch, or members of the legislature to register with the State of Florida," Timm observes. "Under the bill, anyone paid to write on the internet would have to file monthly reports every time they utter a government official's name in a critical manner. If not, they'd face potentially thousands of dollars in fines. It's a policy so chilling that it would make Vladimir Putin proud, and I wish that was hyperbole."

Timm continues, "In 2014, Russia's autocratic leader signed a very similar provision, then known as the 'blogger’s law.' As The Verge explained at the time, 'under it, any blogger with more than 3000 readers is required to register with the Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media oversight agency."

The agency that Brodeur has proposed would be similar to the pro-Putin Roskomnadzor, Timm argues.

"DeSantis has turned Florida into a national laboratory for speech suppression," the journalist warns. "And every American, Republican or Democrat, should be horrified."

READ MORE: How an overtly 'authoritarian' Florida GOP bill is designed to silence anti-DeSantis bloggers: journalist

Read Trevor Timm’s full op-ed for The Guardian at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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an 3 23

veterans group is appealing to the U.S. Pentagon to implement a ban that would prohibit Fox News from being accessible on military bases.

According to HuffPost, the progressive political action committee (PAC) VoteVets on Monday posted a video to highlight concerns about the right-wing news network and its anchors who have knowingly circulated baseless, unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud following the 2020 presidential election.

“The most valuable weapon to the enemy is disinformation,” the narrator began. “That’s why the Pentagon spends hundreds of millions training our troops to resist it."

READ MORE: Fox News’ Pete Hegseth has been lobbying Trump to pardon accused war criminals: report

"Yet, at the same time, the U.S. military uses taxpayer-funded facilities to broadcast disinformation on military bases, knowingly letting false propaganda infiltrate the ranks," the narrator added.

At one point during the clip, the narrator also noted that Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have “open access to spread their conspiracy theories to U.S. troops."

The push for a Fox News ban on military bases comes as Fox News' Tucker Carlson faces criticism for his latest attempt to spread misleading information about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

During his broadcast on Monday night, Carlson featured subtle clips of Capitol surveillance footage in an effort to support his argument suggesting what transpired on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection.

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also greene arrest threat for public event

press suppress

https://www.alternet.org/afraid-of-press-ron-desantis/

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an 3 23 no lnx  thom

https://www.alternet.org/far-right-culture-wars/

Marjorie Taylor Greene is calling for an American “divorce.”

She apparently sees herself as a modern-day John C. Calhoun, a demagogue who serves the interests of the white oligarch class and, in turn, receives their support, and the power and wealth that come with it.

She's started a secession propaganda campaign much like Calhoun and his buddies did when he left the White House as VP in 1833, the same year England outlawed slavery on British-territory plantations and talk of abolition in the US kicked into high gear.

It took Calhoun and his fellow traitors about 25 years to convince enough people in the South to go to war against America and try to replace our democracy with a fascist, race-based oligarchy.

But today—with electronic media providing instant communication and AR15s being much more efficient killing machines than the Confederacy had available—the heirs to Calhoun's sedition apparently think they can pull it off in a much shorter time.

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Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie recently suggested the tipping point, the second American Civil War, will come when:

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“[T]hirty to forty percent could agree that [the American government] was legitimate tyranny and it needed to be thrown off."

He then openly argued that American fascists should be sufficiently well-armed to take on the US Marines. Finishing that sentence, Massey—who tweeted a Christmas picture of his family (including his young children) each cradling an assault weapon—added:

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“They [those trying to bring down the American government] need to have sufficient [fire]power without asking for extra permission. It should be right there and completely available to them in their living room in order to effect the change [of our form of government].”

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Make no mistake about it: this is sedition. It's anti-American. It's pro-fascist.

Yesterday on my radio/TV program, Congressman Mark Pocan said Greene's comments were “almost treasonous.  "I'd drop the “almost.”

Greene even said out loud the part Republicans have been trying to not get caught saying for several decades now: she doesn't think Democrats should be allowed to vote if they live in Red states.

When a resolution came to the House floor last week condemning Putin's ally, Syrian dictator Assad, the only two “no" votes came from Greene and Massey.

Dictatorship good, democracy bad.

It's an old, old song for America that dates back to the 1840s.

Keep in mind that the Civil War wasn't just about slavery: it was primarily about preserving the wealth of the Southern oligarchs. While slavery was the source of their wealth, morbidly rich planters had so overtaken the political system of the South that it ceased to be anything close to a democracy—even for white people—by the 1840s.

That decade of the 1840s, in fact, was a key turning point for the effort to end democracy altogether in America. In just the ten years from 1840 to 1850, over 800,000 enslaved people were brought into the deep South.

Poor whites suddenly found themselves without work and pay generally collapsed across the region, while the plantation owner class became fabulously rich. It led to an internal abolition movement in the South, as white workers who didn't own slaves desperately tried to regain opportunities in the workplace.

As Southern abolitionist Hinton Helper wrote in his 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South:

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“The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, but they are also the oracle and arbiters of non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated.”

The book became one of the biggest bestsellers in American history(even though you could go to prison for owning it in the South where it was banned), and sparked such a political crisis in 1860 that the House of Representatives was unable to elect a Speaker for almost two months. Sound familiar?

Abraham Lincoln didn't even advocate ending slavery until well into the Civil War: he was too busy fighting against Southern oligarchs who were hell-bent on ending democracy in America and replacing it with a white supremacist oligarchy. Lincoln's goal in responding militarily to Southern succession wasn't to free enslaved African Americans, it was to keep the country together and try to restore some semblance of democracy to the South.

On Aug. 22, 1862 (the Emancipation Proclamation would come exactly one month later), after more than a year of war, Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune pointing this out:

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

Here we are again, and once more the issue that's got working-class white people riled up is the intersection of economics end race.

Republicans pass laws against Critical Race Theory, teaching Black history, and complain about “woke" and “BLM," but at its core it's all about distracting white people from their being ripped off by a white oligarchic class that promotes racial hatred to deflect anger from themselves.

As Marjorie Taylor Greene is essentially pointing out, just like in 1860.

The genesis of today's discontent began in the 1980s with the Reagan Revolution, as the Reagan/Bush administration opened America to “free trade" with the early stages of what became the World Trade Organization and negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which Bill Clinton signed on January 1, 1994.

Like the middle-class working white people in the South—who'd been about a third of that region's population prior to the 1840s when all those slaves were imported—the four decades since Reaganism began here have also seen the collapse of white working-class income and wealth.

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When Reagan came into office in 1980 about two-thirds of white Americans were solidly in the middle class: today that number is around 45 percent and it requires two people working full time to pull even that off.

