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Open in TheBrain

Nazi fascism

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merri ok

expanded to US 12/16

see neo-nazi, whit suprem, authoritarianism XIAN NAT PENDING

see hitler

see adolph

see neo-nazi

// KKK SEE THOM 3

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RWW

8 26

Dale Partridge Says Nazism 'Represented A Powerful Form Of Christian Nationalism'

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maddow lil greg

The Second Annual European Ethnic Cleansing Conference Looks to Trump for Inspiration - Global Project Against Hate and Extremism

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dn 6 26

In Portugal, hundreds of far-right activists gathered last Saturday for the annual “Remigration Summit” advocating for the mass deportation of immigrants. Former U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and white nationalist leader Jared Taylor were VIP guests alongside elected officials from Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant AfD party and Spain’s Vox. In an interview ahead of the event, Bovino cited Nazi Germany’s lead general, Erwin Rommel, as an inspirational figure. At the summit, Bovino said, “If there is inspiration gained from the U.S. Border Patrol model and method, then fantastic.” Bovino was fired after immigration agents under his command killed 37-year-old VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

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RWW 1 26

Nick Fuentes unleashed an antisemitic rant in response to the controversy that erupted after he and several other far-right figures danced to Kanye West's "Heil Hitler" in a Miami Beach night club: "We do not care about the Holocaust!"

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// MUSK NAZI SALUTE 2X? ALT RT TROLLERY?

RWW

01/23/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

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August 19, 2024 rww

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Nazi Germany had admirers among American religious leaders – and white supremacy fueled their support - Alternet.org

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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

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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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https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-big-business-bailed-out-nazis

How Big Business Bailed Out the Nazis

A tragic tale of what can go wrong when profits are entangled with politics.

Ciara Torres Spelliscy

The views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of the Brennan Center for Justice.

Considering the outcome of this year’s presidential primaries, where the best-financed candidates were defeated, I’ve been asked repeatedly whether corporate money in politics really matters. And I’ll grant, corporate money so far mostly gone to losing candidates. But history may give us some greater perspective on how corporate money in politics can prove decisive.

It’s a largely forgotten piece of history, but in 1932 the German Nazi Party was facing financial ruin. How did the Nazis move from being broke to being in control of the German government just a year later? The Nazi Party was bailed out by German industrialists in early 1933.

The industrialists who led the way were two huge German firms, I.G. Farben and Krupp. Leaders of both of companies were among the few civilians who were later charged with war crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. These trials placed the story of their financial and moral support of the Nazis into the historical record. Krupp was a huge arms manufacturer. I.G. Farben was a vast chemical company which made everything from Bayer aspirin to Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers.

According to The Arms of Krupp, the Nazi Party was essentially bankrupt in late 1932. Joseph Goebbels, who would later become the Minister of Propaganda, complained, “[w]e are all very discouraged, particularly in the face of the present danger that the entire party may collapse….The financial situation of the Berlin organization is hopeless. Nothing but debts and obligations.”

Regardless of the party’s financial problems, Hitler was named Chancellor in late January 1933. He called for elections in early March. With less than two weeks left before the vote, Herman Goering sent telegrams to Germany’s 25 leading industrialists, inviting them to a secret meeting in Berlin on February20, 1933. Attending the gathering were four I.G. Farben directors and Krupp chief Gustav Krupp. Hitler addressed the group, saying “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”  He also told the men that he would eliminate trade unions and communists. Hitler asked for their financial support and to back his vision for Germany.

According to Robert Jackson, the former Supreme Court Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, “[T]he industrialists…became so enthusiastic that they set about to raise three million Reichsmarks worth about [$30 million today] to strengthen and confirm the Nazi Party in power.”

Gustav Krupp was the first executive to speak at the Berlin meeting, and pledged one million marks. As the United Nations summarized in a 1949 report, Krupp was a key financier for the Nazi Party, including through his corporation:

It was clear from the evidence that Gustav Krupp embraced Nazism shortly prior to the seizure of power by the Nazi Party and continued his allegiance thereafter.He played an important part in bringing to Hitler’s support other leading industrialists and through the medium of the Krupp firm… from time to time made large scale contributions to the [Nazi] Party Treasury.

Hitler awarded Krupp the title of Fuhrer of Industry later in 1933.

Krupp acted in concert with other businessmen, including the directors of I.G. Farben, then Europe’s largest corporation. I.G. Farben’s full name was Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft which translates to “Community of Interest of the Dyestuffs Industry, Incorporated” or as one of the Nuremburg prosecutors, Josiah DuBois Jr. in his book, The Devil’s Chemists, put it, the name was “like the cross between a service club and Easter eggs.”  But what I.G. Farben did with the Nazis was no laughing matter, including using slave labor at a specially-constructed plant at Auschwitz called Monowitz. 

In the opening of the tribunal against the directors of I.G. Farben, prosecutor U.S. Gen. Telford Taylor stated: “The indictment accuses these men of major responsibility for visiting upon mankind the most searing and catastrophic war in human history. It accuses them of wholesale enslavement, plunder, and murder.”

At the February meeting, the I.G. Farben executives gave the Nazis 400,000 marks, and a total of 4.5 million marks by the end of 1933, according to The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. This infusion of corporate cash saved the Nazi Party from financial disaster. The rest, as they say, is history — tragic, tragic history.

As the book Hell’s Cartel explains, the history of the German industrialists’ support of Hitler shows “what can go wrong when political objectives and the pursuit of profit become dangerously entwined.”  One can only surmise what might have happened if the businessmen had simply said “no” to Hitler that night.

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The journalist David de Jong has just published a devastating investigation detailing the complicity of some of Germany’s biggest industrial fortunes in its Nazi past.

Germany has long been the great exception to the rule that countries don’t atone well, memorializing and confronting the sins of the Nazi era and drilling into young people born decades afterward the unique historical baggage and responsibility of that legacy.

Except, de Jong writes in his painstakingly reported new book, for one gaping hole in that reckoning and truth-telling: Germany’s billionaires, then and even unto this day.

And while drawing parallels between that episode of history and anything since is perilous, de Jong, in our conversation, told me that the history of German tycoons’ cynical embrace of Nazism should offer a warning to American business leaders (whom he also covered, for Bloomberg) contemplating how long they can continue doing business with the anti-democratic, hate-propelled movement of Trumpism.

De Jong’s book isNazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties, and our conversation about it is below.

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aha: nazi is demon term; the right (purposely?) confused on national SOCIALIST party name; plus hard core rt is authoritarian/fascist, so some rubber glue at work:

{{VAXXER:

https://www.mediamatters.org**/tucker-carlson**/fox-guest-demands-covid-vaccines-be-immediately-pulled-market-calls-them-dangerous

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/see-right-wing-diatribes-falsely-comparing-vaccine-mandates-nazis

See the right-wing diatribes falsely comparing vaccine mandates to the Nazis

In fact, the Nazis withheld vaccines from conquered populations — and spread propaganda that vaccines were bad

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD & JOHN KERR

PUBLISHED 01/28/22 no lnx vid

Right-wing media personalities have relentlessly pushed a disgusting set of talking points comparing present-day vaccine requirements to the atrocities of Nazi Germany — a comparison that is not only wrong in ethical terms, but also contrary to the actual history of Nazi policies on vaccines.

The commentators spreading this message have included Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson, Infowars’ Alex Jones; podcast host Joe Rogan; religious right broadcaster David Brody; YouTuber Steven Crowder and his co-hosts; One America News Network host Dan Ball; and others. (And just to top it off, Fox host Will Cain has compared vaccine requirements to life under East Germany’s post-war communist regime.)

In fact, Nazi Germany overturned the mandatory vaccination laws it had inherited from the earlier Weimar Republic. The regime also deliberately withheld vaccines from conquered peoples, with Adolf Hitler explaining that providing such benefits would “would result only in an enormous increase in local populations.” Furthermore, Hitler told his chief of staff to propagandize against vaccines for this very reason: “No inoculations and other preventative measures for the natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous.”

Oddly enough, Fox News’ Carlson has pursued a dual-pronged approach: On the one hand, he has fearmongered against “eugenics” and warned that “whites would go last” in line for the vaccines. But at the same time, he has compared universal vaccine requirements to “what the Imperial Japanese Army and the Nazis did in their medical experiments.” And, of course, Fox News is waging a propaganda campaign telling its own viewers that the vaccines are dangerous, while the company also practices a strict vaccine and testing regimen for itself.

And in a truly outrageous comparison, multiple right-wing hosts including Jones and Brody have invoked the Nuremberg Code, a set of medical ethics adopted in the wake of Nazi war crimes including medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. These claims about vaccines have circulated online since mid-2020, before the COVID-19 vaccines had even become widely available.

In fact, the codes do not declare that medical care such as vaccines “could never be imposed on anyone,” as Carlson claimed— if that were true, it would prohibit all the other vaccine requirements that already exist for schoolchildren. Instead, the Nuremburg Code was formed in response to the gruesome and evil medical experiments the Nazi regime forcibly conducted on concentration camp prisoners, who were often murdered immediately afterward if the experiment itself did not kill them.

As a result, the Nuremberg Code’s text governs the circumstances of any medical experiments on human subjects, and says they must involve only subjects who have consented and be conducted under circumstances that would “avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.” The COVID-19 vaccines are no longer experimental, precisely because they went through vigorous testing on volunteer subjects as required by medical ethics.

And just to make it clear how outrageous this comparison really is — and how people like Carlson, Jones, and Brody are trafficking in sheer historical ignorance — consider exactly the sort of conduct the Nazis committed, to which the Nuremberg Code was written in response:

For the benefit of the German Army, whose frontline soldiers suffered greatly from gas gangrene, a type of progressive gangrene, doctors at the Ravensbruck concentration camp performed studies to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide and other drugs in curbing such infections. They inflicted battlefield-like wounds in victims, then infected the wounds with bacteria such as streptococcus, tetanus, and gas gangrene. The doctors aggravated the resulting infection by rubbing ground glass and wood shavings into the wound, and they tied off blood vessels on either side of the injury to simulate what would happen to an actual war wound. Victims suffered intense agony and serious injury, and some of them died as a result.

In short, to compare a vaccination campaign providing the public with lifesaving drugs to the genuine war crimes against captive subjects that gave birth to the Nuremberg Code is simply a moral abomination.

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german neo-nazi go qanon 10 21

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https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/

stanton

a  secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church.They want to disarm the police.They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.

Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.

I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.

The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Central to its mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.

The Nazis published a children’s book of the Protocolsthat they required in the curriculum of every primary school in Germany. The Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer(derived from the German word for “Storm”) spread the Blood Libel. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his narcissistic autobiography and manifesto for his battle against the Jewish plot to rule the world, copied his conspiracy theories from the Protocols.

The Nazis worshiped Adolf Hitler as the Leader who would rescue the white race from this secret Jewish plot. Nazi “storm troopers” (“storm detachment” – Sturmabteilung) helped bring Hitler to power. Nazi Germany went on to conquer Europe and murder six million Jews and millions of Roma, Slavs, LGBTQ and other people.

America had its own dark side. Henry Ford echoed Nazi hatred of Jews and had 500,000 copies of the Protocols printed and distributed in the U.S. Father Coughlin preached the Protocolson national radio. The Ku Klux Klan combined its white supremacist racism with hatred of Jews.[REMIX MEMES // NOW?]

QAnon’s conspiracy theory is a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

QAnon purveys the fantasy that a secret Satan-worshiping cabal is taking over the world. Its members kidnap white children, keep them in secret prisons run by pedophiles, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood. The cabal held the American Presidency under the Clintons and Obama, nearly took power again in 2016, and lurks in a “Deep State” financed by Jews, including George Soros, and in Jews who control the media. They want to disarm citizens and defund the police. They promote abortion, transgender rights, and homosexuality. They want open borders so brown illegal aliens can invade America and mongrelize the white race.

QAnon true believers think Donald Trump will rescue America from this Satanic cabal. At the time of “The Storm,” supporters of the cabal will be rounded up and executed.

The QAnon conspiracy theory has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany, where over 200,000 German QAnon accounts infest the internet.  A faction known as “Reichsbürger,” or citizens of the Reich, orchestrated a brief storming of Parliament on Aug. 29.

Many people are perplexed at how any rational person could fall for such an irrational conspiracy theory. But modern social science shows that people in groups don’t always think rationally. They respond to fear and terror. They blame their misfortunes on scapegoats. They support narcissistic demagogues they hope will rescue them.

In the 1930’s, millions of Europeans were unemployed. Violent battles between Nazis and Communists raged in city streets. Democratic governments were powerless. Fascist dictators ruled Spain and Italy. Hitler took power in Germany and conquered Western Europe.  Stalin’s Communists conquered the East.  The Hitler-Stalin Pact sealed totalitarian rule over most of Europe.  It took World War II and the deaths of millions to defeat the Nazis’ genocidal tyranny, and another fifty years to free the gulags of the Soviet Union.

Today the American people suffer from a Plague.  Millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Angry mobs roam American cities and battle militarized police and heavily armed militias. The American government seems to be paralyzed.  Dictators rule Russia and China. Islamic fascists rule Saudi Arabia and the old Ottoman and Persian empires. The American President appeases Russia, scapegoats China for the pandemic, and looks the other way as Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman murder their opponents.

In July, the Texas Republican party unveiled a new slogan, “We Are the Storm.” Over a dozen Republicans running for Congress have signaled support for the QAnon movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate from Georgia who has endorsed QAnon’s views, is likely to win a seat in Congress. The President praises her as a “future Republican star.” The Trump campaign welcomes QAnon supporters to his rallies. When asked about QAnon on national television, the President replied, “I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate.”

Some leading Republicans have begun to speak out against QAnon. Rep. Liz Cheney, chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, has denounced QAnon as “dangerous lunacy that should have no place in American politics.”  Republican leaders such as Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Sen. Ben Sasse have also denounced QAnon. Former Gov. Jeb Bush has said of QAnon, “Nut jobs, racists, haters have no place in either Party.”

The world has seen QAnon before. It was called Nazism. In QAnon, Nazism wants a comeback.

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der volk is pseudo-populism?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/maga-nazi

hnn

William A. **Galston's recent essay "The Bitter Heartland" begins, "We are living in an age of resentment .. . [that] shapes today's politics." The more I read of it (and more about it later), the more the great resentments of Hitler's followers came to mind. They resented rich Jews, the victorious Allies who in 1919 had imposed the "unfair" postwar Versailles Treaty [TPP clinton trade deal mex cda] upon them, civilian German politicians who had signed the treaty, communists, who had taken over in Russia and were a rising force in Germany, and the "decadent" godless ways of Berlin, as hinted at in the play and film Cabaret.

The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up land to their west and east and also their overseas empire. It also imposed strict limits on its armed forces and weapons. But perhaps most bothersome of all to the average German was the imposition of war reparations, which many Germans believed contributed to their great financial agonies. This was especially true during the great inflation of 1923 – by then a loaf of bread could cost billions of Reichsmarks – and the Great Depression. Historian Peter Fritzsche notes that "between 1929 and 1932, one in three Germans lost their livelihoods. At the same time, young people had no prospect of entering the labor force . . . German farmers suffered terribly as commodity prices slumped."

Fritzsche also relates some of Hitler's early tactics like boycotts that "relied on entrenched resentments against allegedly wealthy, rapacious, or tricky Jews," and he writes that "the Nazi leader appealed to popular fears and resentments and transformed them into final judgments and the promise of direct remedial action." Moreover, Hitler used a we-versus-they approach, "pitting patriotic Germans against subversive Communists, Aryans against Jews, the healthy against the sick, the Third Reich against the rest of the world."

Almost a century after Hitler came to power in 1933, some of Donald Trump's followers remind us of Hitler's crowds. On at least one occasion, after Hitler ranted about the "November criminals" (German politicians who negotiated the war-ending armistice of 1918), the audience cried out, "Hang them up! Bust their ass!" In both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump crowds (in response to their hero's words about Hillary Clinton) shouted "lock her up."

Already during the 2016 campaigning, writer George Saunders observed some of the resentments of Trump supporters. Many believed "they'd been let down by their government . . . and [were] sensitive to "any infringement whatsoever on their freedom." Many suffered from what Saunders labeled "usurpation anxiety syndrome," which he defined as "the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other with questionable intentions."

In Galston's 2021 essay "The Bitter Heartland" he cites a 2016 poll that indicated that 65 percent of whites without college degrees "believed that America's culture and way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s." But more than that poll, his essay dissects the continuing Trumpites' resentments much more thoroughly.

Like some before him, he indicates or hints at where the Trump resentful are mostly found: in small towns and rural areas, and among older people, non-college graduates, groups once dependent on manufacturing and mining jobs, and "social conservatives and white Christians." The resentful are more provincial and traditional and many of them "lack access to high-speed broadband."

"They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life." They believe that the big-city elites, the professionals, and the government—before Trump came along—all failed to help them achieve their share of the American Dream. They resent professionals and liberals telling them how to live, calling them racists, or limiting their freedoms—e.g. to buy multiple guns or go about maskless during our present pandemic. "President Trump was at his best, they say, when he ignored the experts and went his own way."

Like Saunders earlier, Galston thinks that many of the resentful feel they are "being treated unjustly, unfairly, or disrespectfully." The appearance of Trump and discovery of like-minded people—via the Internet and the person-to-person contacts of smaller towns—help overcome feelings of powerlessness. Feeling more powerful, some "people merely want a remedy for the injustice they have experienced. But others—typically those who experience disrespect—want more than redress; they want revenge."

Galston closes his essay with some suggestions for dealing with Trumpite resentments, but they are less compelling than his analysis of them. Partly this is because, while some are legitimate, others—like the reluctance of many white Christians to grant equal rights to all ethnic and religious minorities—are not. As we learned from examining the supporters of Hitler, understanding the difficulties of people and even sympathizing with their plight (e.g., being jobless) does not mean condoning resentments that lead to hateful behavior like victimizing Jews.

The preceding comparison between two phenomena of group resentment, separated by almost a century, in two different countries and political cultures, omits many contrasts and nuances. In addition, we know how Hitler and German Nazism ended. The ending of the Trumpite culture of resentment is still unknown. Will it gradually decline? Will the Biden administration successfully address many of the Trumpite grievances? Will Republicans continue to stoke them? Will Trump run again in 2024? None of us know for sure. But thanks to the writings of Galston and others--he mentions Katherine Cramer and Arlie Hochschild--we better understand the resentments, and that's a start.

Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University, a Contributing Editor of HNN, and author of A History of Russia. 2 Vols.For a list of his recent books and online publications click here.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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Facial recognition company refutes viral conservative site's story used by GOP congressman to bolster bogus 'antifa' claim

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https://www.thewrap.com/washington-times-false-antifa-story-capitol-matt-gaetz/

Washington Times corrected a story Thursday that falsely claimed Antifa members were identified among the right-wing mob that infiltrated the Capitol on Wednesday. The outlet also apologized [IE AVOIDED LAWSUIT // SMARTMATIC KRAKEN] to the facial recognition software company at the center of the piece,which was initially deleted Thursday afternoon before being reinstated with the correction.

The story — which was referenced by Rep. Matt Gaetz when he suggested there was left-wing infiltration of the insurrectionists — is no longer on the Times’ site. The link to the piece redirects back to the Times’ home page. According to New York Times reporter Davey Alba, the now-deleted article was the 11th most visited webpage in the U.S. over the last 24 hours.

“Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that XRVision facial recognition software identified Antifa members among rioters who stormed the Capitol Wednesday. XRVision did not identify any Antifa members. The Washington Times apologizes to XRVision for the error,” says the correction.

Also Read:Rep. Gaetz, Sean Hannity and More Baselessly Suggest 'Antifa' Instigated Capitol Mob

On Thursday, Buzzfeed News reported that the facial recognition software at the heart of the Times’ story, XRVision, objected to the piece on the grounds that it was false. A lawyer for the company told Buzzfeed News that XRVision asked the Washington Times for a retraction and an apology.

According to a statement from XRVision CTO Yaacov Apelbaum, the original article claimed, “A retired military officer told The Washington Times that the firm XRVision used its software to do facial recognition of protesters and matched two Philadelphia antifa members to two men inside the Senate.”

Apelbaum wrote, “XRVision didn’t generate any composites or detections for the Washington Times or for any ‘retired military officer,’ nor did it authorize them to make any such claims or representations. Additionally, The Washington Times never attempted to contact XRVision to verify their false claim prior publication.”

He pointed out that XRVision did perform an analysis, which returned two matches linking participants in Wednesday’s riot to “Nazi organizations,” not Antifa.

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President Trump openly embraces the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon and promotes “law and order” while refusing to condemn armed followers of his who target antiracist protesters, we speak with Jason Stanley, Yale philosopher and scholar of propaganda, author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” Stanley says Trump built a cult of personality within the Republican Party, as evident during the Republican National Convention, and has moved the United States steadily into authoritarianism during his term. “Fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed threats by leftist radicals, minorities and immigrants. He promises only he can save us,” Stanley says. “In the RNC, what we saw is we saw a cult of the leader." [vid]

DELEGATES: Four more years! Four more years! Four more years! Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Now, if you want to really drive them crazy, you say “12 more years.”

DELEGATES: Twelve more years! Twelve more years! Twelve more years!

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Because we caught them doing some really bad things in 2016. Let’s see what happens.

AMY GOODMAN: “Twelve more years.” That was how Donald Trump kicked off the Republican National Convention from North Carolina last week, where he flew for the roll call vote. The convention came amidst a nationwide uprising against police brutality, just days after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and while people continued to demand justice for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the streets. But Vice President Mike Pence did not say their names when he addressed the RNC; instead, he focused on the killing of federal security officer David Patrick Underwood in Oakland, California.

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: We will have law and order on the streets of this country for every American of every race and creed and color. … President Trump and I know that the men and women that put on the uniform of law enforcement are the best of us. Every day, when they walk out that door, they consider our lives more important than their own — people like Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer in the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service, who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California. Dave’s heroism is emblematic of the heroes that serve in blue every day. And we’re privileged tonight to be joined by his sister Angela. Angela, we say to you, we grieve with your family, and America will never forget or fail to honor officer Dave Patrick Underwood.

AMY GOODMAN: But Vice President Pence left out a key part of the story. The man charged with Underwood’s death was not a Black Lives Matter activist, but a man with ties to the far-right “boogaloo” movement, which has used protests against police brutality as a cover to carry out violence.

Pence did not mention Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old white vigilante who killed two protesters in the streets of Kenosha last week. On Monday, President Trump refused to condemn Rittenhouse, saying the gunman probably would have been killed had he not attacked the protesters.

This comes as Trump has openly embraced supporters of the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, describing them as “people that love our country.” Last month, he refused to question the central plank of the conspiracy theory when questioned by a reporter.

REPORTER: At the crux of the theory is this belief that you are secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Does that sound like something you are behind?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I haven’t — I haven’t heard that, but is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing? I mean, you know, if I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this week, in an apparent reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory, Trump claimed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is being secretly controlled by people in the, quote, “dark shadows.” He made the comment during an interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t even like to mention Biden, because he’s not controlling anything. They control him.

LAURA INGRAHAM: Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings? Is it former Obama officials?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. People that are —

LAURA INGRAHAM: What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory: “dark shadows.” What is that?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, people that you haven’t heard of. There are people that are on the streets. There are people that are controlling the streets. We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with — with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that. They’re on a plane.

LAURA INGRAHAM: Where was this?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’ll tell you sometime, but it’s under investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump provided no evidence to back up his claim about thugs on planes. He initially claimed the plane was headed to the Republican National Convention. On Tuesday, he told reporters the plane was going from Washington to, quote, “wherever.” NBC reports Trump’s claim is very similar to a conspiracy theory started in June by a man in Idaho that went viral within far-right circles on social media.