Meanwhile, the rich have gotten fabulously richer. Several of America's billionaires are today richer than any person has ever been in history. Richer than the pharaohs.Richer than the ancient kings of Europe. Rich enough to shoot themselves into outer space with their pocket change.

And where did that money come from? Just like the plantation owners in 1850, it came from rigging the system.

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The past 42 years have seen over $50 trillion in wealth stolen from the homes and pockets of working-class people and deposited into the money bins of the morbidly rich through GOP tax-cut and union-busting policies.

In the past 42 years over 60,000 factories and 15 million well-paying union jobs have been shipped to Mexico and China, leaving working class whites (among others) literally out in the cold.

Just like in the 1850s, that's an explosive transition. And just like in the 1850s, it has brought out oligarch-funded political demagogues to tell white working-class people that their problems are all caused by Black people and their “woke" allies, and therefore the nation must divide itself.

Greene, Massey, and the rest of the sedition caucus in Congress are playing with fire. The people they're trying to crank up on behalf of America's rightwing oligarchs have already tried to murder the Governor of Michigan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Vice President of the United States.

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As The Washington Post's Philip Bump noted this week:

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“Over the past decade, 96 percent of incidents in which extremists killed someone were committed by people motivated by right-wing ideologies.”

The number of people murdered for political purposes over the past 25 years by SDS or Antifa or other anti-fascist or “left wing" ideologues? Zero.

And in promoting bloodshed in 2023 America, the seditionists among us aren't even subtle. Last December 10th, Greene told a Young Republican group in New York:

“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that [January 6th insurrection and effort to murder Vice President Pence], we would have won. Not to mention, it would've been armed."

Pitting Americans against each other by race, geography, or even politics when simultaneously invoking bloodshed as a justified outcome is as anti-American as it gets.

It's why the 14th Amendment says:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

If the seditionists within today's Republican Party had any goal other than to tear America apart and create an apartheid state run by and for the oligarchs who fund their campaigns and lifestyles, they'd be telling us about it right now. But are they?

Do they have anything to offer the working class of America?....

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an bad 2 23

Appearing to confess frustration, far-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis says he is remaking Florida’s education system because even after turning the state’s Democratic Party into a "rotten carcass on the side of the street," the left "can still impose their agenda on my people."

That "agenda," apparently includes so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT), Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG), and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, according to far-right Fox News host Mark Levin who told the Florida governor the right is "in a culture war."

"We didn't start it," Levin told DeSantis. "But what I call the Marxist left, they started it. It is devouring our institutions. It is devouring our politics. It's devouring the private sector."

DeSantis did not disagree.

READ MORE: 'I Struck a Nerve': Robert Reich Makes the Case for Calling Ron DeSantis a 'Fascist'

As he uses the power of his office to pave the road for a likely 2024 run for the White House, DeSantis has not gone unnoticed. He has been accused of being "an Honest-to-God Semi-Fascist," turning Florida into "a laboratory for fascism," running his state "like a fascist," and being a "fascist for our time" and a "one-man civil rights wrecking ball, determined to neutralize any group that doesn't conform to his dangerously narrow view of social order."

All those accusations were before his Sunday night Fox News interview with Levin, who warned that "in the classrooms" there is "the sexualizing of little kids." Levin also said, "Disney, Walt Disney has to be rolling in his grave right now what's happened to Disneyland and Disney World and these other events in the culture."

Asked why he decided to take "the lead in taking this on as far as governors go," DeSantis bragged, "I got reelected November 2022. Largest vote than any Republican governor [in] Florida history has got, largest vote margin any governor candidates ever got. 1.5 million votes."

"I can win by 1.5 million votes. Make the Democratic Party in our state, basically, a rotten carcass on the side of the street. And yet, the left can still impose their agenda on my people if I'm not looking after fighting ESG and other woke companies and some of the stuff going on in the universities and the schools."

"And so I think I have an understanding that these fights are far broader than just one particular election. Yes, you do have to fight the woke in the halls of government and in the legislative chambers, and we have super majorities as Republicans in Florida so we will win all those fights, but you also have to be willing to defend your folks against this agenda being shoved down their throat from all these otherinstitutions,where these people aren't necessarily coming up for election."

DeSantis has infamously veered into pushing his supporters into local school board positions of power.

"So you talk about things with like the young kids and with Disney, and I see that not just through the eyes of a governor but also through the eyes of a dad," DeSantis continued. "You know, we have a six, a four, and a two-year-old at home. And we just believe as parents, we should be able to send our kids to school, have them watch cartoons without having somebody's sexual agenda shoved down their throats."

READ MORE: 'Political Theater': Conservative Rips Ron DeSantis for 'Sucking Up to the Anti-Vaxxers'

"And so when this issue came up, with the sexualization of the curriculum, of course in Florida, we think that that's inappropriate. And you know what? Republican, Democrat, Independent parents agree with us overwhelmingly."

That's debatable. In October Florida Politics reported, "Majorities oppose Ron DeSantis-backed 'Stop WOKE' and parental rights laws," including his "Don't Say Gay" law.

In January, a study by UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute found a large percentage of LGBTQ parents say they are concerned their families will be negatively impacted by DeSantis' laws, including HB 1557, the "Don't Say Gay" law – with some saying they already have been.

"Almost 9 out of 10 (88%) LGBTQ+ parents are very or somewhat concerned about the impact that HB 1557 will have on them and their children, with one in four reporting they have experienced anti-LGBTQ harassment since the law was passed and one in five reporting becoming less out in their communities since the law was passed. Parents have considered a variety of coping strategies in response to the bill, including moving out of the state (56%) and moving their children to a different school (11%). Over 16% of LGBTQ parents have already taken steps to move their families to another state."

Watch a short clip or the full interview below or at this link.

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an ah 2 23

During his four years in the White House, former President Donald Trump repeatedly attacked the mainstream media as "the enemy of the people" and dismissed any reporting he didn’t like as "fake news." And others in the MAGA movement haven’t been shy about echoing that type of rhetoric.

Kari Lake, the far-right MAGA Republican who lost to Democratic now-Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs in the 2022 midterms, described the mainstream media as "evil bastards" during a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) speech. And she vowed to be the mainstream media's "worst freaking nightmare" when she was campaigning for governor. Lake’s critics responded that her willingness to threaten journalists underscored her authoritarian mindset.

Now, another MAGA Republican, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and his GOP allies in the Florida State Legislature — including State Rep. Alex Andrade — are hoping to make it easier to sue journalists for defamation. Andrade has sponsored a bill that, according to Politico’s Matt Dixon, would "weaken state laws that have long protected journalists against defamation suits and frivolous lawsuits."