Well, to connect these dots, from the Republican National Convention to white supremacists in the streets of U.S. cities to the president’s embrace of fringe conspiracy theories, we’re joined now by Yale professor Jason Stanley. He’s a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda who wrote the book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Professor Stanley is the child of refugees of World War II. He’s a professor of philosophy at Yale University, joining us from New Haven, Connecticut.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Professor Stanley. You were on when the book was first published two years ago, right in the middle of the Trump presidency. And now either we’re nearing its end or he will be reelected again. But talk about what you just listened to, and why you feel your book, How Fascism Works, is more relevant than ever.

JASON STANLEY: So, fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed threats by leftist radicals, minorities and immigrants. He promises only he can save us. In the RNC, what we saw is we saw a cult of the leader. The Republicans didn’t even bother to provide a platform. They just said, “Whatever Trump wants.” We saw four of the six long speeches given by Trumps.

So, Hannah Arendt, in Origins of Totalitarianism, warns that the first step towards authoritarianism is when a political party starts to value party over parties, meaning one political party treats other political parties not as legitimate opposition but as traitors to the country. The next step is when that political party, that engages in this kind of behavior, just becomes taken over by a social and political movement devoted to one leader. And that, I fear, is what we’re seeing.

When I published my book two years ago, people accused me of hysteria, of exaggeration, and they listed reasons why we shouldn’t be afraid of fascism in America, despite its deep roots in this country. And the reasons they’ve given, I’m afraid, have fallen to the wayside. They’ve given reasons like, you know, the institutions remain independent, the Justice Department remains independent. They’ve given reasons like there are no right-wing militias tacitly endorsed by the administration. So, Arendt calls our attention to the fact that the Nazi government refused to condemn the violence of right-wing — right-wing, far-right violent people on the streets attacking Jews. They refused to condemn them. They didn’t endorse them; they just refused to condemn them. And Arendt said that was giving them permission.

So, you know, we’ve seen four years of chaos here, and yet we’re being told that this is law and order. So, we’re seeing militias on the street endorsed by the president. We’re seeing the administration echo a conspiracy theory that looks, really, a great deal like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is the early 20th century conspiracy that Judeo-Bolsheviks were behind liberalism and controlled the media, controlled the cultural institutions, where bankers were in cahoots with media and the art world to bring about world communism. We saw that at the RNC. Senator Tim Scott talked about Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls supposedly trying to bring socialism to the United States. This mixture of a wealthy elite and communists is reminiscent of some of the worst conspiracy theories of the 20th century. So I’m very concerned here.

We’re seeing — people said, “It’s not fascism, because they’re not attacking democracy.” Well, what are the attacks on the elections about, if not attacks on democracy? So, while I don’t think Trump himself has a vision, has some kind of grand vision, as the fascists of yore has, as Timothy Snyder has called it, this is “not-even fascism.” I think we’re seeing a structure emerge, with figures like Stephen Miller, with all the sort of white supremacist ideologues in this administration, that could bring about, definitely, a turn to authoritarianism. It’s definitely an attack on democracy that the RNC represented.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to — back to the Republican convention, to President Trump formally accepting the nomination before a crowd of about 1,500 people crowded onto the South Lawn of the White House. During his acceptance speech, Trump made no reference to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, or the killing of the two protesters that had just happened in Kenosha by a 17-year-old white Trump-supporting vigilante.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When there is police misconduct, the justice system must hold wrongdoers fully and completely accountable. And it will. But when we can never have a situation where things are going on, as they are today, we must never allow mob rule. We can never allow mob rule. In the strongest possible terms, the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities all, like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and New York and many others. Democrat-run. There is violence and danger in the streets of many Democrat-run cities throughout America.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Professor Stanley, as you have a white officer shooting at point-blank range seven times in the back Jacob Blake just days before, and then two Black Lives Matter activists shot dead in the streets of Kenosha by a Trump-supporting gunman, no mention of them, but talking about mob rule in the streets somewhere of cities that are run by Democrats.

JASON STANLEY: OK. So, there’s two chapters in my book — my book is a 10-part characterization of fascist tactics. There’s two parts in my — two chapters in my book that are deeply relevant for what is happening now: obviously, chapter seven, “Law and Order,” and chapter nine, “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

What is meant by “Sodom and Gomorrah”? Chapter two of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf is called “My Study and Struggles in Vienna,” and he talks about his time in Vienna, a city, the capital of Austria, filled with foreigners, dirty, diseased, all sorts of different languages, filled with immigrants, and then the hated minority group, which for him were Jews. So, what we see is a repetition of this tactic: an attack on cities. Hypocritical, of course — Trump is from Queens. But what Trump is doing is trying to represent cities as filled with foreigners, minorities and disease. Earlier, he described New York City as filled with — as disease-ridden. And I think yesterday or, I think, in the last 24 hours, he said he blamed the COVID deaths on New York City. So, the idea is an attack on — you know,cities are dens of iniquity and foreignness. Real Americans live in rural areas outside the cities. And the cities are where you have mobs out of control, immigrants. There’s sanctuary cities. This is a classic tactic of this kind of far-right fascist politics.

And then law and order. What’s meant by “law and order” here? Not when — you know, Kyle Rittenhouse is not a violation of law and order. Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people, who killed two people, is — he’s a radicalized 17-year-old. He’s not a violation of law and order, because white Trump supporters are law-abiding by their nature. The Trump rally we saw in Portland, shooting paintballs, aggressive against the counterprotesters, that was law-abiding. They were peaceful protesters, because on this notion of law and order, young Black men are, in and of themselves, violators of law and order. Leftist protesters against Trump can be doing nothing but rioting and looting.

Now, any protest — almost any protest is going to have elements with bad apples that become violent. Look at the Hong Kong protests. The Hong Kong became much more violent than anything we’ve seen here. Nevertheless, the Republicans did not denounce the Hong Kong protests as riots. Do you know who denounced the Hong Kong protests as riots? The Chinese government. What we’re seeing here is our government behave like the Chinese government, representing largely peaceful protests, with some bad elements that grow violent and should be condemned, as riots. And that’s a counterinsurgency, authoritarian tactic.

“Law and order” here does not mean law and order. Does this feel like law and order? Do the last four years feel like law and order? That very speech that we witnessed at the RNC was a violation of law and order, because it was given from White House grounds in violation of the Hatch Act, so, you know — and proudly so, because this administration revels in its violation of law and order, because, in fascism, “law and order” means whatever the leader says, and “law-abiding” means whoever the leader is, and “lawless” means the men of the minority group and leftists and radicals, supposed leftist radicals.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has said New Jersey’s first African American U.S. senator, Cory Booker, will help Joe Biden destroy peaceful suburbs by bringing low-income housing and crime. This is Trump speaking to Fox News Monday night.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You have this beautiful community in the suburbs, including women, right? Women. They want security. I ended where they build low-income housing project right in the middle of your neighborhood. I ended it. If Biden gets in, he already said it’s going to go at a much higher rate than ever before. And you know who’s going to be in charge of it? Cory Booker. That’s going to be nice. OK?

AMY GOODMAN: Cory Booker, the president says. Professor Stanley?

JASON STANLEY: So, there’s no evidence at all that Cory Booker, a senator, an African American senator from New Jersey, is going to be running any such program. He throws his name in.

He mentions women. Why does he mention women? Well, this harkens back to what Langston Hughes called “our native fascisms.” This harkens back to the worst moments in American history, the history of lynching. Ida B. Wells, in Southern Horrors, the great Ida B. Wells, the great anti-lynching activist and intellectual and journalist, said, “Look, racism and sexism go together.” They’re treating white women as victims who need to be protected from marauding Black men by a strong leader, by — you know, by white militias, the KKK.

Trump is directly harkening back to that horrific time in American history, which is this sort of lynching in the late 19th, early 20th century to mid-20th century. This is something that Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction, calls fascism, so American fascism. This is the aspect of America that influences Hitler, that influences the Jim Crow laws, the racial subordination.

Here, so I have a chapter in my book called “Sexual Anxiety.” You know, in Germany, the idea behind both Nazi Germany — Nazi German ideology and the Ku Klux Klan, often called the first fascist organization, was that Jews, Marxist Jews, were trying to promote a race war to get Black Americans to — to get Blacks and immigrants to overthrow the white Christianity. And the idea, you know, Hitler fomented this, as I document in my book. It’s also the case that you had this propaganda, that overlaps between here and QAnon, that we need to protect our women and children from these predators, pedophile rings.

But this echoes the classic American, supposed and completely fictional Black male rapist fiction, fictional narrative, that underlay lynching. And the random evocation of Cory Booker is a case in point. Ida B. Wells is, sadly, more relevant than ever.

AMY GOODMAN: During the Republican convention, speakers used apocalyptic language to describe the dangers of a Biden presidency. This is Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point.

CHARLIE KIRK: We may not have realized it at the time, but Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization. Trump was elected to protect our families from the vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life, our neighborhoods, schools, churches and values. President Trump was elected to defend the American way of life.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point. Professor Stanley, respond to this and also people raising their eyebrows and saying, “Oh, come on, Nazi Germany, you’re comparing this to?”

JASON STANLEY: That speech is highly evocative of a speech that Goebbels, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, gave in 1935 called “Communism with Its Mask Off.” In Goebbels’ speeches, including that speech, which I encourage people to look up, he regularly represents the threat as being a threat to Western civilization. He says the Nazi Party is going to protect social conservatives, Christians from the Armageddon of communism, which seeks to destroy civilization as such. Goebbels says the communists are in cahoots with the international underworld. So, that’s that link between communism and crime and supposed lawless crime.

So you have the same idea here. There’s Trump, on the one hand, protecting Christianity, protecting Western civilization, and anyone opposed to Trump is a lawless mob in cahoots with communists seeking to destroy civilization itself. And this is the friend-enemy distinction that is so antithetical to democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: What about science? How does the denial of science, all over, that Trump is doing, from pushing hydroxychloroquine, despite all the studies, to now, apparently, with warp speed, as the operation might well be accurately named, pushing a vaccine just in time for the election, when scientists all over this country are saying this is dangerous and is undermining people’s belief in science?

JASON STANLEY: So, I had to get the preface for the paperback of my book in by March 14th, and it was very unclear which countries would do worst with COVID. But you started off this program by listing the countries that have done worst: Brazil, the United States and India, and Russia, as well. So, I listed those countries. I predicted those countries would do worst, even though some said,

“What? They have strong — supposedly strong leaders.”

Well, I predicted they would be worst because these leaders reject science. They reject science as, you know, the attitude — I’m not comparing here these leaders to Hitler. Hitler did have a grand genocidal vision that these leaders lack. But these are hypernationalist leaders that see the world in friend-enemy distinctions. And as Hitler says in Mein Kampf, science is just a tool for national glory. So, the only way such leaders are going to drag scientists up to the podium is if these scientists are yes men for the leaders, praise the leaders, because that’s all this kind of politics is: You’re either with us or against us. And science, by its nature, facts, by their nature, do not have a side. They do not pick a side. So, science is incompatible with these leaders. These leaders are going to pick scientists that just praise the leaders and tell the leaders what they want to hear. And what we have underlying this is an ideology of social Darwinism: Well, let the weak and old die. That is an ideology that is very clear in Bolsonaro in Brazil’s response to COVID-19.

And finally, we have the weaponization of everything, like there is no America, or this is no — there’s just us and them. And as we’ve seen, the Trump administration backed off from really focusing on COVID-19 when they came to believe that it was largely a disease of essential workers — that is, largely Black and Hispanic Americans — and they believed it was relegated mostly to Democrat-run cities. So, you know, this kind of thinking, there’s just friend and enemy. And when there’s just friend and enemy, well, science has no role. It is really just a tool of national glory.

AMY GOODMAN: Jason Stanley, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of philosophy at Yale University, author of five books, most recently, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

Next up, 50 years ago today, Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. We’ll speak with his former adviser, Ariel Dorfman, who at the time was dancing in the streets of Santiago. Stay with us.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/nyu-fascism-expert-explains-the-next-moves-in-trumps-authoritarian-playbook-hes-a-fundamental-break-from-american-tradition/

At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there’s a poster which identifies “The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism.”

Here are the criteria:

  1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
  2. Disdain for human rights
  3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
  4. Rampant sexism
  5. Controlled mass media
  6. Obsession with national security
  7. Religion and government intertwined
  8. Corporate power protected
  9. Labor power suppressed
  10. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
  11. Obsession with crime and punishment
  12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

This in too many ways is America in the Age of Trump.

Trump and his regime are engaged in a white supremacist counterrevolution against the civil rights movement, in which the human rights of nonwhite people are being revoked. This includes a recent effort to circumvent the Constitution by deeming that undocumented immigrants (overwhelmingly Black and brown people) should be erased from the population for purposes of congressional representation.

Trump and his regime are criminalizing dissent. He has gone so far as to explicitly state that people who disagree with him are akin to Nazis and should be imprisoned or worse.

Trump and his regime have no respect for the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or democratic norms and principles more generally. Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not respect the outcome of the 2020 election if he does not win.

Trump and his regime have unleashed a secret federal police force to gas, shoot, beat and illegally detain nonviolent protesters in Portland, Oregon, and potentially elsewhere.

In a predictable escalation, Trump — through Attorney General William Barr — has ordered that the regime’s thugs be deployed to other Democrat-led cities to enforce “law and order.” It is entirely plausible that Trump’s secret police will also be used to help him steal the presidential election.

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, recently announced that the forces under his command may  “proactively” arrest people for crimes they have not yet committed. Such dystopian logic mixes George Orwell’s “1984” with Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report.”

TrumpWorld also reflects the horrible surrealism of the film and novel “Children of Men” turned into a lived experience for America and the world. Writing at the New Statesman, Gavin Jacobson observes:

The way the film extrapolates from the here and now is the reason the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher thought “Children of Men” was unique. Writing in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Fisher understood the film as a true depiction of what he called “‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

“Children of Men” does not take place at the end of the world, which has already happened, but within its chilling coda, where, as Fisher writes, “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist”. There is no desire to create alternate ways of living, or to make the end of times less awful. …

The idea that we’re out of time is what makes “Children of Men” both a mirror and augur of the world, and the world to come. At the end of history, cut off from its past and pessimistic about the future, and facing slow death under rising tides, humanity has resigned itself to a somnambulant life. It is a life of finitude, routine and conformity; one without vision, spontaneity or surprise, where we no longer seek to live larger lives or even strive for our continued existence. We have become Nietzsche’s “last men”.

Facing the onslaught of neo-fascism, the American people remain stuck in a state of denial, learned helplessness and fear. Donald Trump and his movement have American democracy and civil society in a chokehold.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert in fascism and authoritarianism. She is the author of “Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945” and “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema” and other books.

Her opinion essays and other writing have been featured by CNN, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Atlantic. Ben-Ghiat’s new book is “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present,” to be published in November.

In this conversation she warns that Trump’s threats of violence against the American people — including against leading Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — are very real. Ben-Ghiat also explains that the American news media normalized Donald Trump because most journalists are unable to admit that the United States is a failing democracy.

Ben-Ghiat details how the American people (and America’s political elites) remain in denial about the realities of neo-fascism and autocracy, because to admit the truth would mean confronting the fact that they must take action against such forces — and have not done so.

You can also listen to my conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/matrix-4-writer-breaks-down-the-clash-between-trumps-right-wing-revolution-and-the-democrats-wishful-thinking/

Matrix 4’ writer breaks down the clash between Trump’s right-wing revolution and the Democrats’ ‘wishful thinking’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon June 3, 2020

The American people are in pain. There have been days of protest and civil unrest in many American cities following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by the Minneapolis Police Department on Memorial Day.

This article was originally published at Salon

These convulsions in the American body politic are not just the result of one more murder of an unarmed, surrendered black man by a white cop, televised before the world like a New Age lynching. America’s problems are vast.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 108,000 people in the United States, with the total number of cases now approaching 2 million. Donald Trump and his administration have responded with malevolent indifference. These deaths are but another entry in a social Darwinist ledger where the “useless eaters” are being left to die for “capitalism” — and in service to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Now the American people are struggling through a second Great Depression, in which tens of millions cannot pay their rents or mortgages, or feed their families. Republicans have only offered a pittance for ordinary people amid this global economic disaster — a onetime payment of $1,200 — while giving big corporations and the richest citizens trillions of dollars of the American people’s money.

Overall, there is a sense that something is deeply wrong in this country and this society, which elevated a racial authoritarian demagogue and avatar of corruption to the presidency. Many Americans feel ashamed by how their country now appears before the world. There is great potential for positive change in America, but to this point no great hero or leader has emerged. That vacuum is what makes Trump’s power so great. Even though he lacks a great mass movement after the model of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, he commands cult-like followers who will carry out his every wish.

Trump is an authoritarian and neofascist, who only knows how to destroy and not create. He is not a unifier but a divider. Like other leaders of that ilk, Trump uses violence, chaos and pain as a primary means of expanding and securing power.

For Trump and the Republican Party, America’s pain is a target of opportunity for their gangster capitalist agenda.

Trump has used “stochastic terrorism” to encourage violent threats by his followers and enforcers against prominent Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Trump has also targeted nonwhite people, Muslims, immigrants and “liberals” in general with violent threats.

Trump has made reference to “Second Amendment solutions” as a way of inspiring right-wing militias and other paramilitaries to attack his perceived enemies. As seen with his recent declaration of “MAGA Night,” Trump would like to mobilizes white supremacists and other right-wing terrorists as his street hooligan enforcers.

Trump has urged his armed followers to threaten or perhaps overturn the governments of Democratic-led states and cities if they do not bow to his will by ending public health measures designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. To some extent, they have been successful: The Michigan state legislature was recently forced into recess by such threats of violence.

This week, Trump has threatened to invoke a 200-year-old law called the Insurrection Act to crush the protests and civil unrest which has burst forth in response to the killing of George Floyd. This is one more step in Trump’s effort to create an autocratic pseudo-democracy where he rules indefinitely. Martial law would be the most efficient way for Donald Trump to use a “state of emergency” — his personal Reichstag-fire moment — as a way to end America’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy, just as surely as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had his on the throat of George Floyd.

In a recent article for the Intercept, Bosnian-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon — also the co-writer of the forthcoming “Matrix” sequel — warns that the United States is careening towards ethnic violence, civil war and self-destruction under Donald Trump. The “most important and troubling symptom,” he writes, is the rising atmosphere of conflict “meant to culminate in transformative, cathartic violence; this marks the beginning of collective self-actualization.” Hemon continues:

As we bear witness to armed white American militias storming or protesting outside government institutions, it is clear that the chaos and tragedy of Covid-19 are being used by Trump and the GOP to enhance the conflict and accelerate the birth of a new, greater America. At the heart of every nationalist mythology is some kind of a rebirth, usually bloody and requiring sacrifices, preferably of the weak and the doubtful. …

For many of my fellow ex-Yugoslavs, it was instantly clear that once the GOP and Trump committed to conflict and destruction, they could never afford to quit, for that would constitute a tactical error leading to an irreversible defeat. They now have no choice but to follow their trajectory to its logical extreme, which must be victory and rebirth at all cost. They will kill if they have to, or at least let Covid-19 do it.

When armed Trumpists pretend to be a happening of good people who demand the end of the lockdown, anti-fascist ex-Yugoslavs don’t necessarily see an American version of murderous Serbian paramilitaries. What we see with heart-clenching clarity is that the familiar nationalist strategy of perpetually inciting conflict is advancing along a predictable trajectory.....

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 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) (German: 33. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS "Charlemagne" (französische Nr. 1)) and Charlemagne Regiment are collective names used for units of French volunteers in the Wehrmacht and later Waffen-SS during World War II. An estimated 7,340 to 11,000 men served in the unit at its peak in 1944.[1][2] The unit's members participated in the final days of the Battle in Berlin in the area of the Führerbunker and were among the last Axis forces to surrender in the city.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/the-republican-party-is-holding-itself-together-by-appealing-to-these-3-fascist-evils/

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The Republican party is holding itself together by appealing to these 3 fascist evils

Written by Rick Shenkman / History News Network January 13, 2020

Stone Age Brain is the blog of Rick Shenkman, the founding editor of the History News Network. His newest book is Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books, 2016). You can follow him on Twitter @rickshenkman.

The Republican Party, unsurprisingly, has taken the position that President Trump should be defended. This is unsurprising because this is what parties in power do.  If we want to explain what has happened to the Republican Party, which all must try to do in this hour of crisis when democracy itself is on the line owing to Republican perfidy, it is essential for us to view events not from the perspective of the rational actor but from that of the party politician.  Only then can the alarming events through which we are living become understandable.

We must begin with the basics.  Three overriding causes may be said to account for the behavior of politicians holding national office.  One, is money, with which we need not concern ourselves too much.  It’s obvious the role money plays in our politics.  Members of Congress must always be thinking in the back of their mind how any vote may affect their chance of financing their next election. Every GOP member of Congress has to worry that if they vote against Trump they’ll be cut-off from various campaign funds available to Republicans in good standing with the party and the party’s major-domo donors such as Sheldon Adelson and Charles Koch.

More interesting, though also obvious, is the second factor, pure partisanship. The social sciences tell us that partisanship is hard-wired in the human brain.  It is the reason we cheer for our side in a ball game and hope for the opposition’s defeat.  Once we identify with a group we look for evidence that confirms the group’s status and dismiss evidence that detracts from it.  Because partisanship is stronger among Republicans generally than it is among Democrats, perhaps owing to a default loyalty bias among people who identify as conservative, it is pretty easy to comprehend the ordinary Republican’s behavior in ordinary times.

Of course, these are not ordinary times.  Presidents are rarely impeached.  So Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, ahead of the committee’s vote on impeachment, issued a rare plea that his Republican colleagues consult their consciences before voting.  As many have noted Republicans during Watergate did just this, voting against Nixon when they similarly faced an impeachment vote.  Why is no Republican doing that this time?

The explanation may be found in the third factor accounting for the behavior of politicians. It is this one that is perhaps the most telling in the current situation.  Politicians prefer winning over losing and recent history suggests that the way to win, notwithstanding the losses the party suffered in 2018, is to stand with Donald Trump .  By nature politicians are cautious.  The only way to know what will succeed in winning votes is to follow the path of proven winners like Trump.  As long as he appears to be retaining the support of the GOP party base it is prudent to assume that he has figured out the magic sauce in the recipe of political victory and to follow the recipe closely.  Only a few dare to tamper with the ingredients.

Change is unlikely in the Republican Party short of a massive defeat.  Only in defeat do politicians, facing years in the wilderness, risk experimenting with new approaches.  Thus far there’s little sign that the party base is fielding second thoughts about Trump.  He remains nearly as popular today among Republicans as he did when he was elected.  Polls show his support among Republicans in states like California and Texas is north of 85 percent.  Nixon’s support, by contrast, began to collapse by the time he faced impeachment.  At the beginning of 1973, before Watergate shook the country, Nixon had the support of 91 percent of GOP voters.  By the end of the year — a year in which John Dean testified about payoffs to the Watergate burglars and Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre — Nixon’s support had fallen to 54 percent.

So the real question isn’t why members of Congress are remaining staunch Trump supporters, but why the GOP base is. Many reasons have been offered for this strange phenomenon (strange because Trump is so unlikely an avatar of Republican virtue). They include Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the other leading cogs in the propaganda machine that props up the Republican Party.

Whatever the cause of Trump’s hold over the GOP base, it’s a fact, and we as a country need to do something about it. We have to hope that the GOP evolves into a better version of itself because, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed in an article in the New York Times in 1950, this country needs two intelligent parties. Right now we’ve got just one.  Only the Democrats are grappling with the real problems the United States faces, among them climate change and inequality.  This is untenable over the long term.