READ MORE: 'I struck a nerve': Robert Reich lays out a case for calling Ron DeSantis a 'fascist'

In an article published by Politico on February 23, Dixon reports that Andrade's bill — which he has been discussing with DeSantis’ office — is "being positioned to spark a larger legal battle with the goal of eventually overturning New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that limits public officials' ability to sue publishers for defamation."

Andrade, a critic of the New York Times v. Sullivan decision, told Politico, "There is a strong argument to be made that the Supreme Court overreached. This is not the government shutting down free speech. This is a private cause of action."

Handed down by Warren Court 59 years ago, Sullivan was very clear about what does and doesn’t constitute defamation. According to Sullivan, defamation must involve "actual malice" — which isn’t easy to prove. Dominion Voting Systems is trying to prove "actual malice" in its defamation lawsuits against Fox News, Newsmax TV and others who, in 2020, promoted the false, thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that Dominion’s voting equipment was used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the election from Trump.

Sullivan, a unanimous 9-0 ruling by the late Chief Justice Earl Warren and his colleagues, doesn’t offer protections for outright lies, but it offers considerable protections for edgy commentary — including the type of incendiary comments that are common at right-wing media outlets. Warren was a Republican appointee of GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but his views are detested by today’s MAGA Republicans, social conservatives and far-right white evangelical Christian fundamentalists.

READ MORE:Florida judge rules against Ron DeSantis in firing of state attorney

Seth Stern, who serves as director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, views Andrade's bill as overtly authoritarian.

Stern told Politico, "I have never seen anything remotely like this legislation. I can't say I have seen every bill ever introduced, but I’d be quite surprised if any state legislature had seriously considered such a brazen and blatantly unconstitutional attack on speech and press freedoms…. This bill is particularly remarkable since its provisions have the vocal support of a governor and likely presidential candidate."

On Tuesday, February 7, Florida's governor held a roundtable discussion where he railed against the mainstream media and argued that it should be easier to sue publications for defamation.

Dixon notes, "Andrade’s proposal incorporates many of the elements DeSantis called for during the roundtable, including allowing plaintiffs who sue media outlets for defamation to collect attorneys' fees; adding a provision to state law specifying that comments made by anonymous sources are presumed false for the purposes of defamation lawsuits; lowering the legal threshold for a 'public figure' to successfully sue for defamation; repealing the 'journalist’s privilege' section of state law, which protects journalists from being compelled to do things likereveal the identity of sources in court."

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis' huge step toward academic control

Read Politico’s full report at this link.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/ron-desantis/hungarys-viktor-orban-targeted-central-european-university-gov-ron-desantis-following

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https://www.alternet.org/why-americas-misogynist-incels-adore-vladimir-putin-and-modern-day-russian-fascism-journalist/

why America’s 'misogynist incels' adore Vladimir Putin and 'modern-day Russian fascism': journalist

Alex Henderson

January 05, 2023

During the Cold War, nothing angered right-wing Republicans more than seeing a red Soviet flag. But these days, Russian President Vladimir Putin is admired by many Republicans in the United States’ far-right...

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rw govt trying to grab courts, big protests

https://www.alternet.org/cannot-run-a-racist-government/

netanayu

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aha [amanda] earth2 =  --> fascism

an 2 23

The political media fascination with Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican who appears to have faked approximately 95% of his life, is such that it was inevitable that it would draw a "savvy" backlash piece scolding the press about their priorities. The wannabe party pooper finally emerged last week at the Washington Post in an opinion column headlined, "Real people don't care about George Santos." In it, self-assigned buzzkill David Byler argued "America doesn't seem to care" about Santos, which he can tell based on Google search traffic.

Our nation was founded by puritans, so as soon as people had a laugh over Santos, inevitably someone would shake their finger disapprovingly. But there were some flaws in Byler's argument, starting with his assumption that Santos' own embarrassed constituents are not "real" people. There's also the fact that Google Trends isn't a very exacting measure of interest in a subject, as it only measures if people are searching out information. It doesn't capture people who read articles they saw on social media or directly on a news website. Traffic to stories about Santos is plenty healthy on that front.

But perhaps most importantly, this narrow-minded focus on search traffic ignores what a lot of the sneered-at political observers saw coming a mile away: The imminent George Santos makeover into MAGA's Next Top Superstar.

Santos may not matter to "average" Americans, but his story is being leveraged directly into the right-wing propaganda machine that currently controls the Republican Party. On Thursday night, for instance, Santos was sanctified into the echelon of MAGA saints by the Pope of neo-fascism himself, Tucker Carlson. In a typically dishonest segment on his wildly popular Fox News show, Carlson painted Santos as a hapless victim of the bigoted news media by pretending that the only thing Santos lied about was his volleyball career. (Which is one of the more minor fake careers and hobbies Santos has claimed on his resume.) Media Matters has a sample of the extremely silly diatribe:

It was a tissue of lies constructed to deceive the American people. There was no volleyball scholarship. There was not a single dollar of volleyball scholarship. George Santos made it all up out of whole cloth, out of thin air. George Santos is an ersatz volleyball player. A fraud, a ghoul. People voted for this man believing he had played collegiate volleyball on a scholarship and he hadn't.

And yet tonight ladies and gentlemen, this thief of volleyball glory strides the halls of the United States Congress unimpeded by law enforcement. It's like another insurrection.

Carlson doesn't really have arguments or evidence, but he does do a bang-up impression of someone sarcastically brushing aside nonsense. Except what he's brushing away is usually pretty serious stuff, such as fascist attacks on democracy, attempts to save lives during a pandemic, or, in this case, unbelievable amounts of fraud that look potentially criminal in many cases. With Santos, the number of lies Carlson is ignoring is truly staggering. Santos lied about his resume, his religion, his marriage, his family history, and claimed connections he doesn't have to the Holocaust, 9/11, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and an assassination attempt that appears fictional. It is really no exaggeration to say it's easier to list the things he hasn't lied about (his age and his birthplace in Queens).

But just as Catholic saints get their status through martyrdom, the saints of MAGAdom must get theirs through falsified tales of victimhood at the hands of "woke mobs" or the "fake news media."

People right-wingers hate are alarmed at Santos and his staggering trail of fraud. So if the "libs" have a negative reaction to Santos, in the troll-based logic that drives the modern GOP, that must mean he's their newest champion. And let's just state for the record that, while Byler may not see left-leaning news consumers as "real people," he probably wouldn't say the same about the millions of Trump voters whose entire worldview is shaped by the crap that Fox News pours into their heads every day.

Carlson didn't reach the conclusion that Santos is the latest MAGA idol all on his own. Practically from the moment that Santos's deceit was exposed by the New York Times, Steve Bannon, the Joseph Goebbels-wannabe who frequently sets the GOP agenda with his popular "War Room" podcast, was championing the pathological liar. Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have also rallied to Santos' side, claiming he's only a target because he's a "fighter." It's unclear who he has ever "fought" for besides himself, but then again, the same could be said of most MAGA figures, from Donald Trump on down.

It's not a mystery why these leaders think the right-wing audience is ready to accept Santos as the next MAGA savior. All that matters to the modern right is "owning the liberals," and who better to do that than someone who lies constantly for no apparent reason other than the sheer thrill of it?

Certainly, Santos seems to grasp that the move that will take him from a low-level con man to the ranks of the richest MAGA grifters is to lean into trolling. So he's been rolling out the standard issue liberal-owning stunts for weeks now: Flashing the white supremacist-aligned "OK" hand signal during a House vote. (He even knew how to do it so it was clear enough to photograph but so quick he could pretend later it wasn't intentional.) Wearing an assault rifle pin while playing dumb about why it offends people to celebrate the preferred weapons of mass shooters. Feeding the press donuts and actinglike they had somehow become complicit in the evil by eating them. Getting into Twitter fights with drag queens, who are the favorite punching bag of the authoritarian right. (Santos seems to have a past as a drag queen, as well, but this is just part of a favorite right-wing trolling tactic, to recruit members of a hated minority to speak out against their own.) Dunking on former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for criticizing him by tweeting "cry about it."

Reports suggest Santos is delighted by all the negative attention he's getting in the press. An exceptionally short-lived aide recorded a conversation in which Santos was dressing him down, and right in the middle of it, Santos suddenly exclaims, "Don Lemon just texted me — I'm sorry, I'm listening to you — Don Lemon just texted me!" Getting his name on CNN, even during a story on how he is the worst, was just that thrilling to Santos.

Santos even hired former Steve Bannon employee and professional troll, Vish Burra, as a top aide. Burra's defense of Santos is cynical and self-congratulatory: The lying is a form of "shitposting," which is internet speak for saying outlandish things to draw outrage and attention. For the Trumpist right, aggressive trolling is what politics is all about.

Imagining that they're outraging the left is what the GOP audience gets out of this. (No one tell them that the left's reaction to Santos is more amusement than genuine fury.) But there's an even darker reason that Carlson, Bannon, Taylor Greene, etc. have decided to rally round Santos: He's very useful as a weapon in their larger war on truth.

As with Trump, it's overly simplistic to look at these people, with their non-stop disinformation, as mere liars. Liars are people who are sincerely trying to deceive people. In many cases, it's not at all evident that right-wing audiences actually believe the asinine B.S. that is rolled out by the likes of Carlson and Bannon. For instance, the "outrage" over M&M spokescandy shoe choices is less sincere anger than it is a collective bit of performance art. Both Carlson and his audience merely pretend to be mad as a way to keep ironic distance from their own weird sexual hang-ups. Similarly, conspiracy theories like Trump's Big Lie are often less about true belief and more about displaying fealty to their tribe.

There's a point to right-wingers constantly saying and "believing" things they know not to be true. It's about devaluing empirical reality. Fascists want "truth" to flow from what the right-wing authority figures say is "true," not from lived experience or verifiable facts.They are trying to construct a world where facts don't matter, and only power does. The first step is getting their tribal community to agree collectively to stop distinguishing between true and false and to only claim to believe what is convenient for their leaders or their cause.

For that goal, Santos is useful. He is living the fascist dream of a man whose entire existence seems unmoored from the power of facts. If the MAGA leaders can turn him into a hero, he'd be a living exemplar of their post-truth yearnings: "Truth" can be whatever you want it to be. After all, right-wingers already hate the way facts — Trump lost the election, COVID-19 is real, LGBTQ people exist — get in the way of their desires. They just need permission to let go of that last tendril of reality and start living purely in their authoritarian fantasy world. Santos shows the way. It's unlikely he will be going away any time soon.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/31/florida-new-college-conservative-trustees-00080541

taLLAHASSEE, Fla. — The newly-installed conservative board of trustees at New College of Florida ousted its current president in favor of former state education commissioner Richard Corcoran Tuesday, launching the initial move in reshaping the campus under the vision of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The decision came at the first board meeting since DeSantis appointed six new trustees with the idea of overhauling the liberal arts college in Sarasota into a more conservative-leaning institution. That track was accelerated Tuesday when the board paved the way for new leadership as students and parents protested the major changes that appear bound for New College.

“Some have said these recent appointments amount to a partisan takeover of the college. This is not correct,” said trusteeMatthew Spalding, a constitutional government professor and vice president at Hillsdale College’s D.C. campuswho was appointed by DeSantis. “It’s not a takeover — it’s a renewal.”

A leadership switch from President Patricia Okker to Corcoran as interim leader is one of several moves made Tuesday by the board, which also signaled its intent to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs on campus — all policies pushed by DeSantis. The changes are major developments at the school spurred by the new appointees, including Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who has advised DeSantis on critical race theory, and Eddie Speir, the co-founder of Inspiration Academy, a Christian charter school in Bradenton, Fla.

Tuesday’s meeting was met with apprehension from dozens of students and parents who protested what they called a “hostile takeover” at New College. They urged Okker to stay on as president and push back against the new mandates from the DeSantis administration to model the school as a“Hillsdale of the South” in reference to the private conservative religious “classical“ college in Michigan.

Okker in an emotional address told the board — and the campus — that she couldn’t continue to serve as president amid accusations that the students are being inundated with liberal indoctrination.

“The reality is, and it’s a hard reality and it’s a sad reality, but the vision that we created together is not the vision I have been given as a mandate here,” Okker said.

In remaking the board at New College, the DeSantis administration said the school was “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning” and in need of change following downward enrollment trends. To move on from Okker, trustees agreed to a “generous” exit package that includes at least 12 months of paid professional development leave and benefits. Corcoran is unable to begin serving until March, leaving Okker’s chief of staff Bradley Thiessen in charge until then.

“New leadership is the expectation and I think it makes sense,” Rufo said at the meeting. “I don’t think it’s a condemnation of Dr. Okker, scholarship or skills or character.”

DeSantis’ changes at New College follow other efforts to reshape higher education in Florida. Earlier Tuesday, the GOP governor proposed several changes to Florida’s university system, including pressing the GOP-led Legislature to cut all funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to allow university leaders to launch tenure review of professors. Last year, DeSantis and state Republicans placed GOP allies in top university posts and pushed legislation that could limit how professors teach race.