Through much of our history we have had a responsible conservative party, as Schlesinger noted in his piece in the Times.  In antebellum America the party of Jefferson was cross-checked by the party of Hamilton and Adams.  In the next generation Jacksonians faced off against Whigs, and while the Whigs eventually disappeared, for decades they offered Americans like Lincoln an intelligent alternative.  In the postbellum period the GOP espoused (for a time)  a bold vision of racial equality and entrepreneurial zeal.  Later it was captured by the plutocrats but by the turn of the 19th century reform elements led by Teddy Roosevelt succeeded in refashioning the party as an engine of reform.  In the 1920s the party once again became beholden to the rich until the Great Depression put an end to its control of the federal government.  For a couple of decades it nearly ceased to exist at the national level.  Then, as if in response to Schlesinger’s call, the party finally made peace with the New Deal under the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower.  “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs,” Ike wrote, “you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

Under both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan the GOP continued to deal with real world problems, particularly in foreign affairs.  But slowly in the years following the end of the Cold War Republicans gave themselves over increasingly to fake nostrums.  They did this because they found they couldn’t win by running on their real agenda — tax cuts for the wealthy, which constituted nearly the whole of their domestic program once welfare had been reformed in the 1990s.

Trump in 2016 correctly identified several key issues that demand public attention, especially the decline and demoralization of much of rural America.  But rather than offer a rational program to address this and other issues he won election by dividing the country along racial and religious lines.  Instead of appealing to the better angels of our nature he played his voters for fools.  He began his time in the national political spotlight by hinting that Barack Obama was born in a foreign country and might be a secret Muslim.  Later he signed up as a card carrying member of the anti-science brigade of climate change deniers.  Throughout his presidency he’s spread rumors of conspiracies. And his biggest “accomplishment”?  It was giving the wealthy huge tax breaks.

What if the GOP doesn’t reinvent itself as a responsible party? Schlesinger worried seven decades ago the GOP could collapse into pieces, leaving “its members prey for fascist-minded demagogues.”  There was, it turns out, another possibility Schlesinger didn’t anticipate.  It’s that the party would hold together by itself appealing to atrinity of fascist evils: xenophobia, racism, and authoritarianism. This should worry all of us.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/fascism-scholar-if-trump-wins-again-america-will-be-ready-for-full-on-authoritarian-rule/

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Fascism scholar: If Trump wins again, America will be ‘ready for full-on authoritarian rule’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon January 13, 2020

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Congress will soon send its articles of impeachment for Donald Trump to the Senate, where Republicans are determined to acquit him on all charges, including abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and encouraging foreign powers to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.

No evidence or witnesses will persuade the Senate majority to reach a conclusion consistent with the obvious facts that Donald Trump should be impeached, convicted and removed from office. The Constitution’s mandate that a impeachment should involve an impartial trial and a fair hearing of evidence and witnesses has no meaning in TrumpWorld.

The Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump’s regime and an expression of his personal will and power. To that end,Trump has promised financial support to the Republican senators who will soon be voting at his trial. It has also been reported that Trump ordered the execution of Iranian Maj. Gen.  Qassem Soleimani in order to ensure that Republican senators would support his acquittal.

In essence, Donald Trump pays political blood money to his supporters. This is more evidence of Trump’s political thuggery and mobster-style behavior that is unbefitting an American president.

Like other dictators, authoritarians, autocrats and political thugs, Donald Trump believes he is above the law. With the support of Attorney General William Barr, this appears increasingly true.

The obscenities continue.

Donald Trump has suggested he is “the chosen one” and God’s messenger on earth. White Christian evangelicals believe this to be true and have pledged themselves to his cult.

Writing at USA Today, historian John Fea described the first event of Trump’s “Evangelicals for Trump” campaign, which occurred in Florida two weeks ago:

His evangelical supporters loved every minute of it. That night, Christians who claim to be citizens of the Kingdom of God went to church, cheered the depraved words of a president and warmly embraced his offer of political power. Such a display by evangelicals is unprecedented in American history.

I usually get angry when members of my tribe worship at the feet of Trump. This time, I just felt sad.

Trump and his allies label Democrats, liberals, progressives and anyone else opposing him as traitors and enemies of the United States. The most recent example: at a rally last Thursday in Toledo, Trump said that Democrats were “vicious horrible people.”

None of this should be surprising. Trump is following the authoritarian’s playbook almost to the letter in his assault on American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. The question is not whether Donald Trump is an authoritarian and would-be dictator but rather whether anything or anyone is capable of stopping him.

I recently spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat in an effort to better understand where America is on its road to fascism and authoritarianism in this fourth year of Trump’s regime.

Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert in fascism and authoritarianism. She is the author of “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema” and other books. Her opinion essays and other writing have been featured by CNN, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Atlantic.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to my full conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat through the player embedded below.

As you watch the Trump regime’s ongoing authoritarian assault on America, how do you feel?

I feel very resolute. It is very important not to feel helpless and desperate. In a funny way, I’m not frustrated with the Trump supporters because I understand how the process works. Of course, I’m very upset that there are in fact Trump supporters and I have zero sympathy towards them. But once individuals bond to an authoritarian leader it is a process, like a train that has already departed the station. It is very hard to stop and is well underway.

How is this constant state of temporary hope and then inevitable disappointment impacting the American people? For example, Trump has been impeached. Yet now he will be acquitted by his servants in the Republican Party. The American people are in a manic state because of Trump’s regime.

This is all happening a little bit at a time. Surveying the history of authoritarianism, only in a military coup do you really have an instant change. A person leaves the house in the morning and five hours later they are living in a dictatorship and there is mass violence. But otherwise, even Mussolini and Hitler took many years to get into power.

The shoe drops slowly, and it is hard for many people to discern what is really happening. This is especially true when there are multiple things happening at one time. For example, William Barr and his attacks on the rule of law and how he is part of this right-wing Christian counterrevolution in America. Yes, Trump is impeached, and that is a type of pushback against him and his forces. What judges are doing to slow down Trump’s agenda is very important too. It is very important to not give up because that is what authoritarians want the public to do.

Authoritarian leaders want you to believe that resistance is futile and that you should just give up. If we give up and resign ourselves to the conclusion that impeaching Trump is not going to have an effect, then he has won. Impeachment is extremely important because it will be on the record, marked in the history books as opposition to Trump and his agenda.

Three years into Trump’s regime, why are so many Americans still in a state of denial about this crisis?

They have no reference point for what is going on in America right now. Providing that reference point is one of the things that motivates my work. Many people are also scared. Many people in the news media are afraid to really engage the fact that Trump is an authoritarian because if they do so then reality becomes too threatening, and therefore they would have to take a different stance publicly.

Is this a lack of historical context and knowledge? Is it cowardice?

As I said earlier, only in a military coup do we really see sudden change in a society. Most people are not trained to recognize what is going on with Trump’s authoritarian agenda. If these leading media voices admit that they are living in the middle of a fascist, authoritarian takeover, then what are they going to do about it? Compare the United States to Hong Kong. Those incredible human beings are out there in the streets in Hong Kong day after day, month after month, because they know really well what the stakes are. The American people either do not understand those facts or they do not want to inconvenience themselves and disrupt their lives. That lack of mass protest and resistance is also an indictment of a particular American way of life where people are overly comfortable and take too many things for granted about their culture and democracy and their own lives.

Applying your historical framework and expertise about fascism and authoritarianism, what are Donald Trump and his regime an example of?

Donald Trump is an example of someone who comes up in history, and the way forward has been prepared for him, in this instance by the Tea Party and the Republican Party.

The road was already prepared for Trump by eight years of Barack Obama and how that created a type of mass anger and rage and panic among many white people. People like Donald Trump appear in history and their role is to undo social and political progress. Trump is a figure who is trying to undo everything that Barack Obama stood for and accomplished. But of course, historical figures such as Donald Trump add something new. Trump comes in and he has a “movement.” Trump does not have a political party. At first, Trump said that he was above politics. This is another common thread among authoritarians.

When we say that Trumpism is a “movement,” what specifically do we mean?

Donald Trump said, “This isn’t a party, it’s movement.” Trump did this to excite his potential followers and get their loyalty. At a traditional Republican convention or campaign rally, there are not loyalty oaths. There are not MAGA hats. All successful movements have rituals and symbols. Donald Trump is a marketer. He knows that symbols and rituals and having a movement is how you get people excited. Nobody is excited to show up for the Republican Party. But the Tea Party? Donald Trump? MAGA? That is something different. There are actually people who are addicted to Donald Trump’s rallies. They are following a movement. Of course that movement has now taken over the Republican Party — and Trump transcends the GOP.

Trump is establishing what is known as “personalist rule.” This can happen in failing democracies and in actual authoritarian states. Personalist rule is a process wherein the state comes to revolve around the personal agendas and needs of the ruler. This includes the need to defend the ruler’s corruption. To defend the ruler from the law and judicial processes and investigative journalists. Another indicator of personalist rule is when the leader’s personal obsessions, such as Trump’s wall, begin to monopolize and overtake other policies. This would not be possible and sustainable without the leader’s supporters coalescing in a movement.

There is an obsession in the mainstream news media with Trump’s “white working class” supporters. In that reporting, one of the repeated narratives is that those people feel some type of kinship with him. Somehow, in their delusional minds, Trump’s supporters believe that a supposed billionaire is actually like them. He is “oppressed” and “victimized,” as they are. The premise is absurd. But why is it so compelling for some people?

That is the personality cult. For Trump’s rule to work — as with Putin and other autocrats and authoritarians — the leader must be both an everyman and a superman. The leader is a populist in the sense that he speaks the “language of the people.” Almost all of these types of leaders have a sense of humor where they make crude jokes that get people to laugh. Politically incorrect jokes. Their humor is corrosive, of course. But the jokes work in showing that these types of leaders are very much of the people. Donald Trump uses a fourth-grade vocabulary. He is also very visual. He performs with his body. Yet Donald Trump is a billionaire, and supposedly a great success. The combination of all those traits is very attractive to his followers. “He’s a super success story. He’s done this, he’s done that.”

Consider the expression “TrumpWorld.” It is an accurate description. The goal of Trump and his allies is to colonize society and the media 24/7. To achieve that goal, they need attention and toget inside people’s heads. This is TrumpWorld. Authoritarian leaders also present themselves as victims of coups or other attacks by their enemies. This makes them look vulnerable. These types of leaders talk about emotion in their speeches. Trump does this. He’s always talking about “love” and “hate,” relative to his friends, enemies and rivals. This makes Trump’s followers bond to him because they feel very emotional and want to take care of their leader. This is a very successful strategy by authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump.

Part of the power of the Trump cult is how he promises to be their savior, protector, friend and father figure.

It is no accident that during the impeachment process Donald Trump has said that he is going to stay in office for 28 years. Of course, that is not physiologically possible. But what matters is the fantasy, because Trump is terrified right now. Leaders of that type create fortresses around themselves in a million ways. They do this with flatterers, lackeys and family. Authoritarian leaders like Trump do not want to hear any criticism. They also want and need total control over people because that settles the anxiety.

Trump does this in other ways as well. He does not have permanent appointees. This means they do not have to be confirmed by the Senate. Authoritarian leaders are actually terrified and brittle people inside. That is why they retreat inward. Donald Trump will not take any real questions from the news media. The authoritarian leader’s ego will not permit any questions, and the longer they stay in charge the worse it gets for a country because they lose all sense of reality. Leaders like Donald Trump make bad decisions, such as starting wars. One of the things that scares me the most is that Donald Trump is extremely destructive. Authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump delight in being destructive. Sometimes such people are also self-destructive.

How does authoritarianism impact people’s sense of time and history?

Part of the experience is the anxiety of the minute. Twitterfacilitates this because it is not just how many people check the news, but also journalists drip out news stories in the form of small tweets.This is not just one presentation of a story and the facts. It is not like reading the front page of a newspaper and getting the whole narrative at once. Twitter is a filter for information and experience that is constantly changing. People lose perspective on what is important and what is not.

Our capacity for discernment goes down and our anxiety goes up. Everything is made to feel urgent. Yet the more time people spend on Twitter the less time they are doing anything about Donald Trump and the crisis.Twitter is just an example of this problem. But it is the prime example because it is an unhelpful mechanism psychologically, emotionally and politically because it’s like a mass venting session without much real world impact.

How should we understand the ways that Trump and his movement conflate their love for him with loyalty to the country and what it means to be a “real American”?

The civil service has been purged and ruined under the Trump administration. The civil service makes government work. The State Department is a particularly sad example.Career civil servants have been purged because of ideological tests. This can take the form of leader loyalty — which is an ideology of loyalty. It could mean Trump removing experts who know that climate change is real. Civil rights as well. For example, The Department of Health and Human Services under Trump now has a “civil rights office” devoted to the “rights” of right-wing Christian evangelicals who believe their freedom is violated by doctors who agree to perform abortions. The state has been hollowed out. Expertise is gone and ideology rules. The state, the government bureaucracy and civil service are now just a vehicle for the authoritarian leader’s goals.

The end goal is for Trump, Barr, the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally is to have their own secret police. I keep returning to the question of civil disobedience, protest and corporeal politics as a response to this threat to democracy. Are the American people just cowardly? Have they already surrendered? Is the news media just afraid of the truth? Calm my nerves — or not — about the Trump’s regime’s plans to have political police and other enforcers.

This brings up the question of madness versus method. One of the objections that gets leveled at people who offer these types of analyses about Trump and authoritarianism is, “No, Trump’s just impulsive.” He’s not mentally ill. He may have some dementia, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. Trump’s spokespeople have been very clear that Trump wants his own intelligence and security services.

Such goals are part of the counterrevolution that has been slowly chipping away at democratic institutions, norms and laws under Trump and the Republican Party. Trump is going after the country’s trust in the FBI and intelligence services. All the relevant structures of government that could obstruct what Trump wants to do are being chipped away. What Trump has been doing up to this point is not at all an accident in that regard.

It takes a lot of time to prepare the public for such an outcome. It requires information and psychological warfare. Trump is very expert in those areas. Chip away at reality and objectivity, and then the public is ready for full-on authoritarian rule. The Nazis knew this very well.The public must be shaped and prepared. This is what Goebbels excelled at. The Russians excel at it. Once the public is shaped and prepared, the authoritarian regime can do what it wants.

What is the Trump regime preparing the American people for?

Not only Trump, but many other people around him, including Republican elected officials, have been speaking like authoritarian thugs. They say things such as, “Hillary Clinton needs to be executed.” That is how fascists speak. Making such threats is a type of trial balloon. If Trump wins in 2020, those trial balloons of fascist threats will be able to be made real. Even with all the horrible things that Trump has said and done, his popularity remains stable. Trump’s followers have not deserted him. The 2020 presidential election is almost a referendum and a mandate for Donald Trump to finally do what he’s been threatening to do all along.

What were some moments when the rise of Trumpism, and what feels like a type of inevitability and path dependency, could have been stopped?

This is called “gatekeeping.” Authoritarian leaders and their movements are very clear about being violent. Authoritarians always tell you what they are going to do. It’s just that the American people are not ready to hear it. We do not want to hear the truth that Donald Trump is not kidding with his violent threats and promises. When Trump would not release his tax returns, that was a damning signal of how imperiled America is and was. When Trump said he could shoot someone on the street without losing any followers, that was another moment where I knew we were stuck on a very dangerous path. No American presidential candidate in modern history has threatened to murder someone as part of his campaign. Such behavior is what political thugs do.

The Republican Party’s leaders and other influential voices could have prevented the corruption of the system by this violent outsider. That was one path. The other path was and is to accept Donald Trump fully and claim he’s your savior sent from God. That is the path America is now on.

What comes next with Donald Trump in 2020 and the presidential election?

Exacerbation of the polarization. The goal is to leave people so confused about the truth that they are more and more dependent on Trump while also being increasingly disaffected. Trump may capitalize on some horrible event happening to the United States.Donald Trump has made some very scary declarations that the way to unite a country is through some catastrophe. Trump says that he hopes such a horrible thing does not happen but that is the way a leader can unite the county. Donald Trump has stripped anti-terrorism programs of their resources. He has defunded many national security programs that combat terrorism. If a calamity took place, Donald Trump would use it to declare martial law or some type of ongoing national emergency.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/a-historian-reflects-on-the-return-of-fascism/

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A historian reflects on the return of fascism

Image via Wikipedia.

Written by Lawrence S. Wittner / Daily Kos January 6, 2020

Back in 1941, the year of my birth, fascism stood on the brink of conquering the world.  During the preceding decades, movements of the Radical Right?mobilized by demagogues into a cult of virulent nationalism, racial and religious hatred, and militarism?had made great strides in nations around the globe. By the end of 1941, fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan, having launched massive military invasions of other lands, where they were assisted by local rightwing collaborators, had conquered much of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

It was a grim time.

Fortunately, though, an enormous movement arose to resist the fascist juggernaut. Led by liberals and assorted leftists around the world and eventually bolstered by the alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, this resistance movement ultimately prevailed.

The antifascist struggle of World War II established the groundwork for a new and better international order. In January 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a major public address, outlined what became known as The Four Freedoms.  The people of all nations, he proclaimed, should enjoy freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. That August, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill unveiled the Atlantic Charter, declaring that people should have the right to choose their own form of government, that force should be abandoned in world affairs, and that international action should promote improved living and working conditions for all people.

These public declarations?coupled with the widespread discrediting of rightwing parties, movements, and ideas?led directly to the establishment, in 1945, of the United Nations. According to the UN Charter, the purpose of the new world organization was to “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,” and “to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”

And, in fact, in the decades following World War II, there were significant strides forward along these lines. Led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the United Nations issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, setting forth fundamental rights to be protected.  Furthermore, much of Europe, the cockpit of two terrible world wars, cast aside nationalism to establish a federal union.  Moreover, a wave of decolonization freed much of the world from foreign rule, UN forces engaged in numerous peacekeeping operations, and the United Nations and many national governments established economic aid programs for the world’s poorest countries.

Admittedly, national policies sometimes fell short of the new internationalist, antimilitarist, and égalitarian ideals and programs.  Governments?and particularly governments of the major powers?all too often ignored the United Nations and, instead, squandered their resources on military buildups and terrible wars.  Many governments also had a spotty record when it came to respecting human rights, promoting social and economic progress, and curbing the rising power of multinational corporations.

Even so, for decades, humane domestic policies?from banning racial discrimination to scrapping unfair immigration laws, from improving public health to promoting antipoverty efforts and workers’ rights?remained the norm in many nations, as did at least a token genuflection to peace and international law.  Political parties with a democratic socialist or liberal orientation, elected to public office, implemented programs emphasizing social justice and international cooperation.  On occasion, though far less consistently, centrist and communist governments fostered such programs, as well.  Only parties of the Radical Right attacked these policies across the board; but, swimming against the tide, they remained marginal.

Nevertheless, in the last decade or so, enormous headway has been made by movements and parties following the old fascist playbook, with rightwing demagogues trumpeting its key elements of virulent nationalism, racial and religious intolerance, and militarism.  Seizing, particularly, on mass migration and funded by avaricious economic élites, the Radical Right has made startling progress?undermining the European Union, contesting for power in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Greece, and taking control of such countries as Russia, India, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, Israel, Egypt, and, of course, the United States.

Long before the advent of Donald Trump, the Republican Party had been shifting rightward, pulled in that direction by its incorporation of Southern racists and Christian evangelicals.  This political reorientation sped up after the election of Barack Obama sent white supremacists into a frenzy of rage and self-pity.

Trump’s 2015-16 campaign for the presidency accelerated the GOP’s radicalization.  Drawing upon unusually hate-filled rhetoric, he viciously denounced his Republican and Democratic rivals.  Along the way, he engaged in his characteristic lying and mocked or incited violence against his critics, the disabled, immigrants, racial minorities, Muslims, women, and the press.  His racism, xenophobia, and militarism, combined with his thuggish style and manifest lack of qualifications for public office, should have doomed his campaign.  But, instead, he emerged victorious?a clear sign that a substantial number of Americans found his approach appealing.

As president, Trump has not only displayed a remarkable contempt for truth, law, civil liberties, the poor, civil rights, and women’s rights, but catered to the wealthy, the corporations, white supremacists, and religious fanatics.  He has also proved adept at inciting hatreds among his rightwing followers through racist, xenophobic diatribes delivered at mass rallies and through propaganda messages. Meanwhile, he has forged close alliances with his authoritarian counterparts abroad.  Either out of fear or love, Republican officeholders cling ever more tenaciously to him as the nation’s Supreme Leader.  If the GOP is not yet a fascist party, it is well on its way to becoming one.

Having grown up at a time when ranting maniacs dispatched their fanatical followers to stamp out freedom and human decency, I am, unfortunately, quite familiar with the pattern.

Even so, the struggle to shape the future is far from over.  During my lifetime, I have seen powerful movements wage successful fights for racial justice, women’s rights, and economic equality.  I have seen massive campaigns successfully challenge wars and nuclear insanity.  I have seen the emergence of inspiring political leaders who have toppled dictatorships against incredible odds.  Perhaps most important, I have seen millions of people, in the United States and around the globe, turn the tide against fascism when, some eight decades ago, it threatened to engulf the world.

Let’s hope they can do it again.

Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).

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thom h predicts para mil brownshirts if 2nd term

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/a-complete-sham-anger-grows-over-report-gop-senators-met-with-trump-to-map-out-rigged-impeachment-trial/

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// 80's death squads

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/4/greensboro_massacre_40th_anniversary

take our country back from commies and nwords; willing to spill lots of bllod;  death to klan chant; undercover cop car, infromant took pix, communicate w/ FBI; no cops helped hurt (arrented those trying to help) 40 yrs ago

Remembering the Greensboro Massacre of 1979, When :{KKK & Nazis :(style="background-color:#ffcc66ff"):}:Killed 5 People in Broad Daylight

11/4/19 DN 2 trials all wht no convictions 5 kia 10 hurt

undreds gathered this weekend to mark the 40th anniversary of the Greensboro massacre, when 40 Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an anti-Klan demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five anti-racist activists in a span of 88 seconds. Those killed were members of the Communist Workers’ Party. Ten other activists were injured. No one was convicted in the massacre, but a jury did find the Greensboro police liable for cooperating with the Ku Klux Klan in a wrongful death. Local pastors in Greensboro are now calling on the City Council to issue an apology for the events that led to the 1979 killing. We speak with Dr. Marty Nathan, the widow of Dr. Mike Nathan, who was killed in the 1979 Greensboro Massacre.

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https://www.salon.com/2019/10/17/the-trump-murder-video-is-no-joke-its-an-encouragement-to-ramp-up-the-violence/

Trump is not a “friendly fascist.” Unlike Ronald Reagan, the prototype for that concept, Trump does not pretend to be harmless. He does not offer up fake smiles and a cheerful nature, or display empathy and human concern for others, feigned or otherwise.

Donald Trump is direct, obvious and public in his threats against democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. Trump and his movement are working to destroy America’s multiracial democracy through appeals to a mythic past that will “Make America Great Again.” In practice this means undoing all the social progress and democratic reforms of the last century or more and returning to a society where white people — rich white male Christians, in particular — are fully in control over all aspects of American society for all time.

And of course, Donald Trump — the not-so-friendly fascist — embraces violence as a means of achieving his goals. When Trump said famously during the 2016 presidential campaign that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing his voters, it was both a threat and a promise.

“Friendly fascism” and traditional fascism are more alike than they are different. Writing in his 1980 book “Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America” Bertram Gross explained this:

In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters.

A major difference is that under friendly fascism Big Government would do less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business.

It is true that both Trump and Reagan are TV presidents: products of the worst aspects of American popular culture and its superficiality, the emphasis on the impulsive versus the meditative and contemplative. It is also true that the results of Trump’s and Reagan’s policies for the poor, the working class, the vulnerable and other marginalized groups are very similar. And it is true that Trumpism is like the venerable right-wing lie about “trickle-down economics,” dosed on meth, crack and steroids.

But in at least one very important way Donald Trump is most certainly not like Ronald Reagan. Cultural critic James Poniewozik explores this in his new book “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America":

[T]he differences between Reagan and Trump were as important as their similarities. Reagan was an actor; Trump was a reality-TV star. Reagan came from the world of fiction; Trump came from nonfiction-based entertainment. Reagan played characters; Trump played an amplified version of himself. Reagan’s job was acting; Trump’s job was acting out.

Reagan’s preparation for being president, in other words, was years of imagining himself in the heads of other people …. Reality TV did not require you to do that. You needed to understand other people as obstacles, or as creatures who would react to stimuli, but not necessarily as full human beings with the same complexities as you. If anything, too much empathy was a liability. It was noise that kept you from being your fullest you …. This is a frightening attribute for a person who has power and responsibility for others.

Trump's performance is seductive and beguiling for his audience. They don't want friendly fascism — it does not satisfy their emotional needs. Trumpists want and need a “strongman,” a bully and political thug who “doesn’t take any crap.” This is projection and wish-fulfillment; Trump is their hero and an imagined cure for their own emotional ailments. In that way, Donald Trump the political cult leader is poison medicine for his followers.

Trump's supporters are bound to him by violence, both real and imagined. This was shown yet again through the fantasy mass murder video that was shown last weekend at an event hosted by the pro-Trump group American Priority at the president’s resort in Miami. In the video, an edited scene from the 2014 movie “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” an imaginary Trump guns down numerous symbolic figures: Democratic politicians, the news media, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other perceived enemies. Donald Trump Jr. and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders were featured speakers at the American Priority conference.

Such fantasies of political violence are a defining feature of fascism and a sign of a failing democracy.

That video was shown at the American Priority conference as part of a presentation on political memes. A meme is a message that circulates rapidly, in uncontrolled fashion, with the goal of changing how its targets think and behave. As such, the goal of the Trump mass-murder video is to encourage Trump supporters to support violence (literal or otherwise) against the president’s adversaries.

Trump himself has also shared videos and other messages on Twitter that encourage violence against the news media if they do not do his bidding.

Moreover, because violence is a core strategy and tactic of authoritarian leadership, he has suggested that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and other leading Democrats — as well, again, members of the news media who dare to criticize him — should be executed for treason.

Trump is a racial authoritarian. Racism is a form of violence.

Trump and his allies obsessively direct their violent threats and other attacks against nonwhite people as a group — notably, but not exclusively, nonwhite immigrants and migrants from Latin and South America. Trump has focused many of his most toxic attacks on prominent nonwhite Democratic elected officials such as Maxine Waters, Elijah Cummings, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, all duly elected members of Congress.

Donald Trump, the Republican Party, conservatives and their media allies are masters of stochastic terrorism. This has resulted in lethal political violence in the form of mass shootings, white supremacist riots and attacks, bombings, and hundreds of other documented hate crimes and other attacks by Trump’s supporters and those others who share his beliefs, across the United States and the world.

Predictably, Trump and his enablers have officially “condemned” the (most recent) Trump mass murder video. This supposed “condemnation” is a function of the plausible deniability which is a feature of stochastic terrorism. Trump’s defenders, including the hosts of the American Priority event, claim that the video is a “parody” and a “joke.” So-called humor has long been a way of encouraging violence against perceived enemy groups, because it dehumanizes the targeted individuals and groups in a supposedly harmless context, lowering the social inhibitions on committing violence against them.

Of course, there is the hypocrisy, which is always at the heart of fascism and authoritarianism.

Comedian Kathy Griffin was pilloried by conservatives when in 2017 she posed with a fake severed head of Donald Trump.

Republicans and other gun obsessives constantly claim that video games and other violent forms of popular culture lead to mass shootings. Yet somehow a video showing the president of the United States slaughtering his “enemies” is harmless fun.

If Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, as president, were featured in such a video at an event hosted by their supporters, at a property either of them owned, the right-wing news media would create an enormous public panic that might well end with their impeachment and removal from office.

Ultimately, the Donald Trump murder video is but another example of how fascism has been normalized in America. In total, Trump’s presidency has unleashed, encouraged, spawned and permitted a long, nasty smear of political scatology across American politics and American life.

It's true that the Democrats and other decent Americans have finally become mobilized to remove Trump, either through impeachment or the ballot box. But we must not overlook the fact that Trump and his movement’s rise to power is both a problem in itself and also a symptom of a much deeper set of political and social crises.

What we are witnessing in the Age of Trump is a behemoth of broken democracy and governance in a society that has become much too rapidly accustomed to a state of malignant normality and moral inversion.

In his brilliant book “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,” political theorist Sheldon Wolin signaled to the rise of Trump and how that regime would wield power:

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy.

What comes next?

There will be (more) blood.

The Trump murder video is a script. When it is followed (again) will Donald Trump and his movement suffer any consequences? No. Instead, Trump and his mouthpieces will issue their obligatory “thoughts and prayers” and “concerns” about right-wing political violence. Trump’s supporters will understand the real message behind such false proclamations. Trump’s condemnations of violence by his supporters and others acting in his name are really not-so-subtle winks of encouragement toward even more heinous actions.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-pro-trump-memes-mirror-the-frightening-ways-nazi-propagandists-got-their-message-to-the-people/

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How pro-Trump memes mirror the frightening ways Nazi propagandists got their message to the people

Written by Christopher Brauchli / Common Dreams October 27, 2019

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[A]fter the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace. . . which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.

—Atlantic Charter issued August 14, 1941

It was all in good fun  It took place for Trump supporters the weekend of October 14, 2019, at the Trump National Doral Miami.  That was the Trump-owned resort that was to be the site of the G-7 meeting in 2020, until it wasn’t. It had been selected by Trump for the meeting of the G7 because, as Mick Mulvaney, Acting Chief of Staff explained: “Trump still considers himself to be in the hospitality business.”

The event was organized by American Priority, a group that pretends to promote free speech.  It was attended by, among others, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump Jr.  In a room adjacent to the main ballroom at the hotel, a video that was produced by an anonymous person operating under the name of: “The GeekzTeam” was shown on a revolving loop. The video includes the logo for the trump 2020 campaign.  According to the New York Times‘s description of the video,  Mr. Trump’s head is superimposed on the body of a man entering the “Church of Fake News. ” As he walks down the aisle he stops, pulls out a gun, and opens fire on parishioners who have the faces of his critics, or the logos of media organizations superimposed on their bodies. Among his victims are “Black Lives Matter”, and “Vice News.” He continues walking down the aisle and as he approaches the alter, he is shown striking John McCain in the back of the neck, hitting Rosie O’Donnell in the face, and then stabbing  her in the head. He sets fire to Bernie Sanders’ hair. The video ends with Trump standing on the church altar and admiring the victims of his violent behavior.

Reports suggest that there are many similar memes, as they are known, available on the internet, all depicting violent acts against critics of trump.  The Trump himself tweeted a video in which he participates in a wrestling match and body slams and beats up the CNN logo.  That tweet went viral among his supporters.

Although lacking internet, the Nazis knew the value of film in order to get their message to the people.  In 1930 the party established a film department. In Mein Kampf  Hitler wrote that: “The picture, in all its forms, including the film, has better prospects.  In a much shorter time, at one stroke I might say, people will understand a pictorial presentation of something which it would take them a long and laborious effort of reading to understand.”

In 1932, Hans Traub, a Nazi propagandist,  said that film is a “formidable means of propaganda.” Explaining its importance he said that: “Achieving propagandistic influence has always demanded a ‘language’ which forms a memorable and passionate plot with a simple narrative. . . . the most effective is the moving picture. . . . it has  an unimaginable richness of rhythm for intensifying or dispelling emotions.”

Discussing films made in Nazi Germany, “Facing History and Ourselves” observes that although many films were made to glorify the Nazis, others were made to “dehumanize, criminalize, and demonize vulnerable minorities-particularly Jews.” The Trump and his supporters know how that works.

Noel King of NPR conducted an interview of Taika Waititi, the director of the movie, “Jojo Rabbit” on October 18, 2019, the date the movie was released.  The movie is a satire of Nazi Germany,  and is about a 10-year old boy named Jojo  Rabbit. Jojo is in the Hitler Youth Movement and he wants to be the best Nazi he can be. In the film Jojo says  “I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler.”

The NPR interview concludes with a lengthy commentary from Mr. Waititi, that is especially timely in today’s world.  “So we think we live in the safety of 2019?  Yes, we don’t have to worry about Hitler and his retribution on us for making jokes about him.  [But} I mean, this film shouldn’t really need to be made.  In 2019 do I really need to make a film with the heart of the message being, you shouldn’t be a Nazi.  At the end of  World War II, there was a very clear and simple law.  If you’re a Nazi, you go to jail because there’s no room in this world for you and those ideas. Now, sadly, in America and other places, the law now is, if you’re a Nazi feel free to go down to the town square and have a little rally because we’ve got this thing called freedom of speech. And you can sort of say what you want, and you’re protected by that.  It’s become very twisted. And if anyone says [about this movie] “oh, well, another World War II film-we get it.  That was 80 years ago.” Well, we obviously don’t get it-because we’re getting dangerously close to this sort of thing happening again.  And we’re living in a world where there are world leaders who are very happy to promote hate and intolerance and ideas that were prevalent in the ’30s.'”

Mr. Waititi got that right.  Think Orban, Assad, Duterte, Putin, Xi, el Sisi, Erdogan, and, Trump, the spoiled, petulant, mendacious occupant of the White House, to name just a few. It’s frightening.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-conservatism-turns-to-fascism-when-liberal-capitalist-societies-fail-nations-turn-to-glory-nobility-and-war-to-legitimate-the-system

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trump-a-wannabe-dictator-in-training/

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Trump: A wannabe dictator-in-training

Written by John C. Waugh / History News Network September 16, 2019

In a view shared by many, it is easy to believe that what Donald Trump really wants is not to be president of the country, but dictator of it.

Indeed, he has suggested how good it might be for him to enjoy a third term, perhaps more, even though the Constitution forcefully forbids it.

In a Fathers Day tweet he fantasized over the possibility, suggesting the public might “demand” that he serve a third term. The [good news], he wrote, “is that at the end of six years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House  (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT)….”

After Chinese president Xi Jingping abolished term limits in his own country, Trump said he liked the sound of that. “President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have give that a shot some day.” Just joking? It is not all that laughable. [The quotes in these two paragraphs are from an article by Gabrielle Bruney in Esquire, July 16, 2019. They have also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post.]

So what does a wannabe dictator who wants to give that a shot some day have to do day-by-day to reach his miserable goal? And how is Trump measuring up?

It is not an easy jump from democracy to dictatorship in our country. There is that dratted Constitution in the way. There are laws to be violated. There are critics, opponents, Democrats, immigrants, and the unfaithful to be purged.There is the critical mainstream media to be done away with. There are many lies to be told. It is hard, nasty work and Trump is fast running out of time.

A dictator must as soon as possible, by any means, shut down the media or control it. No dictatorship can exist in the presence of a free press. So far Trump has only been able to call the media names—”the fake news media,” “the enemy of the people,” “the opposition party.” From the time of announcing his candidacy to the end of his second year in office he had tweeted 5,400 times. Some 1,339 of those tweets were attacks of some kind on the media or individual reporters. This doesn’t count the times he has harangued the media in his speeches. He has turned many of his supporters into media haters like himself.

He is particularly incensed by the Washington Post and the New York Times, both of them highly critical of him. He has said that in the event that the public did demand  that he stay, “both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone!”

A dictator must be an avid hater of some minority group and wanting to purge it. Trump hates Muslims. He is not too crazy about blacks and Hispanics either. But there are now many of them, a very tall purging job. On the other side of this coin, Trump seems in no mind to purge white supremacists, who love him as one of their own.

A dictator must tell lies, lots of lies. Trump is far and away the champion liar in presidential history. It is said by news outlets who keep track of such things, that Trump averages about six lies per day.

A dictator must be willing to exterminate people, lots of people. Since this is forbidden in a democracy, Trump can only slander them with a tweet or in a speech or fire them. In a successful dictatorship you just shoot anybody you want any time you want. Trump can only fire them, or tweet insults at them. But it is not a far jump to think of Trump’s firings and insults as symbolic exterminations. Nor is it a far leap to think of the would-be immigrants pinned up and families separated on our southern border as concentration camps.

A dictator often has an affinity with other established dictators. Trump admires and is on friendly footing with two elite of the world’s dictators—Vladimir Putin of the Soviet Union and Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He has met and spoken kindly of both. And there is that admiration of  China’s Xi Jinping for making himself president for life.

A dictator is narcissistic, in love with himself and glory seeking, demanding and getting total obedience and acclamation from his followers. In his first cabinet meeting Trump invited each member to praise and celebrate his greatness. He loves his many rallies out in the country, where he basks in the acclamation of his many avid followers, which are said to be a strong third of the country’s population.

A dictator is lawless, often pushing the limits of his power. Breaking a law seems meaningless to Trump.Whether intentionally or ignorantly, he has violated a host of laws, many later challenged or overturned by the courts, thwarted by the judiciary. That is why it is so important for Trump and the Republican Party to appoint sympathetic judges to as many courts as possible. As for the Constitution, it can perhaps be questioned whether he has ever read it, much less  whether he worries about violating it.

A dictator questions the legitimacy of his opponents, demonizing them and curtailing or abolishing their rights. In the 2016 campaign for president, Trump suggested he might not accept the legitimacy of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, if she won the election, and suggested several times that she ought to be thrown in prison. He has tweeted hatred of many of his detractors and has encouraged brutality against anti-Trump demonstrators at his rallies.

As a wannabe dictator in training he has been doing reasonably well.

John C. Waugh is the author of One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War.

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919

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/autocrats-do-not-need-a-majority-to-destroy-democracy-a-divided-opposition-helps-them/

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Autocrats do not need a majority to destroy democracy. A divided opposition helps them

Written by Claudia Koonz / History News Network September 16, 2019

As we witnessed in the third Democratic primary debate last week, Democratic presidential candidates are struggling to distinguish themselves from their party rivals and competing for endorsements. Their horizontal vision in these disagreements diverts their gaze from the peril we face as Donald Trump dismantles the norms that have guided our political life since 1776.

Whatever their differences, Democratic candidates must agree to broad principles related to key issues, for example, immigration, health care, and the growing wealth gap. A general consensus would leave plenty of room for healthy debates about implementation, but failure to emphasize shared ideals in relationship to two or three major questions will blunt Democrats’ offensive against a candidate whose campaign is based on slander and fear.

Although we Americans like to think our nation is exceptional, the choices made by defenders of democracy in 1922 Italy and 1933 Germany are worth revisiting. The parallels are not perfect. Our two-party tradition sets us apart from Germany and Italy, each of which had five major parties. But legislative gridlock and voter cynicism today are reminiscent of conditions that marked the last months of democracy in Italy and Germany. The threat to our democracy does not command militias, but hate groups incite violence. Our economy is stable but many Americans feel left behind.  Most worrying, Republicans march in lockstep behind Donald Trump, while Democrats fragment – like opponents of authoritarianism in interwar Europe. Of course, we can’t know whether different strategies in Italy and Germany would have preserved democracy, but since hindsight is 20-20, let’s use it.

In economically devastated post-World War One Italy, labor unions and peasant leagues clashed violently with Mussolini’s Black Shirt militias.Voters in 1921 gave Socialist and Christian Democratic candidates almost half of the vote – compared to seven percent for the Fascist Party. Fearing a revolution from the left, the King used his constitutional power to appoint Mussolini as prime minister in 1922. Mussolini manipulated the election of 1924 to create a Fascist majority. An exposé of Fascist electoral interference by journalist Giacomo Matteotti touched off massive demonstrations. After Fascist thugs murdered Matteotti, 150 deputies protested by walking out of the Chamber of Deputies. After Mussolini expelled them and won the King’s approval, erstwhile critics in the Chamber calculated that opposition to “il Duce” would be futile.  Superficially, the trappings of democracy remained.

Fast forward to the German elections of 1932, when Marxist parties won 38 percent of the vote, compared to the Nazis’ 33 percent. Instead of forming an anti-Nazi phalanx, Communists and Social Democrats fought about tactics and theory. In January 1933, the President appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor. On February 27, after arsonists set the Reichstag on fire, Hitler called it the beginning of a communist revolution. Despite massive repression of leftist rivals, on March 4, Nazi Party candidates won only 43 percent. Two weeks later, the Catholic Center Party legislators joined conservatives and moderates in granting Hitler four years of dictatorial power. As in Italy, the handover was technically legal.

Mussolini and Hitler promised to restore national glory and depicted themselves as the last defense against radical socialism. Neither appealed to racism at first. Not even Hitler, who muted his virulent anti-Semitism in public to attract middle-class voters during the late 1920s. New followers told themselves he had mellowed, but his base and his Jewish targets never doubted his true intentions.

President Trump has violated many of the norms and laws on which our democracy depends. He circumvents Congress by declaring the “crisis” at the border a national emergency. He orders his staff to ignore subpoenas. He uses his presidential status to enhance his family’s wealth. He demands absolute loyalty from his appointees. He treats truth like a despot and jokes with Vladimir Putin about his “fake news” problem. He boasts about his misogyny and spews racist insults.

Trump is not a despot. But neither were Mussolini and Hitler early on. No black or brown shirts march in our streets. President Trump’s enablers wear white shirts and black robes. They are unified. Democrats are not.

Claudia Koonz is the author of The Nazi Conscience and Peabody Family Professor of History Emerita at Duke University.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/two-years-ago-i-compared-trump-to-hitler-nobody-listened/

c de v

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'Two years ago I compared Trump to Hitler’ — nobody listened

written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon June 21, 2019

On Tuesday, Donald Trump held his 2020 re-election campaign kickoff rally in Orlando. It was nothing new: Trump has held dozens of such events since becoming president. His “speech” was repetitive and monotonous. That was precisely its appeal: For Trump’s supporters and other members of his political cult, white rage, violence, bigotry, nativism and lies are entertaining, cathartic and even life-affirming.

Throughout the rally Donald Trump engaged in scripted violence and stochastic terrorism, telling his followers that the Democrats were going to hurt them and only he can protect them:

Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage and want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.

Trump wallowed in racist lies about threatening and dangerous “illegal aliens” and how the Democrats want to let them run amok, raping, killing and otherwise preying upon “real Americans” — primarily meaning white women. Trump played his goon card, bragging that his ICE shock-troops would round up millions of “illegal” (black and brown) immigrants across the country in the upcoming weeks. Trump’s people howled in delight. Eros, desire and violent lust are central to fascism. This is the libidinous aspect of political devotion between and among the followers and the leader in a cult of personality. Trumpism is no different.

Trump’s political carnival featured the usual attractions. Men pranced around shirtless in charismatic ecstasy at the thought of seeing Donald Trump in person. Women paraded about as deranged versions of Lady Liberty, apparently as teleported to Orlando out of a dark mirror universe. Trump’s masses were of course festooned in his MAGA regalia.

Overt white supremacists, or a close approximation thereof, marched in the streets outside the rally. There were plenty of right-wing extremists inside the Amway Center as well. This includes both honest, overt and unapologetic members of the White Right as well as those white conservatives who largely agree with the tenets of white supremacy, but choose to translate their hate into vaguely more palatable terms, such as “Make America Great Again” — or, as in Trump’s new version,”Keep America Great.” Evidently inspired by the Great Leader, one Trump fan assaulted a local news reporter.

One cannot be a good person and continue to support Donald Trump. This is especially true of Trump’s most devoted acolytes.

Tuesday’s rally, and the Trump presidency more generally, are teachable moments about history in real time, especially for those who wonder how millions of people in Germany and elsewhere were beguiled to their own mass destruction by the rise of a charismatic authoritarian leader. It can happen here; In the form of Trumpism it is happening now.

Where is the mass resistance to Trump’s movement and his assault on American democracy and freedom? Why have some Americans chosen to surrender? How can psychology help to explain Trump’s assault on reality? How has the Mueller Report fueled Donald Trump’s apparent mental illness and other abhorrent and dangerous behavior? Can Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives be compelled to impeach Donald Trump? Will there be violence from Trump’s supporters if he is forced to leave office?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Dr. John Gartner, a former professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Gartner is also the founder of the Duty to Warn PAC, an organization working to raise awareness about the danger to the United States and the world posed by Donald Trump. Gartner was a contributor to the 2017 bestseller book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” Along with two other expert mental health professionals, he wrote the recent USA Today op-ed “President Donald Trump’s poor mental health is grounds for impeachment.”

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. My conversation with Michael Wolff can also be listened to through the player below.

Where is the mass resistance to Donald Trump and his regime’s cruelty and assault on the rule of law? Have the American people been cowed into a state of learned helplessness and submission?

I am sure you have had many conversations with people who simply can’t take this situation anymore with Donald Trump and what is happening in this country. They have to turn off the TV. I understand that feeling. Stress at a certain point actually becomes physically and mentally destructive. There is only so much stress that a person can endure before they actually start having a physical or mental breakdown. Part of this lack of activity against Trump is a function of simple self-protection — it is a like a circuit breaker, where at a certain point it stops the electricity because there will be a fire. All human beings have a mental circuit breaker.

This impulse to self-protection is normal. People feel helpless. They do not know what else they can do in this moment. They feel like they do not have control over what is happening and they can’t let it kill them.

I had the pleasure of speaking with novelist Jonathan Lethem recently, and he made a powerful and profound observation. He said there is a whole industry around Donald Trump that’s committed to keeping him in his dream, meaning Fox News and the right-wing news media echo chamber. Donald Trump is dreaming and the American people are all stuck in it.

That is related to a concept known as “malignant normality.” The noted psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton introduced it to describe how in a country like Nazi Germany the dangerous and crazy views of the leader can eventually become the normal reality of a whole society.

In psychiatry there is a condition known as folie à deux, which describes how two people share a psychosis. This almost never happens. It is very rare. But on a massive societal level this is when there is a delusion that millions of people share. This delusion becomes its own reality. The people imbibe it and then reinforce this alternate reality among each other. In Rwanda, how did genocide suddenly occur among people who the other day had been previously living in peace? A shared mass delusion. In the United States we are discovering that reality is more fungible and easy to manipulate than most of us realized. With Fox News and Donald Trump, it is possible to create a nightmare fantasy and make it real.

Donald Trump routinely uses scripted violence and eliminationist rhetoric to encourage his supporters to target his enemies. Trump’s presidency has been associated with a large increase in political violence by his supporters — some of it lethal. There has been an increase in the number of hate crimes and white right-wing extremist groups that is directly correlated with the rise of Trumpism.

If Trump is removed from office — either through impeachment or the 2020 election — I have no doubt he will cause mayhem in this country. If Donald Trump orders his followers to “fight back,” there will be a wave of domestic terrorism in the United States. Many of these plans are likely already in motion.

I agree. Under Donald Trump America is heading towards greater violence. I have no doubt about it.

Two years ago I was comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. People didn’t believe me. They thought I was being hyperbolic, exaggerating. They couldn’t believe that Trump would build concentration camps. Well, he is doing it now. They’re not death camps, but the definition of a concentration camp is where you are concentrating one element of the population that you consider to be undesirable and therefore need to be segregated and imprisoned. In this case it is undocumented immigrants, primarily from Latin America, who are being put in these concentration camps. The original plan was for Donald Trump to put hundreds of thousands of people in these camps. Trump’s administration is still pursuing that policy.

Part of Trump’s plan is that we will soon, in the United States, going to start having experiences where you are eating dinner in a restaurant, and then Trump’s ICE enforcers will come into the restaurant and pull someone out of the kitchen and most people will just continue eating like nothing happened that is wrong or aberrant. It will be, “Oh yeah, it’s the ICE police, they’re just dragging people off and putting them in buses and driving them to camps.” America under Trump is not far from that situation. It is what Donald Trump wants to do.

If Donald Trump wins re-election in 2020, which is very possible, you are going to see people being dragged off the street and put in camps.

Donald Trump’s regime is planning to use the Insurrection Act to allow the U.S. military to operate across this country, particularly in major Democratic-controlled cities, to arrest and imprison black and brown “illegal aliens.” This should be a major story but it has been overlooked by most American mainstream media outlets. Trump has also publicly bragged to his supporters that there will be mass arrests across the United States where millions of “illegal aliens” will be put in his concentration camps. ICE enforcers are also doing this, grabbing people from courts, schools, weddings, churches, and waiting for people to walk out of their jobs to arrest them. What can good Americans do about this? Where is the outrage?