New College is also now set to review its Office of Outreach & Inclusive Excellence at the request of Rufo as part of the state’s stance against diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools. Rufo originally pushed to abolish the office outright, including four positions, and take other actions tied to diversity and equity, but decided to request further details on the program for a discussion in February.

New College trustees also want former Senate President Bill Galvano to serve as their general counsel and attorney. They asked the interim president on Tuesday to enter negotiations with the former Republican lawmaker who practices law in Sarasota.

Tuesday’s meeting was tense at times, with audience members frequently shouting over and at the new trustees as they spoke. Several parents and students addressed the board before they huddled, often criticizing their plans to retool the university and asking them to leave the college alone.

Some faculty said students felt “hopeless” about what could happen at the school, which is a unique college of under 700 undergraduates where students craft personalized education plans and don’t receive letter grades.

“Many students came here to feel safe and access the education that is their right as Floridians,” Diego Villada, Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, told the board. “And the impulse to make this a place where race, intersectionality and DEI are banned indicates to them that you want everyone to be the same – to be like you.”

Trustees, though, made it clear that the New College overhaul is fully underway, a message that came the same day DeSantis pledged to invest millions of dollars into recruiting faculty to the school.

“The campus needs a deep culture change. You sat up here, you called us racists, sexists, bigots, outsiders,” said trustee Mark Bauerlein, professor emeritus of English at Emory University who was appointed by DeSantis. “We are now in a position of authority in the college. And the accusations are telling us that something is wrong here.”

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Responding to backlash over Florida banning a high school advanced placement course on African American history, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis lashed out, saying part of the reason it was banned is it includes “indoctrination” on “queer theory.”

Standing in a school classroom at a podium with a sign that reads, “Florida, the education state,” DeSantis defended the move to block the Black history class while not banning any others.

Acknowledging that “in the state of Florida, our education standards not only don’t prevent but they require teaching Black history, all the important things as part of our core curriculum,” DeSantis called the class “a separate course on top of that for Advanced Placement credit.”

READ MORE: Democrat Ruben Gallego Praised After Launching Campaign to Unseat Unpopular and ‘Out-of-Touch’ Senator Krysten Sinema

:{:{“The issue is we have guidelines and standards in Florida,” he proclaimed, as does every other state in the nation. “We want education, not indoctrination. If you fall on the side of indoctrination, we’re going to decline. If it’s education, then we will do.”}:

“So when I heard it, we didn’t meet the standards. I figured, yeah, they may be doing…” he said as his voice trailed off. “It’s way more than that,” DeSantis warned.

“This course on Black history. What are one of what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory,” he criticized.}:

“Now who would say that an important part of Black history is ‘queer theory”?” DeSantis said mockingly, not recognizing that LGBTQ people are an integral and important part of all races and cultures. The Florida GOP governor has a history of trying to erase LGBTQ people, especially from public school curriculums with his “Don’t Say Gay“ law.

READ MORE: ‘I Will Never Leave That Woman’: McCarthy Vows He ‘Will Always Take Care’ of Marjorie Taylor Greene, His Friends Say

“And so we’re on, that’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards. We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them. When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”

:{:{}:

Governor DeSantis studied history at Yale and taught history at a private college prep school in Georgia.}:

Last week White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blasted DeSantis, saying, “let’s not forget,” Florida “didn’t block AP European History. They didn’t block our music history. They didn’t block our art history. But the state chooses to block a course that is meant for high-achieving high school students to learn about the history of arts and culture.”

Watch below or at this link.

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Teachers in Manatee County, Florida, are being ordered to remove or make inaccessible libraries of books inside their classrooms or face possible felony prosecution, as the district responds to legislation Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law prohibiting any books that have not been thoroughly vetted by a credentialed librarian.

The law, which went into effect at the start of this year, “is based on the premise, promoted by right-wing advocacy groups, that teachers and librarians are using books to ‘groom’ students or indoctrinate them with leftist ideologies,” according to Judd Legum at Popular Information.

He puts it simply: “classroom libraries that are curated by teachers, not librarians, are now illegal.”

READ MORE: DeSantis: One of the Reasons I Banned Black History Course Is It Includes ‘Indoctrination’ on ‘Queer Theory’ (Video)

“My heart is broken for Florida students today as I am forced to pack up my classroom library,” one teacher wrote on Facebook, Legum reports.

Calling it a “travesty to education, the future of our children and our nation,” another teacher lamented they have spent 18 years “dedicated to providing students with quality literature,” and helping them “connect with books and develop a love of lifelong learning,” but now they will have to dismantle their classroom library.

Kevin Chapman, the Chief of Staff for the Manatee County School District, “says that school principals in Manatee County were told Wednesday that any staff member violating these rules by providing materials ‘harmful to minors’ could be prosecuted for ‘a felony of the third degree.'”

READ MORE: Democrat Ruben Gallego Praised After Launching Campaign to Unseat Unpopular and ‘Out-of-Touch’ Senator Krysten Sinema

Not only are teachers now packing up their classroom libraries, but children are being told they are not allowed to bring any books from home to school.

Books can be returned to the classroom only after vigorous review by certified librarians, whose official title is media specialist. They are also subject to felony prosecution if they make any errors.

“That review must also be consistent with a complex training,” Legum reports, “which was heavily influenced by right-wing groups like Moms For Liberty and approved by the Florida Department of Education just last week. Any mistake by a librarian or others could result in criminal prosecution. This process must be repeated for any book brought into the school on an ongoing basis. But librarians and teachers are not being provided with any additional compensation for the extra work.”

Earlier on Monday Gov. DeSantis defended the decision to ban advanced placement for African American history classes in Florida.

Standing in a school classroom at a podium with a sign that reads, “Florida, the education state,” DeSantis declared the “issue is we have guidelines and standards in Florida.”

“We want education, not indoctrination. If you fall on the side of indoctrination, we’re going to decline. If it’s education, then we will do.”

“This course on Black history. What are one of, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory.

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Scholars and lawmakers are outraged over DeSantis’ rejection of AP African-American curriculum

Jake Johnson and Common Dreams January 20, 2023

Academics and Democratic lawmakers reacted angrily Thursday after the administration of Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected a new high school Advanced Placement African-American studies course—without even seeing its syllabus—claiming it violates the state's ban on "woke" educationand "lacks educational value."