People of conscience need to go to Democratic representatives’ offices and chain ourselves there. We need to basically say, “You can arrest us, but we’re not leaving until you vote to open an impeachment inquiry.”

We elected this Democratic Congress to save us from this monster. Instead, they have allowed themselves to be stymied, neutered and cowed. Each day they don’t open an impeachment inquiry Trump becomes more normalized, more powerful and emboldened to do even worse. They worry about backlash if they impeach. Wait till those who knocked on doors for them come back to occupy their offices in protest and rage, and they will learn what a real backlash feels like.

The Republicans keep winning elections by inflaming their base. A vast majority of Democrats want impeachment. People are experiencing extreme stress because they can’t stand another day of this corrupt lunatic Donald Trump running amok. And what happens? The Democrats are doing nothing. They’re being weak.

Somehow they think by being weak and ineffectual it is some clever political strategy. It isn’t. No one will respect the Democrats if they follow such a weak strategy.

History is watching. In a crisis some individuals and groups rise to the challenge and others do nothing. I am very worried about how the Democratic Party under Trump will be remembered by history. “Political convenience” and what is “practical” or “expedient” is just another way of describing cowardice.

The Democrats are hiding. They are cowards. They do not seem to know how to fight or when to fight. If these Democrats are so weak that they are not willing to stand up and defend the Constitution, why would anyone believe in them? Do they think anyone’s going to believe in them? It’s appalling.

History will indeed judge the Democrats for this. And why are they behaving this way? Because they’re looking at polls which say a majority of people don’t want impeachment? Guess what? The majority of Americans didn’t want to impeach Nixon when that impeachment inquiry began. Then support doubled. Why? Because they had the courage to start an impeachment investigation and then, as the evidence came out, more people turned against Nixon. The Democrats should not wait for the polls to tell them what to do. It is time to defend the Constitution.

The Mueller report should have ended Trump’s presidency. Instead Trump is standing tall. Based on his public behavior, what is Trump thinking right now?

Donald Trump is thinking that he can get away with anything. When Trump first heard about Mueller being named special counsel, he said, “This is the end of my presidency.” Trump thought it was curtains. Every day that his presidency is not ended Trump is realizing, “Oh my God, I actually can get away with this!” It emboldens him.

The Democrats do not understand that Donald Trump is running out the clock. The Democrats can go to court to fight Trump’s policies and assaults on the rule of law, but that takes too long.  Every day that goes by where Donald Trump does not have to face consequences or be held accountable for his criminal, anti-constitutional behavior is another day when he says, “Hey, guess what? I got away with it! Let’s try going a little further.”

America is not in a static situation. Donald Trump’s presidency is a coup in process. It’s happening right now.

Trump’s Republican enablers are becoming more corrupt and also becoming more emboldened to do things that support his cause. Not only do Trump and the Republicans want to use the Department of Justice as a shield, they want to use it as a sword. Trump and the Republicans are going to go after their political enemies using the criminal justice system.

What prompted your recent USA Today editorial — which was one of the most read pieces on their site for a week or so — about Donald Trump’s mental health and impeachment?

For some time mental health professionals have publicly been trying to sound the alarm about Donald Trump and how he should be removed from the presidency under the 25th Amendment. What prompted the recent USA Today editorial, which I wrote along with my colleagues Dr. David Reiss and Dr. Steven Buser, was the bizarre meeting between Pelosi, Schumer and Trump, where Trump had a temper tantrum. According to witnesses, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, literally bangs the table and walks out without having a conversation. Trump then goes out to the Rose Garden, spews lies, and basically says, “I’m not going to do my job unless they stop the investigation.”

Nancy Pelosi described Trump as exhibiting mentally disturbed behavior. Trump was basically acting in a way that was crazy. Pelosi suggested that Donald Trump could perhaps take a leave of absence or someone should do an intervention. So at this point the Democrats are overtly saying that Donald Trump is psychologically impaired and so sick and disturbed that he is actually incapable of doing his job. That is a reason to consider impeachment. Donald Trump is crazy, dangerous and disordered. This is an urgent situation, an emergency.

What will happen next if Donald Trump continues with his behavior and the United States stays this course?

I think what the American people and the world need to understand is that Donald Trump’s coup is almost complete. Congress is the last line of defense. Instead of fighting back the Democrats are going to let him proceed. The Democrats are saying, “We’re not going to fight Donald Trump. We’re going to wait until the next game. The next election is almost here. We’ll win that one.”

The reality is that the United States may be getting to a point where there will not be another free and fair election because of Russian hacking and Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s unwillingness to protect the country. Not only did Donald Trump collude with Russia and its agents for the first attack on the American electoral system in 2016, he is now using his power as president to open the door even wider for the next attack in 2020.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/what-happens-in-a-totalitarian-regime-capitol-police-slammed-for-disturbing-physical-attacks-on-reporters/

no lnx twit

'What happens in a totalitarian regime’: Capitol Police slammed for ‘disturbing’ physical attacks on reporters

‘What happens in a totalitarian regime’: Capitol Police slammed for ‘disturbing’ physical attacks on reporters

written by Julia Conley February 17, 2019

28

Press freedom advocates and journalists described a Friday report of Capitol Police manhandling and shoving reporters in the Russell Senate Office Building as “bizarre” and “disturbing,” with some calling the…

Press freedom advocates and journalists described a Friday report of Capitol Police manhandling and shoving reporters in the Russell Senate Office Building as “bizarre” and “disturbing,” with some calling the altercation an incident far more likely to take place in a totalitarian regime than in a democracy.

As Roll Call reported Friday, Capitol Police pushed and “slammed into” reporters on Thursday afternoon around the time that senators were voting on the spending bill. The police attempted to prevent reporters from speaking to lawmakers—a practice that is common in the Senate basement, where the incident took place.

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Field of Vision - A Night at the Garden

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/fox-news-ceo-bizarrely-rejects-ad-for-anti-nazi-documentary-not-appropriate-for-our-air/

hannity

https://vimeo.com/237489146

1939 NYC

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behind the mask of chivlry nancy mclean yale stanley fascism is set of strategies, not an ideology

kkk said union jewish plot (to integrate?)

unions connect us across race; fascism sep via race or gender.

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-11-2018/

1st came for soc, then trade unionists...

alone econ anxiety, cvan't trust fellow citizens lok for fak ID hannah arendt

at last loyalty to fuhrer is ult ID

must be demonized out group (diseased, lazy etc [cf newt lang memo] corruption = impurity

bizzaroworld anti-corrupt campaign used to steal from jews; putin runs, may be richest in world

takes 5-6 years for talk to become violence /genocide klemperer

https://theconversation.com/shithole-countries-trump-uses-the-rhetoric-of-dictators-89850

...Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel 1984 that authoritarianism begins with language. In the novel, “newspeak” is language twisted to deceive, seduce and undermine the ability of people to think critically and freely.

Donald Trump’s unapologetic bigoted language made headlines again Thursday when it was reported he told lawmakers working on a new immigration policy that the United States shouldn’t accept people from “shithole countries” like Haiti. Given his support for white nationalism and his coded call to “Make America Great (White) Again,” Trump’s overt racist remarks reinforce echoes of white supremacy reminiscent of fascist dictators in the 1930s.

His remarks about accepting people from Norway smack of an appeal to the sordid discourse of racial purity. There is much more at work here than a politics of incivility. Behind Trump’s use of vulgarity and his disparagement of countries that are poor and non-white lies the terrifying discourse of white supremacy, ethnic cleansing and the politics of disposability. This is a vocabulary that considers some individuals and groups not only faceless and voiceless, but excess, redundant and subject to expulsion. The endpoint of the language of disposability is a form of social death, or even worse.

As authoritarianism gains strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become more embattled, along with the public spaces and institutions that make conscious critical thought possible.

Words that speak to the truth to reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more difficult, if not dangerous, to judge, think critically and hold dominant power accountable. Notions of virtue, honour, respect and compassion are policed, and those who advocate them are punished.

I think it’s fair to argue that Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future is no longer fiction in the United States. Under Trump, language is undergoing a shift: It now treats dissent, critical media coverage and scientific evidence as a species of “fake news.”

The Trump administration, in fact, views the critical media as the “enemy of the American people.” Trump has repeated this view of the media so often that almost a third of Americans now believe it and support government-imposed restrictions on the media, according to a Poynter survey.

Thought crimes and fake news

Trump’s cries of “fake news” work incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable. Reason, standards of evidence, consistency and logic no longer serve the truth, according to Trump, because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. Orwell’s “thought crimes” are Trump’s “fake news.” Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” is Trump’s “Ministry of Fake News.”

Donald J. Trump > ✔@realDonaldTrump

I’ve had to put up with the Fake News from the first day I announced that I would be running for President. Now I have to put up with a Fake Book, written by a totally discredited author. Ronald Reagan had the same problem and handled it well. So will I!

145K

6:40 AM - Jan 7, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy

77.7K people are talking about this === ===

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The notion of truth is viewed by this president as a corrupt tool used by the critical media to question his dismissal of legal checks on his power, particularly his attacks on judges, courts and any other governing institutions that will not promise him complete and unchecked loyalty.

For Trump, intimidation takes the place of unquestioned loyalty when he does not get his way, revealing a view of the presidency that is more about winning than about governing.

One consequence is the myriad practices by which Trump gleefully humiliates and punishes his critics, wilfully engages in shameful acts of self-promotion and unapologetically enriches his financial coffers.

Under Trump, the language of civic literacy and democracy has become unmoored from critical reason, informed debate and the weight of scientific evidence, and is now being reconfigured and tied to pageantry, political theatre and a deep-seated anti-intellectualism.

One consequence, as language begins to function as a tool of state repression, is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear and injustices proliferate.

Fascism starts with words

What is crucial to remember here, as authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, is that fascism starts with words. Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political spectacle are disturbingly similar to earlier periods of propaganda, censorship and repression.

Under fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty was normalized through the proliferation of strident metaphors of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity and demonization.

As German historians such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer have made clear, dictators like Adolf Hitler did more than simply corrupt the language of a civilized society, they also banned words.

Soon afterwards, the Nazis banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights.

The end point was an all-embracing discourse of disposability — the emergence of concentration camps and genocide fuelled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing.

Echoes of the formative stages of such actions are upon us now. An American-style neo-fascism appears to be engulfing the United States after simmering in the dark for years.

... h giroux

d'souza tries to make hitler leftist b/c he hated jewsish banks etc?

==

==

sonali too?

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/we-should-be-very-worried-philosopher-explains-americas-history-fascist-politics

no lnx

'We Should Be Very Worried': Philosopher Explains America's History of 'Fascist Politics' — Up to and Including Trump

We're at risk — even if we don't end up with a complete fascist state.

By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet October 22, 2018, 1:22 PM GMT

Jason Stanley, a Yale professor of philosophy and the author of "How Facism Works: The Politics of Us and Them," is sounding the alarms about the disturbing trends in American political culture evident in the rise of President Donald Trump.

Though many characterize warnings about Trump's fascist tendencies to be overblown, Stanley makes a serious and compelling argument that the dangers of fascism in America are not that distant and can easily come roaring back.

"For fascist politics to take hold, we have to have a failure of our democratic culture," Stanley explained in an opinion video with NBC News.

"Fascism is ultranationalism, where the nation is defined in racial, ethnic, religious or perhaps cultural identity, and the nation is identified with one person: the leader, who is its voice," he continued. "Fascist politics is tactics that exploit this kind of us/them distinction. Fascist politics might not result ultimately in a fascist state. But it's important to be attendant to the dangers because in and of itself, it breaks down the democratic culture."

While Trump is the latest and most prominent embodiment of this trend, it's nothing new in American politics, he argued.

"We should be very worried. We already have a long history of racial divisiveness in this country. And we've expanded those techiques to other groups, to immigrant groups And we can slip back very quickly — we have slipped back very quickly," he added.

He also noted several features of Trump's Republican party that are key indicators of fascist tactics: "When conspiracy theories become the coin of politics; rallies where the leader is one with his supporters; dividing people into the enemy versus the leader's supporters."

Watch the video below:

==

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/26/far-right-urging-jailing-political-rivals-linked-history-bombings

juan cole, new arabs

the mass right wing parties of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were led by charismatic leaders who whipped up the hatreds of mobs by denouncing immigrants and ethnic and religious groups as threats to the nation and as terrorists and saboteurs.

Somehow when politicians set such a tone, in which alternative political leaders and movements are not just seen as a legitimate loyal opposition, but are depicted as criminal traitors who must be locked up, one thing that happens is that bombs start to go off, planted by members of the far Right parties.

If you don’t believe me about the connection, consider a few news articles from the 1920s and early 1930s, as the Fascists came to power in Italy and increasingly agitated in Germany:

Jan. 4, 1925, AP, Rome: “Despite the order of the Government, the Fascisti have been holding imposing processions in different parts of the country. At Pisa rioting followed a parade, crowds invaded and devastated the local Freemasons’ Lodge. Republican headquarters and the offices of the anti-Fascisti newspaper Messagerio. At Giugliano, near Naples, a bomb was exploded at the house of Mayor Prof. Tagliatela . . . Premier Mussolini, returning to the vehement Fascist style of oratory, which he had abandoned when he became head of the Government, Saturday thrilled the opening session of the Chamber of Deputies by delivering a speech in which he declared, “Within 24 hours of this speech I assure you that the situation will be cleaned up and the air will again be breathable.”

Aug. 26, 1929, NYT: Princeton, N.J.: “An attempt was made to blow up the home of an anti-Fascisto member in Princeton this morning, climaxing the two months’ conflict between the supporters of the Mussolini government and its opponents in the local Italian colony. A stick of dynamite was placed in a cellar window at 333 Witherspoon Street . . . Four leaders of the Fascist group were arrested later, as it was charged that they had been heard threatening to kill [Salvatore] Forte [the occupant of the house]. . . Clashes between the Fascist and anti-Fascist groups have been occurring for two months. A street fight, in which concealed weapons were found on the participants, and several assaults and attempted assaults have marked the controversy.

September 11, 1929, The Scotsman, Berlin: “The police have made a lightning descent upon the lairs of the political desperadoes who for the past nine months have been terrorising towns and villages in Northern Germany with their bomb outrages. Yesterday and to-day they effected 22 arrests in Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Berlin, and are hot on the tracks of further persons suspected of implication in this conspiracy of violence. They have also secured a perfectly new bomb of the usual make which was ready to be placed in the doorway of some official building . . . Responsibility of Fascists . . . The Allied authorities are keeping a close watch on the activities of the National Socialistic German Workers’ Party in occupied territory. The bomb outrages carried out in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, [are] alleged to be the work of this party . . .

Dec. 30, 1929, NYT, London: Threats, supposedly from Fascisti, to blow up the New York publishing house of G. P. Putnam’s Sons if that company publishes a book by Francesco Nitti exposing Italy’s prison conditions, was received today by George Palmer Putnam of that firm . . .

Jan. 19, 1933, NYT: Frankfurt-am-Main: “A mob of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists, hurling tear gas and stench bombs, today attacked a meeting of 500 women held here under the auspices of the International League for Peace and Freedom . . . a man jumped up and read a resolution adressed to President Paul von Hindenburg demanding the death sentences for all persons objecting to war. When he had finished Nazis hidden in the gallery launched their stench and gas attack.”

==

https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-brett-kavanaugh-and-path-neoliberal-fascism

no lnx

Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the Path to Neoliberal Fascism

Even in the darkest of times we have the right to some illumination. -- Hannah Arendt

By Henry A. Giroux / Salon October 10, 2018, 2:10 AM GMT

...

==

In a new piece for the New York Review of Books, historian Christopher Browning warns that there are troubling parallels between the present-day United States and the days of fascism's rise in Europe.

Browning, a specialist in the areas of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and world war-era Europe, isn't arguing that President Donald Trump is a modern Adolf Hitler or that Trumpism is akin to Nazism.But he does argue that certain stress fractures in the society and the international order appear to be re-emerging and that these patterns portend troubling trends for the United States and the rest of the world.

And there is one figure in American politics that Browning does see as a relatively direct — and troubling — analog to a crucial world war-era figure. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, is becoming "the gravedigger of American democracy," Browning wrote, a role played for Germany beginning in the 1930s by President Paul von Hindenburg.

Hindenburg didn't defend democracy in Germany. Instead, he unleashed emergency powers in 1930 to appoint chancellors to skirt over political divisions in parliament. Eventually, Hitler became chancellor, when Hindenburg erroneously thought he could be controlled.

Now, McConnell shows a similar disregard for democracy and likewise opens up the country to serious risk, Browning explained:

He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

As a result of McConnell's strong-arm tactics, Browning argued, it will now be impossible for a president to make significant judicial appointments — including to the Supreme Court — unless the Senate is led by the same party. This dynamic will push the country toward greater dysfunction.

He continued:

Whatever secret reservations McConnell and other traditional Republican leaders have about Trump’s character, governing style, and possible criminality, they openly rejoice in the payoff they have received from their alliance with him and his base: huge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for). Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.

Most ominously, Browning warns that the detrimental effects of figures like McConnell and Trump will last for a long time. However long they stay in power, they will eventually leave — but the damage done to democracy and American institutions may persist for generations.

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tim snyder yale on tyranny : 20 lessosn from c20:

#1 don't obey in advance

#2 defend institution (only source of collective power) eg unions, NGO, the constitution [corp personhood?!]

...

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https://www.alternet.org/expert-nazi-germany-explains-how-average-citizens-enabled-hitler-just-trump-ordinary-people-will-do

=

from western goals:

The Klan has never been the sole or even principle point of intersection for US fascism; formal, official Americanism has always been the lynchpin. During the 1920s, the US’s great industrial and finance moguls, from Hearst, Ford, Du Pont, and GM to the house of JP Morgan, Jr., went fascist, and big business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a leading purveyor of Americanist propaganda, joined them. In 1923, after Mussolini’s March on Rome, the counsel of NAM delivered a speech to their convention called il Duce an “extreme leader, not only converted by the lightning stroke of intelligence and falling from his error like Saul of Tarsus from his horse, but leading through the streets of a reunited country a great body of citizens,” liberating Italy from “the blighting hand of radical socialism.”

pg 145https://books.google.com/books?id=sWB9BgAAQBAJ julian barnes, prez CoC, Nam lawyer

Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America

By John Patrick Diggins

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thom h

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/9-ways-trumps-authoritarianism-taking-hold

==

https://www.alternet.org/death-democracy-author-says-trumps-cultivation-dishonesty-strongly-reminiscent-nazis

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/trump-brexit-racism-xenophobia-globalization-gop/

in Voxpiece called “White Riot,” Zack Beauchamp recently laid out his case that the rise of Trump and the European far right is rooted in longstanding racist and xenophobic tendencies in the electorate. This orientation was activated by a sense of lost power and prestige in an era of mass immigration and a generally cosmopolitan and pluralist elite.

Beauchamp’s argument is interesting, and in several instances he brings forward useful evidence about the causes of far-right para-politics and political violence. But it is also historically naïve.

The equivalent case was made, famously, by center-right historians about the rise of fascism in the first instance, for which they blamed the long durée of German anti-Semitism and anti-modernism. That argument has been correctly interpreted since then as a bid to relieve the right wing of the political establishment from blame for welcoming nihilistic elements into formal politics and ultimately ushering them to the apex of power as a cynical means of serving its own interests.

The key task before us is not to explain why far-right elements exist. They have always existed. They take different forms in different countries — in the United States, far-right politics has always meant anti-black racism and the insistence on white supremacy. In Europe, far-right politics has always drawn stark boundaries around the national ethnos and excluded immigrants and even those long-intermarried from the neighboring village as not members of the right tribe....

==

https://www.c-span.org/video/?440037-1/how-democracies-die

2/18 pol and prose bkstore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v4NTtS2f5k

==

my sum:

how democracies die

4/28/18 15pp

howdemocdie

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Table of Contents

Introduction p. 1

cold war 3 in 4 were coups

chavez populism led to coup, hc stalled referendum for yr until oil price up

new 1x party took pwr 2017 --> autocracy

1 Fateful Alliances p. 11

MUsso not revo [wanted to ride in on horse, but invited, train]. 1/33 conserv wanted him b/c pop, and thot cd control [//AH?] odd bedfellows coalition only got 20%, but made musso legit?

table p 23-4

2 Gatekeeping in America p. 33

wallace mix racism with pop appeal to poor white victimhood/anger 36

wood ally of Teddy backroom deal got harding

elec college important but reasonable guys aT STATE LEVEL PICK PRES 40

negated by rise of parties, so electors loyalists

H Ford very pop, mention mein k, got award, said he wd run if obstacles remove; GOP? Sen said cand ridiculous; Wallave, Lindbergh (medal from Goring, tour for Am 1st] 47 Roth novel;

after 68 chic melee, McGo comm end party gatekeepers [chris M RFK bk thot pat brown, daley irish mafia big city mayors might have tipped to bobby]; jesse rev, forbes, pat b all filtered out 52

3 The Great Republican Abdication p. 53

post 72, increase outsides ( esp GOP?) celeb (fame or $) could skip "invisible primary" (donors, state level posl, grassroots gps)

CU made worse, pet billionaire or crowdsrc on IN [?] 56

frum: cons ent complex"

djt 2 bill $ free media 58

djt said wd not accept results of defeated 61 1st debate) mod octr poll 41% am 73% gop thot possible to steal; denied hillary legit, called criminal; pay legal fees suckerpunch deaththreat fayeteeville NC 62

repeat incite to viol; [mitt strong Sp ~ djt, but not from gop as whole, cd have changed hist?]

4 Subverting Democracy p. 72

peru (skipped)

capture refs, buy off or neutral ize opponents, rewrite rules --> perm win 92

CRISIS --> CONCENTRATION AND OFTEN ABUSE OF POWER 93

thus combo with authoritarian can be deadly 94

5 The Guardrails of Democracy p. 97

constit open to interpret; eg ct packing; US deoc survive b/c $, large MC, strong civil society; 100

MUTUAL TOL

Inst forbear 106, can mutually support each other 111. virtuous circle amplif fdbk

if opponent is enemy, loss is disaster ("escalating constit brinkmanship"  eg Chile oscillations? hate campaign systematically stoke fear 114 ~ by any means (CIA $) --> block --> legal loophole, rhet degrades, anti-system gps may abandon democ means, win any way they can; coup, pinochet 17 yrs

6 The Unwritten Rules of American Politics p. 118

scotus record block New deal 35-1936; press, dems ppl ~ packing;

hardball: 1798 Sedition act

Calhoun apocalyptic about slaves dom white ppl

waving the bloody shirt

[cf something i just read on ctr-cycle/force to civil rights?] So Dem saw civ rts as existential threat, so GOP? backed off pressure which restored mutual toleration 124

113 bipart 16th amend, 17th, fed tax, 19th women vote [not progressive age?] 125

GW set imp precedent forbearance, imp b/c big potential for abuse;  [fdr scotus skipped].

7 The Unraveling p. 145

fedsoc said no new justice min after scalia dead; mike lee, mitch mcc

(1st x since 1866) stole scotus seat and got away w/ it; divergence between way sys works and the way it should;

newt june 1978 CR pitched war; purpose of leader is to build a majority 147; cadre of loyalist, hijacked CSPAN, "corrupt? sick" shocked dems silent for years 148

GOPAC spread tactics; 2k audio tapes // Allay Khomeini ; anti-family, traitors "... min whip then spkr 1995, pulled pty to rt (vs resistance to him); and Gingrich Senators ~ compromise; new wave of polarization based on pop discontent, esp gop 149; pol as war" --> dom strategy ; enemy is immoral, a Mccarthy who succeeded"

1993 dole sez BC had no mandate, thus no honeymoon; filibusters and invest "scandals"

2 govt shutdowns 95=6; weaponized impeachment;

// delay. K street: if it's not illegal, do it;

B43 declared tex bi-part model, uniter vs divider --> 0

Rove said US so polarized, go hard rt to energize base [djt?]

dems ~, slowed down jud noms [Bork? 1987 RR]; 110th, last b41, record filib, 2x BC years 153; GOP quit "regular order' so no amendments --> no oversight of pres; 140 hrs on BC xmas list for $, but no subpoena b41 1st 6 years;

2003 state redistrict TX House majority leader delay; 2004 dems need 13 seats to win house; 47 legs fled to OK on buses 4 days;  sen flew 1 mos, but caved; delay from DC to oversee reconciliation; dems lost 6 in TX

coulter "treason" bill ayers (hannity and colmes 61 shows 2008 campaign) 156

delay, steve king BO marxist; McC balked but "lipstick" Palin, palin' around with terrorists (domestic) BO not a real american, who sees the world as we do;

TP: BO a threat to democ; Broun dictator //AH, joni ; tancredo, newt, rudy g;

birther 2004 sen, 2008 pres, mike coffman co; djt 2011 as think of run;

not 1st, but unprecedented got beyond fringe and accept by high gop palin and TP

lock her up"

loss forbear b/c Cruz sez BO 0 respect rule of law, then block judge noms by all means;

young guns mccarthy ryan , cantor --> party of no; sen mcconn"1 term pres"

sen obstruct spike 2008 (holds used to be a couple days to prep) 385 filib = 70 yrs

dems nuke option (elim filib for noms except scotus) --> BO exec order/memo eg fed agy co2 (McConn said ignore regulatory order on co2 [cpp?]

debt limit as hostage

tom cotton 3/15 46 gop sen wrote letter to iran said pres no authority 165

cruz, mccain and bur said block hillary scotus noms 4 yrs;

polar: sep by race, religion, geogr "way of life" 167.

1960 cross marr 4-5%; 2010 33 dem 49 gop unhappy if; 70 dem 62% gop fear other pty;

60's both big tent; evangel slightly dem; 64 CR act, RMN so stra, RR coded dog whistles; gop went hard right, dems not hard left ; 60's big immigration start, asia lat am, proj non white maj 2044; Row swung evangels; 2000's married wht xian 80 -40%

Media: gop 2010 69% fox; talk radio; no compromise, attack any defector/enforce; trent lott warned, also Norquist and CFG no tax pledge [also climate] AFP Am Energy Alliance Koch 400m$; gop --> more vulnerable to pressure groups and donors 173;

hof paranoid style about response to threat (here demographic)

8 Trump Against the Guardrails p. 176

skipped

arpaio; fake news, love 1st amend but press  no rep the ppl; "open up the libel laws" 181 threat use regs vs bezos  cnn, at7t, voter ID KKKobach,

djt followed authoritarian script 1st year; 187  gop could go along? contain , remove him; high polls make him more dangerous; crisis could also help him[he will make them, if only thru incomp or crony corrupt capilatilist]

norm breaking corrodes; nepotism, mix public and pvt; accuse BO of wiretap, voter fraud; lies break norms, but he pays no price[furies?]; attack press 9even RMN did not do publically] 200

ex soc sci moynihan "define deviancy down" so --> norm, we have trouble coping w/ ppl who deviate?

dana loesch schools say dht= Ah...smash window, shut hwy, only option cops, fight "violence of lies with clenched fist of truth" threat NYT, we are coming for you"

9 Saving Democracy p. 204

scenarios include crackdown eg see gop on BLM now 208

more no guardrails;

cvf No Caro; rev barber Moral mondays, 2012 mccrory all 3 branch;  voter ID; dems win 2016 but no concede for a month; gop special session " legis coup; cts ~ gerry;

mcnerney john lewis boycott inaguag b/c djt not legit; do not escalate like chavistas, but use all instit power; build big pro democratic coalition; chile eg  gop need to be refounded;

~ triangulation eg on immigration?

polici ~ inequality can polarze or not; means testing SS [cf last book warn?]

Acknowledgments p. 233

Endnotes p. 235

Index p. 301

---

Summary: Donald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang--in a revolution or military coup--but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die--and how ours can be saved. --

Excerpts

more 15 pp:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OzpfVGFW7okwNPg8-ZIug-7OY4XPgR-V0N8ue7-0n9g/edit?usp=sharing

==

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/22/579670528/how-democracies-die-authors-say-trump-is-a-symptom-of-deeper-problems

...

LEVISKY: The rules themselves, particularly in a very simple, short Constitution like that of the United States, can never get a - can never fully guide behavior. And so our behavior needs to be guided by informal rules, by norms. And we focus on two of them in particular - what we call mutual toleration,which is really, really fundamental in any democracy, which is simply that among the major parties, there's an acceptance that their rivals are legitimate, that we may disagree with the other side. We may really dislike the other side. But at the end of the day, we recognize publicly - and we tell this to our followers - that the other side is equally patriotic, and that it can govern legitimately. That's one.

The other one is what we call forbearance, which is restraint in the exercise of power. And that's a little bit counterintuitive. We don't usually think about forbearance in politics, but it's absolutely central. Think about what the president can do under the Constitution. The president can pardon anybody he wants at any time. The president can pack the Supreme Court. If the president has a majority in Congress - which many presidents do - and the president doesn't like the makeup of the Supreme Court, he could pass a law expanding the court to 11 or 13 and fill with allies - again, he needs a legislative majority - but can do it. FDR tried.

==

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-how-democracies-die-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt-viking

How did a billionaire property tycoon with no political experience become president of the United States? How did Britain vote to leave the European Union?

Liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have been struggling to answer those questions since 2016. Overwhelmingly, their interpretations have focused on the motivation of the electorate. Broadsheet feature-writers have dispatched themselves, as if on some purgatorial safari, to Nuneaton and to West Virginia, to ask representatives of the “left behind” how they could have voted in ways that appear to flout their economic interests.

This book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two professors of government at Harvard University, suggests that the commentators have all been looking in the wrong place. They argue convincingly that, to understand why demagogues succeed, we should look not to public opinion but to the actions of party elites.

In the all-engrossing present tense of Twitter and rolling news, we have lost historical perspective. We know that we have seen the likes of Donald Trump before – in Nuremberg footage, for example – but we don’t know if he’s as bad as that, and we don’t know how bad things are likely to get. We don’t quite know how we got here, and we certainly can’t see a way out.

This book is not a systematic historical survey: it skips from one potted account to the next to illustrate its argument: from Benito Mussolini’s staged “March on Rome” to Alberto Fujimori’s initially reluctant rise to power in Peru; from democracy’s death spiral in Salvador Allende’s Chile to Vladimir Putin’s postmodern post-democracy. The anecdotes, however, are exceptionally well recounted, and read rather thrillingly as familiar stories told from a counter-intuitive viewpoint.

The precedents chosen are both salutary and concerning. Building on the work of the German political scientist Juan Linz, the authors have developed a litmus test to identify authoritarians in the making: the refusal to recognise opponents as legitimate; the encouragement of violence; attempts to restrict media liberty and so on. Trump ticks all the boxes, but so far he has only probed rather than barged through the containing boundaries of American democracy.

History reveals both continuity and change. Levitsky and Ziblatt note that aspiring despots have always knocked at the doors of power. But since the early 20th century, they have gained office not by means of violent coups, but because party insiders have handed them the keys. Leaders who have found themselves weakened or in political deadlock have invited in popular outsiders, confident that they will be able to control them.

This gamble backfired most notoriously in the wake of the collapsed government in 1930s Germany, when a cabal of conservatives chose Adolf Hitler as chancellor: the nobleman Franz von Papen dismissed concerns by insisting, “Within two months, we will have pushed [him] so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.” The rest, of course, is history; but we have forgotten history’s patterns. David Cameron thought that he was containing the Eurosceptics in his Conservative Party by holding a referendum, but right-wing Brexiteers have taken over mainstream politics in Britain.

Democracies die when elected politicians renounce their role as gatekeepers. In a post-deferential, anti-political age, this process is accelerating. Candidates were once selected by party grandees behind closed doors, but the shift towards open primaries is allowing extremists on to the ballot.

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s defence of smoke-filled rooms is very unfashionable, as is their very notion of democracy. For them, democracy does not mean rule by the people; it means constitutional checks and balances. This goes against the grain of much cutting-edge thinking on both left and right: the opening-up of parties to a wider pool of candidates, the privileging of the grass roots, and the introduction of direct, participatory and deliberative forms of democracy. Left-wing protesters have taken to chanting, “This is what democracy looks like.”

These activists have a point. Representative democracy was being dismissed as obsolete well before the rise of Ukip and Trump. Politicians are increasingly professionalised, and hail from a narrow, entitled demographic. The system has been captured by financial and corporate interests. The powerful are not held to account. But Levitsky and Ziblatt’s approach unlocks the paralysis that has gripped democracy in the West. It suggests that politicians should resist siren calls to give up their status. It reminds us that there is a difference between the system itself and its relatively recent corruption. And it reveals, by implication, that liberals who style themselves as opponents of demagoguery actually reinforce, through their cries of mea culpa, the dangerous populist opposition between “real” voters and “out of touch” elites.

We are unable to effectively counter the threat to democracy posed by Brexiteers and Trump, because insurgents, as Levitsky and Ziblatt illustrate, have long portrayed themselves as advocates of “true” democracy, and have employed false appeals to “common people” to conceal their authoritarian ambitions. Augusto Pinochet, Juan Perón, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Viktor Orbán have all claimed to represent “the people” against a corrupt political establishment. The segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace declared in the 1960s: “There is one thing more powerful than the Constitution…That’s the will of the people…the people can abolish a Constitution if they want to.” Yet today, in the West, such posturing is often taken at face value: the “will of the people” is a phrase routinely used to describe the marginal result of the UK’s referendum on EU membership, and to silence elected MPs. Trump and Nigel Farage “resonate”, apparently, with “ordinary people”. Like it or not, we are told, Brexit is the result of working-class voters finally “having their say”. Terrified of being branded “experts”, we disown our capacity to take the long view.

Just as “democracy” is used to undermine democracy with the permission of elected representatives, the authors describe how modern despots tend to dismantle democracy from the inside, entirely within the law. A straightforward attack on democracy would raise the hackles of democracy’s defenders. This more subtle approach is concealed by Western complacency and secured by public consent.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are not convinced by American exceptionalism, the belief that the country’s Constitution provides a bulwark against autocrats. They demonstrate that it is actually unwritten rules and norms of behaviour that have – until recently – protected American democracy. Chief among these are “mutual tolerance” – treating political opponents as rivals, not enemies – and “institutional forbearance”: technically, the Constitution permits the use of executive orders, vetoes and filibustering, but historically these have been deployed sparingly, because they tend to incite revenge. These precious yet intangible heuristics are now being jettisoned by “anti-system” politicians, and they are quickly lost from institutional memory: witness Steve Bannon’s proposed “dismantling of the administrative state” or Jacob Rees-Mogg’s attacks on the Civil Service. We are left with a divisive, gloves-off political culture; an unseemly race to the bottom.

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposed solutions are directed primarily – and understandably – at the US. They advocate coalition-building to defend against destructive outsiders, pointing to the uplifting example of the 2016 elections in Austria, where Conservatives voted for the Green Party candidate to stop a far-right extremist becoming president. The authors advise the Democrats to address economic inequality and the racial polarisation of the electorate; and they call for the rebuilding of the Republican Party establishment, which has been distorted and hollowed out by external money and an unhealthy relationship with social media. The GOP in particular has in recent years “behaved like an antisystem party”.

But in an age when public antibodies are activated against the “political class”, and parliamentary democracy no longer seems convinced of its right to exist, it will be a challenge to envisage a defence of the system that doesn’t feel out of date.

Eliane Glaser is senior lecturer in English and creative writing at Bath Spa University and author of Anti-Politics: On the Demonization of Ideology, Authority and the State, to be published next month.

How Democracies Die: What History Reveals about Our Future

By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Viking, 320pp, £16.99

ISBN 9780241317983

Published 25 January 2018

==

https://www.alternet.org/what-we-really-have-worry-about-isnt-trump?src=newsletter1091067

The country is divided into two hostile camps, a division as much geographic as ideological.

On one side are the big cities, the centers of progressive politics and home to social movements for women, for gay people, for minorities, and to an unprecedented wave of immigrants. Many of the immigrants look and dress very differently from residents of longer standing, marking them as followers of a different religious faith. Many are refugees from an unprecedented wave of war and civil war. Many have entered the country illegally.

Then there are the rural areas. These have always been conservative, but now economic hard times and a pervasive feeling of humiliation are driving their conservatism to a new level of anger. People in rural areas attribute much of this humiliation to urban liberals who seem to care more about refugees and minorities than they do about their country cousins. The country people are statistically much more likely to have served in the armed forces and they feel that their patriotism contrasts with the deracinated, increasingly foreign cities. Religious faith, especially evangelical Christian faith, is central to life in the country. Rural people often see the cities as nothing but cesspits of every conceivable kind of vice.

Into this volatile mixture comes a politician who thrives on the exploitation of anger. He tells the suffering rural people that those urban elites, the religious minorities, and much of the rest of the world are responsible for their troubles. He is willing to say things that no other politicians would dare to utter. The rural people respond by giving their votes overwhelmingly to him. Soon the strange new politician is in power.

But this is not the United States in 2018. It is Germany in the early 1930s.

Germany’s rural areas had been hit above all by major shifts in the global economy: the opening up of farmland in the new world had caused grain prices to fall dramatically. German farmers struggled to compete, and many went bankrupt. In the First World War the German army had drawn more recruits from rural than from urban areas, because city people were likely to have skills that made it essential for them to remain at home. This meant far more farm boys than factory hands had died in combat. The war ended not only in defeat but also with a democratic revolution that replaced the authoritarian regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II. With democracy, new people moved into positions of power. Some of them were working class leaders who would never have gotten near power before, like the first postwar president Friedrich Ebert, a former saddle maker. Some, like the foreign minister Walter Rathenau, were Jewish. Rathenau was murdered by right-wing extremists in 1922.

We are familiar with the images of Berlin in the “golden twenties” – the sexual experimentation and the artistic creativity. Germany was home to the world’s largest gay rights movement, and it had an active feminist movement that succeeded in winning the vote for German women. But Germany’s cities, Berlin above all, were also the home to a new wave of immigrants. Many of them were Jews fleeing revolution and civil war in Eastern Europe. Some Germans reacted to their presence with virulent anti-Semitism. Germany had a new and winding border with Poland, and it lacked the military and police resources to control it. The border, like the immigrants who crossed it, became a bitter political issue. In desperation, some local governments outsourced border security to private militias, including the infamous Nazi Stormtroopers.

Rural German communities were above all permeated by Christian faith and practice, which historically had tended to be nationalist and prone to anti-Semitism. It was in Protestant rural areas in Germany’s north and east that Hitler and his party, once a fringe movement, began to achieve electoral breakthroughs in the late 1920s. By 1932 they were winning the overwhelming share of the vote in these regions. By contrast the Nazis underperformed electorally in cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt.

How worried should we be about these striking similarities and the near future they suggest? History never exactly repeats itself, but as Mark Twain is said to have observed, sometimes it rhymes. Donald Trump is far from being Adolf Hitler 2.0, but he has succeeded by exploiting similar grievances in a similar way. And just like the original, his policies will do nothing to allay the causes of his supporters’ anger, just as Hitler’s dismantling of the rule of law, military buildup, and ultimately war and genocide did not solve the problems of the rural German population.

The real danger may come when a more ruthless and competent politician than Trump realizes he or she can succeed by playing on the same themes.

Benjamin Carter Hett, a professor of history at the City University of New York, is the author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic.

==

https://www.c-span.org/video/?441518-1/enlightenment-now

FEBRUARY 27, 2018

Enlightenment Now

Experimental cognitive scientist and bestselling author Steven Pinker explored the thought processes behind extremism and authoritarianism.

==

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/could-donald-trump-trigger-global-democratic-recession

this week, during a freewheeling speech to Republican donors at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump cracked the following joke about Chinese leader Xi Jinping: "He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday."

If he was doing his best Don Rickles impression, only the most febrile members of his base seemed amused. Since Trump abruptly removed James Comey as FBI director last May, the United States has been slowly lurching toward a constitutional crisis. In January, we learned the president had ordered the firing of special prosecutor Robert Mueller last June, only to back off after White House attorney Don McGahn threatened to resign. (A New York Times reportpublished Wednesday revealed that Trump has contacted several key witnesses in the collusion probe, directly disobeying his legal counsel). The following month, Trump lobbied the Justice Department to open investigations of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Meanwhile, his administration continues to stack the courts at a breakneck pace, trampling norms and procedures to accelerate the appointment of right-wing judges in a host of blue and purple states.

For Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die,these are but two telltale signs of creeping authoritarianism. While violent coups have largely become a thing of the past, elected officials can dismantle a republic just as effectively as a military junta. Examples abound, from Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Hungary) to Latin America (Venezuela and Nicaragua) and Asia (Turkey, the Philippines and Singapore). As he writes in the book's introduction, "Democracy's erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible."

Nearly a week before the far-right Lega Nord made huge gains in the Italian elections, Levitsky spoke with AlterNet over the phone about Trump's hypothetical impeachment and the danger he poses to the global democratic order. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Jacob Sugarman: Since your book published, Donald Trump has effectively bullied Andrew McCabe and Rachel Brand into resigning from the FBI and the Justice Department respectively. Do you believe the guardrails of American democracy are still holding, or have they begun to buckle even in the past month?

Steven Levitsky: I think they're still fundamentally holding for now. But there's no question that the Trump administration has done what virtually every elected autocrat we've studied anywhere in the world has before him, which is go after the legal system, law enforcement and the courts in an effort to control the referees. That accomplishes two things: It creates a shield to protect the government from investigation and prosecution, and ultimately, it can be used as a weapon.

You can use the legal system to "legally" go after your rivals, and both Trump and the Justice Department have made noise about doing just that. This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. I'd say I'm more worried now than I was when we first wrote How Democracies Die. It once appeared that there was at least a handful of Republican senators who were willing to draw a red line, particularly in terms of protecting the FBI, law enforcement agencies and the Mueller investigation. That seems less likely now.

JS: It feels like every week there's an explosive new development in the collusion probe. Democrats are unlikely to take back the Senate, but if they were to recapture the House, is it in the interests of the party and the country for them to pursue impeachment? Do you believe a push has the potential to backfire?

SL: Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism and one of the few tools that we have to remove presidents who have committed a crime or are otherwise unfit for office. There's at least some reason to believe that Trump meets one or both criteria, so if the Mueller investigation were to uncover serious wrongdoing, it has to be considered. In the book, we look at two separate crises of executive overreach: FDR's court-packing scheme and Nixon's gross abuse of power. In both instances, a bipartisan consensus was what contained both presidents.

But things are so polarized now, and the Republicans have become so Trumpified, that there may not be enough votes even if Mueller uncovers egregious criminal activity. That would put us in uncharted territory, where impeachment becomes a truly double-edged sword. If Republicans actively oppose it, if it's viewed as a coup by the Fox News wing of the Republican Party, which is to say the majority, then it could tear the country apart. It might be the right thing politically for Democrats, and the probe may well demand it, but it would further weaken our norms of mutual toleration and forbearance. The next Democratic president would have to watch their back.

JS: Your book does an excellent job of explaining why norms are so essential to a functioning government, but can a rigid adherence to them pose a danger to democracy itself? I'm thinking specifically of Obama's refusal to pursue the perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis, as well as certain members of the Bush administration for their crimes in Iraq. Doesn't that generate an apathy that a demagogue like Trump can exploit?

SL: It almost certainly can, and there's really no easy way out of that dilemma. We're definitely not advocating an unthinking preservation of all norms. Societies evolve, and politics change all the time. But I think I was sympathetic to Obama's predicament, even if a lot of my progressive friends were not. There is a real cost to pushing for, or even permitting, the prosecution of your major political rivals. It's led to the failure of any number of democracies in Latin America.

Look at what's happening in Brazil right now. I wouldn't go as far as to call it a coup, but the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff was highly politicized. The Democratic Labour Party has every right to be angry about it, and now Lula may be barred from running for president. The corruption charges against him are likely legitimate, but the right has created an environment in which the PT no longer trusts the political establishment.

SL: I want to be clear that the decline in power and prestige of the United States and the European Union, along with the rise and increasing self-confidence of Russia and China, clearly do not bode well for democracy across the world. The horizon is darker than it was 20 years ago. The challenges for new democracies in central Europe, in Africa, in Latin America are much greater than they once were, so there is real reason for concern.JS: I'm glad you brought up Brazil, because democracy would appear to be in retreat across the globe. I was a little surprised to see that your book largely rejects this narrative.

But the number of democracies in the world is the same as it was 10 years ago. The notion that we're in a global democratic crisis simply isn't true. It may well happen in the next five years, but it hasn't happened yet.

JS: Given the scope of America's wealth and influence, does Trump pose an existential threat to global democracy?

SL: Because the United States has completely abandoned even the pretense of promoting democracy abroad, Trump's presidency could end up expediting a democratic recession, yes. We're already seeing some signs of it. Duterte in the Philippines faces no external pressure, despite massive human rights violation, while Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández recently held an election whose results have been widely disputed. Autocrats are learning that they can get away with more than they have in a decade.

JS: What kind of threat does Trump pose to American democracy? Do you see a scenario in which the United States elects a blood-and-soil fascist?

SL: Trump may ultimately lead us into a devastating war, but I think we're actually fortunate that he doesn't have a political project. Or if he does, he doesn't have the discipline, the intelligence or the attention span to build something really destructive. If there's another major terrorist attack, I think all bets are off, but if we can get through the next three years crisis-free, I'd bet our democratic institutions muddle through.

Trump's attacks on the press and the integrity of our elections can't be minimized, but the lasting damage of his presidency will likely be his explicit appeal to white nationalism. Once you let that genie out of the bottle, it's almost impossible to put it back inside. As long as the GOP is an exclusively white Christian party in a society as diverse as the United States in 2018 and 2020, it will remain vulnerable to extremism and authoritarianism. We saw it in South Carolina during Reconstruction: if Republicans, in this case, fear becoming a permanent minority, they could try to hold onto power by any means necessary.

JS: Where do you think we go from here? The people who voted for Donald Trump obviously aren't going away, so how do we rebuild our democratic institutions? And what can the Democrats do as an opposition party?

SL: If I had the answers to those questions, I would be in a much more powerful position than I am today. The answer is, we really don't know. But if our republic is truly under threat, which none of us thought possible just a few years ago, then normal politics has to be set aside and we need to build much broader coalitions. This is not a concrete formula, of course, but a way of thinking—one we want to encourage because it's been a very long time since progressives found partners outside their traditional ideological camp. Maybe that includes some evangelicals or members of the private sector, as distasteful as the idea might sound. Once we successfully defend our democracy, we can go back to fighting for economic and social justice.

As for the Democrats, they're not the only center-left coalition to set aside economic redistribution over the past 25 years. Basically everybody has, but that's the problem, and there's no quick fix. Taking up the cause of inequality is probably their best hope right now of combating this wave of right-wing populism we're facing.

Jacob Sugarman is a managing editor at AlterNet.

==

pro pub 2/18

...he organization, which celebrates Hitler and Charles Manson, has been tied to four other murders and an elaborate bomb plot over the past eight months. Experts who study right-wing extremist movements believe Atomwaffen’s commitment to violence has made it one of the more dangerous groups to emerge from the new wave of white supremacists.

Two of the three people who described Woodward’s affiliations are friends of his; the other is a former member of Atomwaffen Division.

ProPublica’s revelations about Woodward’s background add a new element to a murder case that has attracted considerable local and national news coverage. But they also raise fresh concerns about groups like Atomwaffen Division, shadowy outfits of uncertain size that appear capable of genuine harm.

Woodward joined the organization in early 2016 and later traveled to Texas to attend Atomwaffen meetings and a three-day training camp, which involved instruction in firearms, hand-to-hand combat, camping and survival skills, the former member said. ProPublica has obtained photographs of Woodward at an outdoor Atomwaffen meeting in the scrubby Texas countryside. One of the photos depicts Woodward and other members making straight-armed Nazi salutes while wearing skull masks. In other pictures, Woodward is unmasked and easily identifiable.