Some Republican Florida officials said they believe the African-American studies course offered by the College Board—which approves AP courses and runs SAT testing—violates the state's Stop WOKE Act by promoting critical race theory (CRT), a graduate-level academic framework positing that systemic racism is inherent in U.S. society.

DeSantis said the Stop WOKE Act, which applies to schools from the primary through university level and businesses, is meant tocombat "wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism."

The law was partially blocked last year by a federal judge who rejected the state's "authority to muzzle its professors in the name of 'freedom.'"

Marvin Dunn, a prolific author and former Florida International University professor who has dedicated his career to preserving and sharing Florida's Black history, told the Daily Beast that the state's rejection of the AP African-American studies course "means an insult to me, it means an injury to me."

"Florida is doing its best to shut down discussions about race, slavery, anything having to do with a challenge to the idea that racism is still a real factor in American life today," he added.

\u201cThis political extremism and its attack of Black History and Black people, is going to create an entire generation of Black children who won\u2019t be able to see themselves reflected at all within their own education or in their own State.\n\nhttps://t.co/0IDCzOJZlG via @thedailybeast\u201d

— Shevrin \u201cShev\u201d Jones (@Shevrin \u201cShev\u201d Jones) 1674085974

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}:

New York University historian Diane Ravitch wrote:

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}:

Just in case there was any doubt about what Gov. DeSantis and Florida Legislature banned when they outlawed any discussion of "critical race theory," that doubt has been resolved. They do not want schools and teachers to acknowledge race, racism, or the very existence of people of color in the United States. Sight unseen, the [Florida Department of Education] has banned an AP course on African-American studies. The department claimed that the content of the course is historically inaccurate and violates state law, even though the department has never seen the course syllabus.

DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, has backed dozens of right-wing school board candidates while purging education officials who promote or enforce Covid-19 mandates. Last year, he outraged LGBTQ+ advocates by signing into law the so-called "Don't Say Gay or Trans" bill, falsely claiming that schools were promoting "pornographic" material.

Cassandra Quick, a Seattle-area attorney who is Black and transgender, told Common Dreams that Republicans like DeSantis "seek to silence the stories and histories of Black and Brown people, and of queer people, in a bid to maintain the cultural, economic, and political hegemony they've enjoyed since the inception of the United States and which is threatened by current efforts to shine the light on the realities of those they have suppressed and marginalized."

"Diversity and equity are offensive to the conservative worldview, and they will use whatever tools available to continue enforcing a hierarchy which keeps those they consider the in-group at the top, and the rest of us at the bottom, if they must abide our existence at all," Quick added.

\u201cWhat\u2019s worse, is that for voters who buy white supremacy lock, stock & barrel, their fealty to DeSantis just increased.\n\nThey believe him, his \u201cStop WOKE Act,\u201d and banning things like AP Black History are *protecting* them, their power, and their property.\n\nIt makes him stronger.\u201d

— brittany packnett cunningham. (@brittany packnett cunningham.) 1674138829

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}:

In its brief letter explaining why it rejected the AP African-American studies course, the Florida Department of Education (DOE) said that "as presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value."

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}:

The letter was issued on January 12, just days before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and days after the 100th anniversary of the Rosewood Massacre, in which white supremacists destroyed the eponymous Black town in Levy County, Florida in a murderous rampage.

Florida DOE spokesperson Cassie Pelelis told the Daily Beast that "if the course comes into compliance and incorporates historically accurate content, the department will reopen the discussion."

In response to Florida's move, the College Board told the Daily Beast that "we look forward to publicly releasing the updated course framework as soon as it is completed and well before this class is widely available in American high schools."

In a separate statement, the College Board said that "like all new AP courses, AP African-American Studies is undergoing a rigorous, multiyear pilot phase, collecting feedback from teachers, students, scholars, and policymakers. The process of piloting and revising course frameworks is a standard part of any new AP course, and frameworks often change significantly as a result."

\u201cClearly every history except Black, is seen as worthy of further development, exploration and understanding in Florida under DeSantis' leadership. Black history is American history. Striking it from curriculum does students a grave disservice, and makes America weaker for it.\u201d

— Ameshia Cross (@Ameshia Cross) 1674144497

Reacting to the course's rejection, political analyst Ameshia Cross tweeted: "Black history is American history. Striking it from [the] curriculum does students a grave disservice, and makes America weaker for it."

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has become well-known for his efforts to incite culture wars and influence the politics of education across Florida as he considers running in the 2024 presidential election.

In doing so, the potential GOP candidate has violated the First Amendment in numerous ways over the course of his gubernatorial reign, Vox Senior Correspondent Ian Millhiser reports. Millhiser offered an analysis of the ways DeSantis consistently violates the U.S. Constitution by enacting laws that blatantly challenge and disregard freedom of speech and expression.

During his reelection victory address in November, DeSantis promised Floridians that he would “fight the woke in the legislature,” “fight the woke in the schools,” and “fight the woke in the corporations,” which is what he’s already actively tried to achieve as governor.

READ MORE:How a determined Ron DeSantis is trying to 'seize ideological control' of education in Florida: journalist

With that, “DeSantis, in other words,” Millhiser wrote, “does not seem content to simply enact policies that hew to a right-wing economic or social vision.He wishes to use the sovereign powers of government to shape public discourse itself — punishing some ideas, rewarding others, and conscripting public schools and universities into his culture war.”

Millhiser also highlighted DeSantis’ goal of completely changing the trajectory of education across the state, as he recently chose anti-critical race theory leader Christopher Rufo to sit on the board of the liberal New College of Florida. Rufo plans to do all he can to transform the school into an institution that mirrors the conservative Michigan-based Hillsdale College, which boasts ties to Donald Trump. DeSantis also appointed conservative Republican and former Senator Ben Sasse as president at the University of Florida last week.

AlterNet previously reported that journalist Jonathan Chait likened DeSantis’ approach to education in Florida to Hungarian politician Viktor Orbán, who used several strategies to implement an authoritarian educational system.

After his “Stop WOKE Act,” which would ban race-related coursework from college classrooms, was temporarily blocked by a judge, DeSantis distributed a memo requesting course data from state colleges that teach “diversity, equity and inclusion.” And following the governor’s successful passing of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last year, some Florida schools have already removed books with LGBTQ characters from their libraries.

READ MORE:Why 'massive bully' Ron DeSantis 'would be no better' than Donald Trump as presiden**t: columnist

However, when anyone speaks out against the governor’s authoritarian-like leadership decisions, he immediately retaliates.

After the Walt Disney Company denounced DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill last April, he made claims that the company “tried to attack me to advance their woke agenda,” and he retaliated by signing a law that would ultimately disband the “Reedy Creek Improvement District,” a large area of land that houses Walt Disney World, and “where Disney has an unusual amount of control over local land use and taxation.”