The young man is proficient with both handguns and assault rifles, according to one person who participated in the Texas training and watched him shoot. That person also said that Woodward helped organize a number of Atomwaffen members in California.

Social media posts and chat logs shared by Woodward’s friends show that he openly described himself as a “National Socialist” or Nazi. He “was as anti-Semitic as you can get,” according to one acquaintance.

ProPublica contacted Orange County prosecutors regarding Woodward’s alleged neo-Nazi activities. Michelle Van Der Linden, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office, said she couldn’t comment directly on the case, but said the investigation is ongoing, with detectives exploring all possible leads.

Woodward told police Bernstein had tried to kiss him while they were in the park, according to a sealed affidavit obtained by the Orange County Register.

Woodward’s defense lawyer, Edward Munoz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Wednesday, Bernstein’s parents spoke to reporters about the loss of their son, but said they were not interested in talking about any information they had on the investigation of his death.

“I was concerned sending him out into the big world,” she said. “But at some point you have to let go and they leave the nest and fly. I couldn’t protect him from everything.”The Los Angeles Times quoted his mother, Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, as saying she had worried during her son’s life that he might be a target -- because he was small, and Jewish, and gay.

Atomwaffen started in 2015 and is estimated to have about 80 members scattered around the country in small cells; the former member said the group’s ranks have grown since the lethal and chaotic “Unite the Right” rally last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia.

While many of the new white extremist groups have consciously avoided using Nazi imagery, Atomwaffen has done the opposite. The name can mean “Atomic Weapons” in German, and the organization embraces Third Reich iconography, including swastikas, the Totenkopf, or death’s head insignia, and SS lightning bolts. The group frequently produces YouTube videos featuring masked Atomwaffen members hiking through the backcountry and firing weapons. They’ve also filmed themselves burning the U.S. Constitution and setting fire to the American flag at an Atomwaffen “Doomsday Hatecamp.”

Atomwaffen’s biggest inspiration seems to be James Mason, a long-time fascist who belonged to the American Nazi Partyand later, during the 1970s, joined a more militant offshoot. During the 1980s, Mason published a newsletter called SIEGE, in which he eschewed political activism in favor of creating a new fascist regime through murder, small “lone wolf” terror attacks, and all-out war against the government. Mason also struck up a friendship with the late Charles Manson, who has become another hero for Atomwaffen.

The organization first gained a measure of national attention in May of last year, when 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, one of Atomwaffen’s founding members, was charged in state court in Tampa, Florida, with murdering two of his roommates, Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22. Both victims were Atomwaffen loyalists.

The murders allegedly occurred after Arthurs traded Nazism for radical Islam. When police took Arthurs into custody, according to news accounts based on police reports, he claimed he had shot his former comrades because they had taunted him about his Muslim faith and plotted violent attacks to further their fascist agenda. Arthurs told investigators he killed Onsechuk and Himmelman “because they want to build a Fourth Reich.”

While Arthurs initially confessed to the killings, he has pleaded not guilty and the case is ongoing. In early January, a judge ordered a psychiatrist to determine whether Arthurs is mentally competent to stand trial.

When law enforcement searched the apartment in Tampa, Florida, where Arthurs and the others lived, they found firearms, a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, rifles, ammunition, and a cooler full of a highly volatile explosive called HMTD. Investigators also discovered radioactive material in the home.

The bomb-making material belonged to a fourth roommate, Atomwaffen leader Brandon Russell, a Florida National Guardsman. Arthurs told authorities that Russell had been planning to blow up a nuclear power plant near Miami. Earlier this month Russell pleaded guilty in federal district court in Tampa to illegal possession of explosives and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Atomwaffen surfaced again in connection with a double homicide in Reston, Virginia, in December 2017. A 17-year-old neo-Nazi allegedly shot to death his girlfriend’s parents, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker and Scott Fricker, who had urged their daughter to break up with him. The accused, who shot himself as well but survived and remains hospitalized, was charged as a juvenile in state court in Virginia with two counts of homicide.

The 17-year-old was a big fan of Atomwaffen and James Mason, according to reporting by the Huffington Post, which examined his social media trail.

The former Atomwaffen member in contact with ProPublica said that the teen was more than a fan: He was in direct communication with the group.

“Their rhetoric is some of the most extreme we have seen,” said Joanna Mendelson, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The group, she said, views itself as the radical vanguard of the white supremacist movement, the frontline soldiers of an imminent race war.

Ali Winston is a reporting fellow with the Investigative Fund

==

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-11-2017/

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-30-2017/

tribally related Americans" reach out to

Review: James Q. Whitman's "Hitler's American Model"

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HITLER'S AMERICAN MODEL by James Q. Whitman | Kirkus Reviews

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==

// djt, demonization of press

http://www.alternet.org/activism/media-busy-creating-left-wing-threat-balance-out-awful-racist-right-wing-hordes-who

...Some of us have seen this movie before.  In my generation, when I was a teenage member of MSU’s SDS in the late 1960s, I remember the guy who was always yelling, “Kill the pigs,” and encouraging us to burn down the ROTC building on campus.  In later years, I heard from old SDS colleagues that when they sued the police, they learned that the outspoken guy was a police officer and his friends were informants.

For my dad’s generation, the right-wing takeover of a protest movement happened in Germany generations ago, so most Americans don’t even recognize Marinus van der Lubbe’s name.

But the Germans remember well that fateful day eighty-four years ago - February 27, 1933.  And many of them are looking at the confrontations in our streets and worrying.

It started when the government, struggling with questions of its own legitimacy and the instability of its leader, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. Historians are still debating whether the “terrorist” was a mentally incompetent young man maneuvered into place to take the fall for the crime, or was an actual communist ideologue (of limited intellectual means and probably schizophrenic; that seems to be one thing most agree on).

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the people claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.

He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.

His coarse use of language - reflecting his background of hanging out with disreputable sorts - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media.

He desperately wanted to be appreciated and loved by the “old money” crowd, but he also hated them because they had never accepted him and, deep down inside, he knew they never would.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike, and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," Hitler proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out German Parliament building, surrounded by national media.

"This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an “all-out war on terrorism” and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

And, he said, their fellow travelers – “communists” like the man who’d set the Reichstag on fire – needed to be tracked down and utterly destroyed.

Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianburg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.

Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants and peek around without homeowners know it, if the cases involved terrorism.

To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Just like with America’s recent PATRIOT Act, the first version of which had sunset provisions, legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader who was so newsworthy.

Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was constantly talking up the threat of these “other people” among the German people, while armed gangs terrorized minorities and smashed windows in Jewish-owned businesses.)

Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage.

He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his white countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will."

As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.

Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't put Germany First was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of the United Kingdom.

His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was supported by the power brokers of the most fervent of Germany’s Christian sects. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.

Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly the troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals."

He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the Homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader. He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the Homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.

His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at our disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection, as his central security office began advertising a “See Something, Say Something” program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors.

Those denounced often included opposition politicians and celebrities who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime. He began a campaign to discredit the press – he called them the Lugenpresse, or “Lying Press” (“fake news” in today’s vernacular). The phrase was repeated endlessly until all the free press was shut down in 1934. By 1935, all the radio stations and newspapers were owned by wealthy, hard-right friends of his regime.

To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the “leftist terrorists” lurking within the Homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas.

He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by liberals or Jews. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.

But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, and away from questions of his illegitimate rise to power.

To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will.

In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself.

The majority – the “silent majority” – of good Germans hated the leftists, Hitler and his friends in the right-wing press repeatedly told the people.

Those questioning him were labeled “communists,” "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the police and army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.

He spoke openly of his “love” for police and the military, and they, in turn, embraced him with fervor, redoubling the violence they wrought against peaceful protestors.

Hitler’s rise to power was largely on the backs of the labor and communist movements.  They were his “enemies” first and foremost (although anti-Semitism had been part of his shtick from the beginning: his main attack was that the labor and communist movements were filled with Jews).  And he largely destroyed them when he successfully sold the German people on the idea that “the left” were responsible for burning down the Parliament building, the 9/11 event of that day.

There’s little doubt in my mind – having lived through the era of COINTELPRO and the PATRIOT Act – that somewhere out there is a person who’s planning to commit an act of terrorism.  It may be a dedicated but deluded left-winger, or, more likely, it’s a right-winger hoping to stir things up by pretending to be a left-winger. And Trump and his friendly “news” outlets are ready to use it.

Perhaps apocryphally, Mark Twain once noted that, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

There’s no shortage of examples of that rhyme, and given all the “mainstream” press now being thrown at the Antifa movement, it’s a sure thing that they’re going to be the Administration’s and the media’s next big boogeyman.

Somewhere out there is the next Marinus van der Lubbe, and Trump and his press are ready.

Look out.

---

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/26/joshua_green_on_how_steve_bannon

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Joshua Green, senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. I want to turn to a speech that Steve Bannon delivered via Skype to a conference held inside the Vatican in 2014.

STEPHEN BANNON: I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis. And it’s really the organizing principle of how we’ve built Breitbart News to really be a platform to bring news and information to people throughout the world, principally in the West, but we’re expanding internationally, to let people understand the depths of this crisis. And it is a crisis of—both of capitalism, but really of the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West and our beliefs. We are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing almost far quicker than governments can handle it.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Steve Bannon, delivering a Skype address to a Vatican conference in 2014. Joshua Green, talk about the religion that informs Steve Bannon’s politics.

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, so, we just talked about kind of the newspaper bio of Steve Bannon and the blue-collar background. But the most interesting line of research for this book is Bannon’s religious and intellectual biography. And this is a story that hasn’t been told, that I go into some detail in in the book.

But in the course of my reporting, I asked Steve Bannon—I said, "You know, when you were at that Vatican conference"—and this wasn’t just a Vatican conference, this was a group of far-far-right conservative Traditionalist Catholics. Bannon name-checked a man named Julius Evola, who was an Italian intellectual and Benito Mussolini’s fascist ideologist at the beginning of World War II. And I said, "Steve, if you’re not an anti-Semite and a Nazi and a white supremacist, as you’re often charged with being, but you say you’re not, why is it that you are familiar with people like Evola?" And he said, "Oh, you know, when I developed my ideas about nationalism, I went back and was looking for an intellectual edifice to kind of inform these ideas. And to find nationalist thinkers, you really have to go back to the 1930s and the 1940s, when those ideas were ascendant. But the real guy who influenced me," Bannon told me, "was an man named René Guénon, who was Evola’s intellectual godfather."

Guénon has a fascinating biography. He was born in France in the late 19th century to a Roman Catholic family, practiced occultism, Freemasonry, and later converted to Sufi Islam and observed the Sharia, which is a very unusual guru, it seemed to me, for a guy like Steve Bannon, who is so virulently Islamophobic. But Guénon was the founder of a religion, a kind of religious philosophy, known as primordial Traditionalism. That’s capital-T Traditionalism. And primordial Traditionalism holds that there is common spiritual truths, unifying spiritual truths, at the heart of ancient religions, like the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, medieval Catholicism, even paganism. And these are original spiritual truths that were revealed to mankind in the earliest ages of the world but had been lost in the West by the rise of secular modernity.

So, Bannon, who was raised in a very traditional Catholic family, who went to a right-wing Catholic military high school and has been steeped in this right-wing, Western sieve curriculum, believes, as Guénon does, that we are entering a dark age, that the rise of the Enlightenment in the 1500s has led us toward apocalypse, and that if he can’t prop up traditional values and do what Guénon had hoped to do, which was to, quote, "restore to the West a traditional civilization," then mankind is going to be destroyed. And that is his animating belief.

AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to turn to Julius Evola, in his own words, the monarchist and racial theorist who struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini. His ideas became the basis of fascist racial theory. This is Julius Evola speaking with a French filmmaker in 1971 about what he considered the positive aspects of fascism and, in particular, national socialism, Nazism.

JULIUS EVOLA: [translated] There are positive and valuable aspects. Those which I could value are the reconstruction of the authority of the state and the idea of overcoming class conflict toward a hierarchical and corporative formation, to some extent, of a military and disciplined style within the nation, in addition to some of their anti-bourgeois proposals. To me, all of that is positive.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Julius Evola, one of the people Steve Bannon—

JOSHUA GREEN: I’ve never seen that clip. So, the unifying thread here is that Evola also looked to Guénon for inspiration. Guénon was the godfather of this capital-T Traditionalist movement. Now, Guénon believed that the way to spiritual transcendence was to basically indoctrinate small groups of important people all over the world, what we would today call influencers. And he was very—he believed that if you could—if you could push spiritual change, then political change would follow.

Evola is the black sheep of the Traditionalist family and had a different view. He said, "No, we can’t just sit back and try and change people’s spirituality. We need to go out and change society." So Evola went out and struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini to try and exert power in the Italian government, which he had. He was, as you said, the chief racial theorist for Mussolini. They had a falling out, and Evola later moved on to Hitler in Nazi Germany.

What all three of these men have, though, in common is the belief in—at the heart of Guénon’s religion was the belief in the Hindu concept of cyclical time, the idea that the world passes through set stages. And Evola believed, as Bannon does, as Guénon does, that we are in what the Hindus call the Kali Yuga, a 6,000-year-long dark age in which man’s connection to God and the transcendent is wholly forgotten. So, Evola brought these ideas to interwar Europe, to Italy, and tried to change society that way to fight back against it. Bannon has come to this through a kind of populist, hard-right politics, where, through Breitbart and some of these affiliated organizations, he’s tried to not only take over American politics, but look at what he’s doing in places like the European Union. He’s trying to destroy what he would call these globalist edifices, which he believes is a manifestation of the rise of modernity and something that needs to be destroyed to pull us back to a pre-Enlightenment era.

==

http://www.alternet.org/lgbtq/how-nazis-destroyed-first-gay-rights-movement

==

AN

So many of us were wrong, myself included, about Donald Trump. We saw in the jut-jawed, brow-furrowed Mussolini-like posturing, in the blatant narcissism, in the reckless disregard for truth, the anger and incitement to hatred, the declamations that he would fix everything single-handedly on Day One of his presidency, his disdain for democracy and hints that he would lock up his opponents — we saw in all of these things incipient fascism.

After the inauguration, I began reading Victor Klemperer’s chilling diaries on the rise of Nazism, I Will Bear Witness, and Sebastian Haffner’s memoir of the early days of Hitler, Defying Hitler. The analogies were all too close. Others on these pages have made similar observations. We were on the verge of something unprecedented, something horrifying. We were on the verge of authoritarian government headed by an ignoramus and possible psychopath. We were on the verge of the end of democracy.

==

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-anti-fascist-2017-story.html

...The “alt-right” — a loose-knit movement of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and misogynists — splintered after footage went viral showing Spencer receiving Nazi salutes at a conference for white nationalists shortly after Trump’s election in November. In February, the British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos lost his speaking engagement at CPAC and a book deal after video emerged showing him apparently promoting pedophilia.

In both cases, facts, not fists or firebombs, arguably dealt the biggest setbacks, prompting people and institutions to distance themselves from Yiannopoulos and Spencer (who was asked to leave CPAC shortly after arriving). Jenkins wants to bring that type of damaging information to light, and so he shows up at right-wing events to photograph and document notable attendees — half activist, half reporter.

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-maintaining-his-own-scary-private-police-force-alarming-security-experts

==

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/can-american-fascism-be-stopped

It is hard to contemplate the new administration without experiencing alarm bordering on despair: Alarm about the risks of war, the fate of constitutional democracy, the devastation of a century of social progress. Trump’s populism was a total fraud. Every single Trump appointment has come from the pool of far-right conservatives, crackpots, and billionaire kleptocrats. More alarming still is the man himself—his vanity, impulsivity, and willful ignorance, combined with an intuitive genius as a demagogue. A petulant fifth-grader with nuclear weapons will now control the awesome power of the U.S. government.

One has to nourish the hope that Trump can yet be contained. Above all, that will take passionate and strategic engagement, not just to resist but to win, to discredit him and get him out of office while this is still a democracy. We can feel sick at heart—we would be fools not to—but despair is not an option.

We need to insist that the era we are entering is not normal, not to be normalized. Just about everything in our daily routines conspires against that imperative. Ordinary life goes on. Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. It has the menacing, surreal feel of the 1930s. We are caught somewhere between the weary fatalism of T.S. Eliot’s hollow men and W.H. Auden’s haunting poem “September 1, 1939,” the day World War II began:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

….

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie

I. How Did This Happen?

The Sunday before the election, a dear friend was rushed into emergency surgery. She survived and fully recovered, but it was a very close call. On the following Thursday, she was aroused from a medically induced coma. Like Rip van Winkle, she awoke to a revolution. Among her first words were, “Did we just have a coup d’état?”

Yes, my dear, we did. The coup had three ingredients: the flipping of an American election by Vladimir Putin; the suppression of hundreds of thousands of would-be voters; and the intervention of FBI Director James Comey to discredit an active presidential candidate, not once but twice. We have a true constitutional crisis, both in the character of the man who was elected and the fraudulent election. The new president has no legitimacy, but there is no process to dislodge him.

Suppose the situation had been reversed? Suppose Hillary Clinton had narrowly won the Electoral College while Donald Trump had won the popular vote by three million? What would Trump have said about a stolen election? Would he have urged his supporters to take to the streets? Would Congress have immediately moved to schedule more hearings on Clinton’s emails, and greeted her inauguration with a bill of impeachment? Paradoxically, there is the appearance of less of a legitimacy crisis with Trump having won rather than having lost.

History is a convergence of deep forces and random events, lucky or unlucky. The ascension of Donald Trump needs to be understood as both. If you limit your analysis to the election itself, you might reassure yourself that 2016 was a fluke—a perfect storm of bad breaks: email hell; meddling by both Russian and U.S. police agencies; Trump as a stunningly talented demagogue; a blemished establishment figure as Democratic nominee; allowing a bizarre billionaire to pose as faux-populist avenger. But it was also the culmination of longer-term trends that weakened democracy and destroyed the New Deal social contract.

For Trump to win, the media had to play into his hands. The press did not know what to do with a candidate who dwelled in his own parallel factual universe. The quest for balance gave equal play to Clinton’s relatively minor sins and Trump’s grotesqueries.

The cable channels covered Trump both as an amusing freak and as a conventional presidential contender. Both roles served his purposes. Once a Trump story became the outrage of the week, it could be discarded as yesterday’s news. Revelations that would have sunk an ordinary candidate were dispatched relatively early, never to be heard again. Did Trump University swindle thousands of students? Did Trump cheat his contractors? Grope women? Call Mexicans rapists? Propose a religious test for immigrants and refugees? Mock Muslim Gold Star parents? Did Trump really say that maybe the “Second Amendment people” could take care of Hillary? Yeah, yeah, we know all that. Old story.

What neither the media nor the Clinton campaign quite grasped was that disaffection ran so deep in much of America that the more outrageous Trump was, the more his supporters loved it. Was his language coarse? Anyone who watches TV or goes to the movies has heard worse. He mowed down the Republican field by breaking all the rules; well, maybe America needs that sort of strongman. He insulted the entire establishment, just as millions of ordinary people felt insulted by elites who talked down to them, and they loved that Trump was a bully because they could believe he was bullying on their behalf.

And once voters believed that, they were already in Trump’s post-fact world. Strategic framing theory has demonstrated through brain experiments that once you have accepted the framing of a proposition, evidence doesn’t matter.Did Trump stiff the hard-working contractors on his hotel projects? Maybe they did a lousy job. Did he brag about grabbing women “by the pussy”? That’s just guy talk. Six bankruptcies? Smart businessman—maybe he can fix the national debt. And so on. Trump took the art of cognitive dissonance to a whole new level. He altered reality so regularly that trying to challenge his views was like punching a vast fog of cotton candy.

One statistic is worth pondering long and hard. Hillary lost a majority of white women. How could that possibly be? Are most American women still victims of false consciousness? Did their husbands browbeat them into supporting Trump? I don’t think so. Clinton’s identification with a political and financial elite that Middle America came to detest proved more important than her gender breakthrough. The Clinton campaign compounded the problem by giving too much emphasis to the presumed rising electorate of people who identify by oppressed group, and not enough to a broader electorate losing income and status and feeling little stake in American democracy.

But that story has roots that date back at least three decades. Since the 1970s, the post-Roosevelt social contract that once served the vast majority of Americans has been under siege. In their embrace of one-way globalization, both parties declined to insist on a trading system of true reciprocity. American manufacturing was sacrificed to the mercantilism of other nations that were valued as Cold War allies. American finance became the dominant influence, economically and politically.

As AFL-CIO chief economist William Spriggs points out, the argument about why Democrats lost the white working class misses the point. The working class is substantially nonwhite. In the 2016 election, Democrats underperformed among the entire working class—white, black, Hispanic, Asian—relative to the Obama vote and to the vote Democrats should have gained among the non-rich.

The debate about whether Trump voters in the heartland were blue-collar workers or the fearful middle class also misses the point. When factory towns become ghost towns, the entire community goes down and the entire community feels betrayed. The proposition that the Democratic Party is the party of regular, working Americans is no longer credible to much of America.

The sense of a collapsing social contract went hand in hand with the erosion of American democracy, both in a civics-book sense and in a political economy sense. In a market economy, democracy is the only counterweight the people have to keep elites from making off with too much of the pie. Over the past several decades, money has crowded out real grassroots politics, causing politicians to spend more time cultivating fat cats than meeting with constituents. Mass membership organizations that were once robust have turned into letterhead groups, run by professional staff, without the sort of democratically run chapter organizations that were common in our grandparents’ day. The AARP is an insurance marketing operation disguised as an advocacy group for seniors. It has no local chapters. The labor movement, once the epitome of a democratically run mass organization by and for working people, has been decimated.

According to research by the political scientist Kay Schlozman and colleagues, there is almost a perfect correlation between intensity of civil and political participation and level of income.That was not always the case, and this participatory tilt reinforces the influence of affluence, in the phrase of political scientist Martin Gilens, at the expense of regular people. No wonder government, the Democratic Party, and democracy itself all lost legitimacy, opening the door to a Trump.

In short, the perfect storm of 2016 had been brewing for a third of a century.

II. Is Donald Trump an American Fascist?

Fascism, classically, includes a charismatic strongman who speaks directly to the mystical People, over the heads of the squabbling politicians who ruined the Nation. Or as Donald Trump put it at the Republican National Convention, “I am your voice. … I alone can fix it.” (Check.)

Fascism scapegoats some demonized other, or sets of others. (Check.)

Fascism can begin as illiberal democracy and mutate into full-blown tyranny, Mussolini-style. Or fascism can preserve the forms but eviscerate the realities of democracy, à la Putin. (Check.)

Fascism attracts unstable personalities, both the maximum leader himself and his more extreme followers. (Check.)

Fascists are superb at getting followers to believe what Adolf Hitler was the first to call the “big lie.” Repeat it often enough, people believe it. Whether it is true ceases to matter. Truth becomes subjective. (Check.)

Fascism papers over contradictions. Hitler, a short, swarthy Austrian, exalted the blond, blue-eyed German ideal. Silvio Berlusconi, a notoriously corrupt billionaire, mixed business interests with the business of government. Yet he was lionized by ordinary Italians fed up with the state’s corruption. Believers are willfully blind. (Check.)

Fascists use mobs or the threat of mobs to intimidate or physically assault opponents and silence critics. Hitler had his Brownshirts private militia of stormtroopers before he became chancellor. Then it became part of the state. The internet adds a new wrinkle. Trump impulsively uses tweets to incite cyber-mobs. When Trump personally attacked Chuck Jones, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, Jones got threatening phone calls. Journalists who have been attacked for criticizing Trump have been subjected to vile personal threats from Trump’s thugs. And all of this before he had state power.

America is an open society (or it has been). If Trump wants to sic mobs on us, either digitally or live, we are sitting ducks. Suddenly, any critic is in the same position as blacks early in the civil-rights era. A lynch mob could show up at your door, egged on by the local sheriff. Only the sheriff is now president of the United States. (Check.)