Prior to signing the legislation, DeSantis gloated that the “Democrat machine Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer.”

Millhiser argued that the law is unconstitutional because even though the state of Florida isn’t necessarily “required to maintain” the land,the state “cannot strip Disney of a legal benefit it already enjoys in order to punish Disney for expressing a political opinion.”

READ MORE:'Tone of humility': Florida columnist issues dire warning to Ron DeSantis

Millhiser provided a list of the legislative decisions a governor can make that are actually considered constitutional, such as “give speeches arguing that the United States is somehow miraculously immune from systemic injustice,” “sign legislation repealing programs intended to cure these injustices” or “appoint officials to public school boards that share his belief that the US is immune to these injustices.

"“He may even enact policies that help perpetuate these injustices, assuming that those policies violate neither the state nor federal constitution," Millhiser added

But, the correspondent asserted that DeSantis “goes much further than that” by “sanctioning speech” he simply doesn’t like.

Although Texas Governor Greg Abbott has enacted laws that are considered “even more aggressive than Florida’s," DeSantis’ rhetoric and unconstitutional actions appear much more alarming, Millhiser warns, as he could “take his speech war national if elected president” in 2024.

Millhiser argued that even though the Constitution acts as a shield, to some degree, to DeSantis’ efforts to violate the right to free speech, “it is a worthless shield if the judiciary is controlled by partisans and ideologues who will not enforce the First Amendment against men like DeSantis.”

READ MORE:'A strange no-eye-contact oddball': Who is the real Ron DeSantis?

In the same vein, what’s most alarming about the governor’s attack on freedom of speech is that, if elected president, DeSantis could appoint conservative judges who share his views to fill courts across the country — judges who will allow him to violate the First Amendment without consequence. If ultimately elected to national office, Millhiser wrote, “with the right judges in place, DeSantis could potentially transform American society and culture in ways that would be unrecognizable to everyone accustomed to how the First Amendment has been interpreted for the last 60 years.”

Lastly, in regards to the ongoing debacle between DeSantis and Disney, Millhiser noted that although a company as vast as Disney likely possesses the necessary resources to stand its ground against unconstitutional state government laws, the main disconcerting component here is “the fact that DeSantis targeted one of the largest and most popular producers of First Amendment-protected art in the world is also a warning about how far his agenda could reach if it is successful.”

READ MORE:How 'authoritarian' Ron DeSantis has made Florida a 'laboratory of fascist politics': scholar

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https://www.mediamatters.org/ali-alexander/stop-steal-organizer-ali-alexander-brags-j6-narrative-has-influenced-other-countries

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no amnesty

https://www.alternet.org/brazil-fascists-attack-democracy-amnesty/

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Although the New York Times’ opinion section is famous for its liberal columnists — including Michelle Goldberg, Jamelle Bouie and economic Paul Krugman — it has had some well-known conservative columnists as well. Two of them are Bret Stephens and David Brooks, neither of whom are happy with the direction that the Trumpified Republican Party has taken in recent years.

In an opinion piece published in the Q&A format on January 11, Stephens and Brooks discuss the GOP’s dysfunction and “path to authoritarianism.” The GOP, they lament, has abandoned traditional Reagan conservatism and taken a radical, anti-intellectual turn. And the conservative columnists cite some of the precursors to Trumpism.

Brooks told Stephens, “My thinking about the GOP goes back to a brunch I had with Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza in the ’80s that helps me see, in retrospect, that people in my circle were pro-conservative, while Ingraham and D’Souza and people in their circle were anti-left. We wanted to champion Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and a Reaganite foreign policy. They wanted to rock the establishment. That turned out to be a consequential difference because almost all the people in my circle back then — like David Frum and Robert Kagan — ended up, decades later, Never Trumpers, and almost all the people in their circle became Trumpers or went bonkers.”

READ MORE:'He’s never been weaker': Conservatives 'rage at Trump' over red tsunami that never materialized

Brooks went on to describe President Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp and Sen. John McCain as Republican “internationalists” of the 1980s and 1990s who were “cosmopolitan” and “believers in the value of immigration” — all the things that “populist” MAGA Republicans are not.

“Then the establishment got discredited: Iraq War, financial crisis, the ossifying of the meritocracy, the widening values gap between metro elites and everybody else,” Brooks told Stephens. “And suddenly, all the people I regarded as fringe and wackadoodle — Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, anybody who ran CPAC — rose up on the wave of populist fury. Everybody likes a story in which the little guy rises up to take on the establishment, but in this case, the little guys rode in on a wave of know-nothingism, mendacity, an apocalyptic mindset, and authoritarianism.”

Brooks went on to say that while he had been a big admirer of McCain and voted for him in 2000’s GOP presidential primary, he ended up voting for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election after McCain decided to make then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin his running mate.

Stephens told Brooks, “There have been previous Republican presidents who rode to office on waves of populist discontent, particularly Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But as presidents, they channeled the discontent into serious programs and also turned their backs on the ugly fringes of the right. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and expanded the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Reagan established a working relationship with Democratic House leaders to pass tax reform and gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.”

READ MORE:'Been to this party too many times': Rick Wilson predicts GOP will nominate Donald Trump in 2024

Brooks asked Stephens where the “old core of the conservative movement” can “go” when the GOP has become “Matt Gaetz’s clown show.” And Stephens responded, “When people get on a bad path, whether it’s drinking or gambling or political or religious fanaticism, they tend to follow it all the way to the bottom — at which point, they either die or have that proverbial moment of clarity.”

READ MORE:'Better late than never': Former GOP insider offers 'DeSantis fangirls' some 'Never Trump' advice

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Far-right media coverage of Brazil’s January 8 riots — in which supporters of Brazil’s far-right ex-President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s federal buildings over baseless voter fraud allegations — closely mirrors the rhetoric of the media’s pre- and post-January 6 insurrection coverage.

In both instances, American right-wing media pushed outlandish conspiracy theories and defended the seditious rioters while casting doubt on presidential election results. Right-wing figures, including coup plotter Steve Bannon, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, all recycled talking points from 2020 and 2021 to defend the Brazilian attackersand find a way to blame outside — and sometimes imaginary — forces rather than the extremists actually at fault.

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https://www.alternet.org/american-politicians/

Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The Squad and the Progressive Caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers’ rights or defying the war machine than the Freedom Caucus fights for freedom. These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry, cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power and wealth. This moral vacuity provides the spectacle, as H.G. Wells wrote, of “a great material civilization, halted, paralyzed.” It happened in Ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here.

Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power, including the media. Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, they pay little to no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas. They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class.

Donald Trump’s seminal contribution to the political landscape is the license to say in public what political decorum once prohibited. His legacy is the degradation of political discourse to the monosyllabic tirades of Shakespeare’s Caliban, which simultaneously scandalize and energize the kabuki theater that passes for government. This burlesque differs little from the German Reichstag, where the final cri de coeur by a mortally ill Clara Zetkinagainst fascism on August 30, 1932, was met with a chorus of taunts, insults and jeers by Nazi deputies.

H.G. Wells called the old guard, the good liberals, the ones who speak in measured words and embrace reason, the “inexplicit men.” They say the right things and do nothing. They are as vital to the rise of tyranny as are the Christian fascists, a few of whom held the House hostage last week by blocking 14 rounds of voting to prevent Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker. By the time McCarthy was elected on the 15th round, he had caved on nearly every demand made by the obstructionists, including permitting any one of the 435 members of the House to force a vote for his removal at any time, thus guaranteeing political paralysis.

The internecine warfare in the House is not between those who respect democratic institutions and those who do not. McCarthy, backed by Trump and far-right conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, is as morally bankrupt as those trying to bring him down. This is a battle for control among con artists, charlatans, social media celebrities and mobsters. McCarthy joined the majority of House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit to void the 2020 Presidential result by preventing four states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia — from casting electoral votes for Biden. The Supreme Court refused to hear the lawsuit. There isn’t much in the Freedom Caucus extremist positions, which resemble those of Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany and Fidesz in Hungary, McCarthy doesn’t embrace. They advocate greater tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation of corporations, a war on migrants, more austerity programs, champion white supremacy and accuse liberals and conservatives who do not line up behind Trump of treason.

“I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it,” McCarthy said in audio posted to YouTube by a Main Street Nashville reporter in 2021. Pelosi, for her part, called McCarthy a “moron,” after he said that a possible renewed mask mandate was “a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.” This is what passes for political discourse. I yearn for the time when political rhetoric was geared to the educational level of a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth or seventh-grade education. Now we speak in imbecilic clichés.

This political vacuum has spawned anti-politics, or what the writerBenjamin DeMott called “junk politics,” which “personalizes and moralizes issues and interests instead of clarifying them.” Junk politics “maximizes threats from abroad while miniaturizing large, complex problems at home. It’s a politics that, guided by guesses about its own profits and losses, abruptly reverses public stances without explanation, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized(e.g.: [the war in] Iraq will be over in days or weeks; Iraq is a project for generations).”

“A major effect of junk politics — its ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho and therapeutic fustian — is to pull position after position loose from reasoned foundations,” DeMott noted.

The result of junk politics is that it infantilizes the public with “year-round upbeat Christmas tales” and perpetuates the status quo. The billionaire class, which has carried out a slow motion corporate coup d’état, continues to plunder; unchecked militarism continues to hollow out the country; and the public is kept in bondage by the courts and domestic security agencies. When the government watches you twenty-four hours a day, you cannot use the word “liberty.” That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The iron primacy of profit means that the most vulnerable are ruthlessly discarded. Supported by Republicans and Democrats, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to slow economic growth and increase unemployment to curb inflation, exacting a tremendous cost on the working poor and their families. No one is required to operate under what John Ruskin called “conditions of moral culture.”

But the second result of junk politics is more insidious. It solidifies the cult of the self, the amoral belief that we have the right to do anything, to betray and destroy anyone, to get what we want. The cult of the self fosters a psychopathic cruelty, a culture built not on empathy, the common good and self-sacrifice but on unbridled narcissism and vengeance. It celebrates, as mass media does, superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and an inability to feel guilt or remorse. This is the dark ethic of corporate culture, celebrated by the entertainment industry, academia and social media.

The essayist Curtis White argues that “it is capitalism that now most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment.” He assesses our culture as one in which “death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives.” This “legality” ratifies the systematic exploitation of workers. White excoriates our nationalist triumphalism and our unleashing of “the most fantastically destructive military power” the world has ever known with the alleged objective of “protecting and pursuing freedom.”

“Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal ‘rights’ that constitute that order, especially the right to property and the freedom to do with it what one wants,” he writes. “That’s the real and important ‘moral assessment’ sought by our courts. It comes to this: that decision will seem most just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust.”

The consequence is a society consumed by excessive materialism, pointless soul-destroying work, suffocating housing developments closer to “shared cemeteries” than real neighborhoods and alicense to exploit that “condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal property.”

The billionaire class, for the most part, prefers the mask of a Joe Biden, who deftly broke the freight railway unions to prevent a strike and forced them to accept a contract a majority of union members had rejected. But the billionaire class also knows that the goons and con artists on the far right will not interfere in their disemboweling of the nation; indeed, they will be more robust in thwarting the attempts of workers to organize for decent wages and working conditions. I watched fringe politicians in Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tudjman, dismissed by the political and educated elites as buffoons, ride an anti-liberal wave to power in the wake of widespread economic misery.Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Citibank, Raytheon, ExxonMobile, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs will easily adapt. Capitalism functions very efficiently without democracy.

The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, the more these political deformities are empowered.As Robert O. Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” fascism is an amorphous and incoherent ideology. It wraps itself in the most cherished symbols of the nation, in our case, the American flag, white supremacy, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Christian cross. It celebrates hypermasculinity, misogyny, racism and violence. It allows disenfranchised people, especially disenfranchised white men, to regain a sense of power, however illusory, and sanctifies their hatred and rage. It embraces a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance to coalesce around an anointed political savior. It is militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy, especially when the established ruling class mouths the language of liberal democracy but does nothing to defend it. It replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as contaminants who must be physically purged, usually with violence, to restore the health of the nation. It perpetuates itself through constant instability, for its solutions to the ills besetting the nation are transitory, contradictory and unattainable. Most importantly, fascism always has a religious coloring, mobilizing believers around rites and rituals, using sacred words and phrases, and embracing an absolute truth that is heretical to question.

Trump may be finished politically, but the political and social decay that created Trump remains. This decay will give rise to new, perhaps more competent, demagogues. I fear the rise of Christian fascists endowed with the political skill, self-discipline, focus and intelligence that Trump lacks. The longer we remain politically paralyzed, the more certain Christian fascism becomes. The January 6 mob assault on the Capital two years ago, the polarization of the electorate into antagonistic tribes, the economic misery afflicting the working class, the rhetoric of hate and violence, and the current dysfunction in the Congress is but a glimpse of the nightmare ahead.

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