Fascists are not just charismatic but entertaining. Juan Domingo Perón and his wife, Eva, put on a terrific show. Likewise Benito Mussolini. And of course Hitler. They were so compelling to their followers that the contradictions were effectively invisible. (Check.)

One such contradiction is fascism’s habit of both bashing business and climbing into bed with business. Though fascists often condemn an international bankers’ conspiracy, fascists work with corporate elites. And business, either naïvely or cynically, often hopes to use fascists—to restore order, to create a favorable business climate, to help domestic business against imports, and to repress free labor unions. German industry and finance supported Hitler and thrived under Hitler. Much of Italy’s corporatist state, with heavy state financing and business-government interlocks, was developed under Mussolini. (Check.)

Despite a lot of blather about democracy and capitalism logically reinforcing each other because of common norms of transparency and rule of law, when push comes to shove capitalists are a weak firebreak against fascism. (Tom Friedman, take note.) As the financial collapse showed, rules are made to be gamed; transparency is for suckers.

We’ve known for a century that capitalists get along fine with dictators in third-world settings—such leaders operate a better business climate than messy democracies. Likewise at home. (Check—and maybe checkmate.)

Fascism also steals the left’s clothes. Fascists sponsor public-works projects and expand social benefits. “Nazi” was an abbreviation for National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler ran a prodigious welfare state, as well as extensive public improvements. Here, however, Trump may botch the necessary tightrope act, because the bread is turning out to be far more meager than the circus. It’s not clear how long psychic income will substitute for real income.

There are two other key respects in which Trump is not a classic fascist. He did not come to office as candidate of a new out-party. His hostile takeover of the Republican Party will produce complications. Moreover, fascists usually take power with a clear agenda. Other than his own vanity, Trump doesn’t have a coherent agenda beyond vague slogans. Incoming Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Vice President–elect Mike Pence are staffing Trump’s cabinet with conventional billionaire conservatives. But that’s not exactly the Tea Party’s cup of tea, nor is the bizarre alliance with Putin.

An astute observation is ascribed toMark Twain: It is easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.True enough, but the contradictions are piling up. Even hardcore Trump voters are starting to experience buyer’s remorse.

III. Undoing the Folded Lie

The first line of defense, surprisingly, may be other Republicans. As the CIA-Putin episode suggests, we are in a fateful race between Republican opportunism and the deeper concern of at least some Republicans for the republic; between Trump’s assumption that he was elected dictator and collapsing approval ratings—that may yet give pause to some of his allies—as well as the dawning realization that Trump is even crazier than they thought. The Republican view of Trump may be coming full circle, from contempt to ingratiation and back to contempt.

Several leading Republican senators have drawn the line at Trump’s rejection of the CIA and his footsie with Putin. And while Republicans may want to cut public spending, the plans of designated Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price of Georgia to make drastic cuts not just in welfare but in Social Security and Medicare will not sit well either with Trump voters or with several Republican senators. And some, such as Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, may not want to turn the EPA over to a leading climate denier.

Trump’s designs on Obamacare spell big losses for hospitals, which are in every congressional district. His version of economic nationalism will wreak havoc with supply chains without doing anything real for American workers. It will backfire if he keeps attacking Boeing, one of America’s few remaining export champions. Tragically, we can’t rely on big business to defend democracy, but we can expect business to fiercely defend its own interests.

In the short run, Trump’s combination of tax cuts and deregulation may produce an economic boom. But a majority of Federal Reserve governors have been spoiling for an excuse to raise interest rates. The widened deficit will give them one. Higher rates, in turn, will slow the economy, increase the value of the dollar and thus widen the trade deficit. Tighter money will also threaten the latest asset bubble in real estate and stocks. We could even see another financial crisis.This is a time to defend core democratic institutions, to amplify all of the contradictions between who Trump pretends to be and who he is. The Democrats need to force Republican legislators to take as many awkward, coalition-splitting votes as possible. They need to put forward affirmative policies that are far more attractive to workaday voters than Trump’s. They need to take some actions of conscience that could also be good politics, such as fervently defending the Dreamers. For the long term, they need to defend and expand a free society, beginning with Obama’s reported efforts on gerrymandering, which could be expanded to a general defense of democracy. Obama could play a far larger role as leader of the opposition. He is a counter–role model to Trump.

But one should not minimize the perils. Trump will wield a massive amount of executive power. This is a man with a short fuse and a long enemies list. As I wrote in a piece last summer that I assumed was merely a passing nightmare, titled “Donald Trump’s Constitution,” he can use the power of the presidency to conduct vast surveillance, threaten the commercial interests of the free press, selectively prosecute, and further weaken the labor movement while his allies in Congress change the ground rules of federalism to undermine progressive policies of blue states and cities. Trump will float above cadres of conservative professionals with detailed playbooks. They will try to back-load the impact of unpopular policies such as deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Even so, Trump may be too impaired to function as a competent leader. Mario Cuomo famously observed that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. By analogy, Trump may campaign in an alternative, post-fact universe, but he will govern in a world constrained by reality. Missteps and plummeting public support will give his Republican allies second thoughts.

The words attributed to martyr Joe Hill, “Don’t mourn, organize,” were never more urgent. Obama’s audacious, maybe naïve, hope of bridging divides was crushed by Republican cynicism. The post-Trump consensus must be both tough and progressive, for nothing else will bring back the support of working Americans who felt deserted by the presidential Democratic Party.

The more fundamental challenge is to defend democracy itself. Trump can restrict voting rights, but he is unlikely to cancel the elections of 2018 or 2020. With a sour electorate still in an anti-incumbent mood, the incumbent will be Trump. He can’t prevail by promising that things will be great. He will have a record to defend, an all-Republican record. An abbreviated boom could well fizzle by 2018 or 2020. But with the Justice Department as the ministry of voter suppression, progressives can’t prevail by winning by a point or two. It will take a steal-proof margin—a blowout win of ten to fifteen points.

My friend, who narrowly survived urgent surgery, recovered. It is asking a lot to hope that American democracy will make a full recovery. Here at the Prospect, All we have is a voice, to undo the folded lie.

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospectand a professor at Brandeis University's Heller School. His latest book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. [3]He writes columns forthe Huffington Post, the Boston Globe and the New York Times international edition.

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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/noam-chomsky-unveils-americas-deplorable-history-of-playing-footsie-with-fascism/

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https://kpfa.org/program/letters-and-politics/

Interview with Robert O. Paxton, Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and author of The Anatomy of Fascism.In the book, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others, and explores whether fascism could exist outside the early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged.

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-14-2016/

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chip berlet

trump closer to mussolini

when ppl think downward mobil or are, rt populism; gop will go to rt, ultra rt will try to woo from trad rt.

https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-november-16-2016/

one strong man to save us

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https://antifascistnews.net/tag/fred-trump/

DONALD TRUMP’S KKK CONNECTION RUNS DEEPER THAN YOU THINK ... As the media pundits expect Donald Trump to clean up on tonight’s Super Tuesday run, Trump’s recent response to the endorsement of David Duke is getting more headlines than his usual racist antics.  Duke recently put forward a formal announcement, stating that if you care about your “race” then you are “required” to vote for Trump.  Duke is one of the best known white nationalists in the world, formerly becoming state representative in Louisiana before running for Governor, and almost winning with 55% of the state’s white vote.  Duke is one of the few open racists to see any electoral success into the 1990s, where he continued to support his past KKK and neo-Nazi affiliations, deny the Holocaust, argue for racial differences in intelligence, and run his organization, the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

Duke is only one on the long list of white nationalist endorsements.  Recent, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance voiced a robocall in support of Trump in Iowa, which was funded by the nationalist American Freedom Party.  The Radix Journal, The Right Stuff,Counter-Currents Publishing, Occidental Dissent, The Daily Stormer, and many more have jumped behind Trump, using his open nativist rhetoric as the mainstreaming of their own racism.  Every one of these organizations have shared membership with various incarnations of the KKK, drawing them straight to Trump, yet Donald’s KKK connections move even beyond that.

After Duke’s endorsement, Trump was cornered on CNN and asked to denounce Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.

I don’t know anything about David Duke. I don’t know what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacist. I don’t know. I don’t know, did he endorse me, or what’s going on?

Trump later said that he had a “bad earpiece,” but in reality he was refusing to denounce a base that has thrown more resources than expected at him.  While he may play ignorance, he actually knows exactly who David Duke is and where his politics come from.

In a 2000 report by ABC News, Donald Trump was interviewed about the Reform Party and its connections to the paleoconservative and racist right-wing.

As you know, the Reform Party has got some pretty big problems.  Not the least of which is Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Fulani, and it’s a problem.

He then went on to bring up the same reference with the New York Times discussing the relationship between the Reform Party and the New York Independence Party.

Although I am totally comfortable with the people in the New York Independence Party, I leave the Reform Party to David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Lenora Fulani.  That is not company I wish to keep.

It is difficult for Donald to now claim that he knows nothing about David Duke, and therefore will not condemn him as the Anti-Defamation League has requested.  He was endorsed by Duke quite a while ago actually, and when he originally found out he smiled and joked “I even got endorsed by that KKK guy.”

Trump’s connections to the KKK actually go much deeper into his family tree, which is a politic that we have seen played out in his new public persona.  Fred Trump, Donald’s millionaire father, has been well known for his work with the New York KKK.  He was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens in 1927.  The arrest was a part of a 1,000-person racial brawl that came after a rally intended to restore the “Native-born Protestant Americans” to New York City.  This was in line with the deep anti-Catholic views of the New York KKK of the period, which also said the police were mainly made up of Roman Catholics.  The flier that they were handing out for the event read:

Liberty and Democracy have been trampled upon,” the flier stated, “when native-born Protestant Americans dare to organize to protect one flag, the American flag; one school, the public school; and one language, the English language.

The language of this flier seems awfully familiar given Trump’s recent rhetoric about Latino/a and Muslim Immigrants.

Fred Trump went on to “jumpstart” the campaign of arch-racist Barry Goldwater, where they also got backing from the John Birch Society.  With influence from Roy Cohn, Goldwater went on to develop what was later called the “Southern Strategy,” which plays on Southern racism using “dog whistle” terms to signal to the base. Cohn went on to become Trump’s “mentor,”and helped him to countersue a group that was suing him for discrimination against African Americans in his business.   Cohn eventually introduced him to Roger Stone, a man who has walked the line between the right-wing of the GOP and Libertarian Party and openly racialist, nativist, and white nationalist movements.

Since Donald’s recent misstep on CNN, he has been roundly denounced, even by the GOP establishment.  Joe Scarborough has dropped him entirely with disgust, and Paul Ryan decided to speak up publicly in a press statement.

There has been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours about one of our presidential candidates and his seeming ambivalence about David Duke and the KKK, so let me make it perfectly clear.  That is not the view of Republicans who have been elected to the United States Senate, and I condemn his views in the most forceful way….If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We appeal to their highest ideals. This is the party of Lincoln…his is fundamental. And if someone wants to be our nominee, they must understand this. I hope this is the last time I need to speak out on this race.

Neither of these men are the bastion of progressive values, so their disgust is a good sign of how far outside of any conventional discourse Donald Trump has become.  With the recent violent stabbing of anti-fascist protesters in Anaheim by California by KKK members, few are willing to accept this tacit support for the KKK that Trump has given.

David Duke has gone to Twitter to continue to support Trump openly, decrying the “corporate media” for distorting his views and libeling Trump.  Donald himself has recently given a speech that his presidency would further criminalize libel, a journalistic dishonesty that is already illegal.  He may have trouble understanding that the reporting on him has actually been straight forward, yet he will not accept that he simply does not look good after ranting and raving on stage.

As votes are being cast today, we are about to learn a lot about what American whites are willing to accept to protect their last vestiges of privilege.  Anti-racist author Tim Wise started his career with an organization fighting David Duke’s two political runs in Louisiana.  After Duke got more than half of the white vote even though the media coverage clearly revealed his open racial politics, Wise said that he had to reckon with what was happening to whites.  He labeled this turn “Dukism,” the ability for these whites to overlook his Nazism.  Anti-fascist writer Alexander Reid Ross has given the current period Trumpism, and has a similar pattern to both David Duke and Pat Buchanan, two people that Trump had previously condemned.  In periods of crisis and strife, working class whites are presented with a choice on how they will deal with the country’s future.

Hopefully, this is not the choice they will make.

DAVID DUKEDONALD TRUMPFRED TRUMPKKKPAUL RYANROY COHN

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https://itsgoingdown.org/trumpism-pt-2-american-fascist/

On a fast-pace, FOX News talk show discussing the recent beating of a Black Lives Matter protestor at a Trump rally, the presidential hopeful phoned in with an ambivalent tone. First contemplating the host’s term “roughed up,” the Don returned to the notion with more effrontery: “maybe he should’a been roughed up.”

Activists around the world signaled despair at the thought that the local violence against a Black Lives Matter protestor would translate to open season against protestors across the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it did, in Minneapolis, where white supremacists fired on a peaceful gathering of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, sending five to the hospital. According to reports, before they fired the shots, the culprits yelled, “Race war and Trump 2016!” Trump’s parallel non-response came in the form of a tweet—a meme with false information about “black-on-white crime” traceable to a neo-Nazi handle.

Despite the fact that even mainstream media sites and even conservative commentators have begun to note the proximities between Trump’s ideology and fascism, some more academic commentators still seem to be on the fence. One article states that describing Trump as a fascist “obscures the fact that Trump’s demagogic hate-mongering is deeply rooted in mainstream U.S. politics.” Some have even gone as far back as the 19thCentury “Know Nothings” to identify Trump’s style.

We have seen Trump’s recent statements to the effect of issuing special IDs (perhaps badges?) to Muslims in the US and shutting down “certain” Mosques reflected in the opportunism of Republicans refusing Syrian refugees. Both seemed to land symbolically too close to the anniversary of the US’s rejection of the St. Louis carrying Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany, with the US Holocaust Museum pointedly condemning the treatment of Syrian refugees. We could further note that, according to his ex-wife, Trump used to read from a book of Hitler’s speeches,*My New Order*, kept in a cabinet near his bedside. There are also reports that when he visits, Trump’s cousin “clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler.”

While it is very useful to observe racist tendencies in the US and Europe before fascism (and even alongside it), I would argue for an alternative viewpoint. Returning to the 19th Century is provocative, but we would do well to identify the important influence fascism has had on the US (and vice-versa) not just as a detail, but as a significant milestone. Trump’s chatter belongs just as much in the fictional Hotel Wessex at the opening of of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 warning of American fascism, It Can’t Happen Here, as it does in his own mega-hotels.

All in the Family

As is well-known, the Don’s father, Fred Trump,likely took part in the Klan’s militant street activity during the 1920s, which many would suggest represents a simple, US-American phenomenon.In fact, the Klan had heavy cross over with the American Legion, the leader of which announced in 1923, “Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States” (don’t worry, we won’t). Just over a decade later, the Klan would join a united paramilitary organization called the Storm Troops with the corporate-funded Silver Shirts, the German American Bund (the Nazi Party in the US at the time), the Black Legion, and other racist neo-fascist groups. While the Klan is distinctly US-originated, by the end of the 1930s, they were intertwined with the US’s homegrown Nazis, and by the 1970s were inextricably united with David Duke’s brand of neo-fascism.

It wasn’t just the Klan, though. In 1976, correspondence between J Edgar Hoover and his “pen-pal” Nazis running Interpol during the late-1930s emerged, showing that Hoover’s autographed picture hung on the wall of Interpol’s offices in Nazi Berlin, and he remained on good terms with Nazi high officials until three days before Pearl Harbor. He became Interpol vice president in 1946, and refused to use his power to incarcerate Nazis war criminals on the run. Instead, through the State Department, the OSS, and FBI, the US brought Nazi scientists to the US, and helped coordinate the escape of numerous high ranking Nazis. To view neo-fascism as foreign to US groups like the Klan and neo-Confederate organizations is to ignore how it was absorbed in this country and to what utility.

The Klan has never been the sole or even principle point of intersection for US fascism; formal, official Americanism has always been the lynchpin. During the 1920s, the US’s great industrial and finance moguls, from Hearst, Ford, Du Pont, and GM to the house of JP Morgan, Jr., went fascist, and big business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a leading purveyor of Americanist propaganda, joined them. In 1923, after Mussolini’s March on Rome, the counsel of NAM delivered a speech to their convention called il Duce an “extreme leader, not only converted by the lightning stroke of intelligence and falling from his error like Saul of Tarsus from his horse, but leading through the streets of a reunited country a great body of citizens,” liberating Italy from “the blighting hand of radical socialism.”

Fascism and the Red Scare

Along with the NAM, the America First Committee, founded by publishing magnate Henry Regnery, warned that intervention in WWII would be traumatic to the US’s small and medium-sized manufacturers, insisting that the US maintain neutrality. One of NAM’s most well-regarded propagandists was a columnist namedGeorge Sokolsky, who famous anti-fascist journalist George Seldes aptly called an “[agent [of] fascist [interests]](https://books.google.com/books?id=N_LbUSH0N1sC&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=seldes+%E2%80%9Cagent+%5Bof%5D+fascist+%5Binterests%5D.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=L110zfrL_N&sig=G34HIPefm51e93deKriM7QKSeao&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwibheSJ2q_JAhVH4WMKHcfDCo8Q6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=seldes%20“agent%20%5Bof%5D%20fascist%20%5Binterests%5D.”&f=false).” By the time the US entered the War, the NAM had abandoned its pro-fascist position, but it maintained the same spirit and ideology, shifting the focus to anti-communism.

While the American Legion’s Americanist Committee spurred the anti-communist movement toward McCarthy’s show trials, Sokolsky played the part of “clearance man” for an “American Fascisti” that now enforced the Black List in Hollywood.Senator McCarthy attempted to stay clear of associations with fascism. However, by 1948, McCarthy’s awkward enthusiasm for the liberation of German POWs had become impossible to hide, as he dove into the Malmedy war crimes case along with Regnery and Rudolf Aschenauer, a* *high ranking official of the Socialist Reich’s Party (the heir of the Nazi Party), which helped to derail denazification in Europe.

McCarthy also developed a relationship with the well-known fascist agent Francis Parker Yockey on his trips to Germany, according to the latter’s friend John Anthony Gannon, and a letter obtained by the FBI, penned in 1952, reveals that McCarthy went so far as to ask Yockey to ghost write a speech for him. The manuscript, “America’s Two Ways of Waging War,” also intercepted by the FBI, concludes in the following fashion: “We shall liberate our land from the domination of traitors and then, by the help of the Almighty God, we shall restore the word America to its old meaning in the world before all nations. By the deluge of our votes, by the irresistible storm of our organized protest, we shall sweep America clear of its inner enemies and onward to its God-given Destiny.” 

Yockey’s tailor-made mission to make America great again was likely going to be unfurled at a rally planned later that year for which McCarthy was a keynote, hosted by the fascist successor to the German American Bund and “floor managed” by infamous Nazi H. Keith Thompson. After negative press in The Daily Compass and The New York Post, McCarthy pulled out.

Americanism Comes to the Don

Perhaps partly as a form of PR, McCarthey enlisted a hot, young, Jewish columnist and lawyer named Roy Cohnas his chief prosecutor for the Red Scare. After illegally convincing judge Irving Kaufman to hand down sentences of execution to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg while acting as a prosecutor in the notorious anti-communist espionage case, Cohn found his way to McCarthy through Sokolsky, who he considered his father figure. One of the more well-funded circles that Cohn gained credibility by helping to establish was the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an anti-communist youth group notorious for singing fascist hymns.

The master of national sleaze, Cohn’s rancor was particularly vitriolic toward Jews. According to Robert Sherrill writing in The Nation, “[Cohn] spent a great deal of his life tormenting Jews to show that, down deep, he could be just as anti-Semitic as the most bigoted WASP.” After Cohen went on what one historian calls a “book-burning” romp through Europe with his semi-secret boyfriend, McCarthy started to feel the heat. When Cohn’s boyfriend was drafted into the army, his tactics of pulling strings, bribing, and blackmailing backfired, and McCarthy found himself in a full-scale war with the Army, leading to the collapse of McCarthyism.

 In the aftermath, McCarthy would drink himself into a death spiral, and some of the leadership of the NAM, including leader James O Welch, moved on to spearhead the John Birch Society, which amassed a sizable constituency of fascists, masking their anti-Semitism in cryptic anti-communist conspiracy theories. In the words of Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons’s impeccable book, Right Wing Populism in America, “it was at the NAM, during the height of the Red Menace hysteria, that Welch honed his Americanist philosophy.” In 1964, the Birchers threw most of their influence behind Barry Goldwater, whose campaign wasjumpstarted by a German émigré turned New York real estate entrepreneur named Fred Trump.[draft dodger tossed out?]

Although even Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan felt that Goldwater went too far at times, his campaign established “the Southern strategy.” Like Cohn and Sokolsky, the Birchers and Goldwater shared what Cohn’s biographer von Hoffman calls, somewhat tepidly, an “apparent willingness to accommodate himself to European fascism.” As time went on, Cohn would sink into a role as one of the Birchers’ leading intelligence men along with members of La Rouche’s network in what would later become known as the Council for Inter-American Security (CIS), infamous for snooping on the Committee in Solidarity for the People of El Salvador (CISPES). By the onset of the 1970s, Cohn’s public life involved representation of mobsters, Studio 51, and a certain élite. In these circles, at a place forManhattan high rollers called Le Club, Cohn met Fred Trump’s son, Donald.

With Roy Cohn, Down and Dirty

The two must have gotten along swimmingly, because Cohn became Trump’s mentor, guiding him through lawsuits and counter-lawsuits as his business grew. It was Cohn who told the young Don to countersueafter being charged with discriminating against black people in 1973—a policy perhaps incurred from his father’s era. Although he lost the countersuit, Trump would revolutionize his dad’s old business into a lavish, luxurious, and extremely modern enterprise. The posterboy of the highflying modernism of the 1980s, Trump outfitted his hotels and casinos with sumptuous furnishings and the latest in technology. He became a Bloom County cartoon character for some, a symbol of the “new man” of the 1980s for others. Either way, he represented a morally bankrupt class that never stepped foot on a tightrope that didn’t have a golden safety net beneath it.

During his relationship with the ne plus ultra of yuppie playboys, Cohn also insisted on a reputably conservative public profile. By the early 80s, he even claimed to reject the John Birch Society, even as he joined the advisory board of the Western Goals Foundation, a private intelligence group organized by leading Birchers that openly worked with Nazis like Hitler’s unreconstructed spy chief, Reinhard Gehlen, who had been rescued from war crimes trials by the CIA’s first chief, Allen Dulles, in order to help coordinate clandestine anti-communist resistance. By the mid-1980s, Western Goals had become embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal due to the workings of the CIS, among others, which Cohn had been a part of since the 1950s. (As reported by Antifa in 1996, the CIS’s hierarchy included Klan and Aryan Nations collaboratorLarry Pratt, who went on to co-chair Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run, as well as Buchanan, himself, who we’ll come to later in this article.)

A UK copy-cat organization called Western Goals Institute formed in the late-1980s, throwing its support behind Le Pen, who historian Martin A. Lee calls the “neofascist führer” of the French radical-right party, Front National. One of the top funders for Western Goals Foundation was the Bircher son-of-an-oil-magnate Nelson Bunker Hunt, who also helped bankroll the Council for National Policy, tied to the leadership of US Nazi Willis Carto’s old Nazi comrade, Roger Pearson (a former member of the editorial board for the Heritage Foundation, which politely allowed Trump to pull out of his September, since his birther ideas are beyond the pale).

While up to his eyeballs in fascism, Cohn attempted to keep his conservative slate clean by fighting legal rights to gay people, although he was gay, himself, and later died of AIDS. Underneath the alleged mob links, drugs, and corruption there remained strong bonds between Trump’s mentor to the fascist-fused Americanism of the War years, brought through McCarthyism by the leadership of NAM into the John Birch Society, and further into the Western Goals Foundation.

Meet Roger Stone

This year, Trump enlisted as his campaign manager another of Cohn’s protégés, Roger Stone, who Mark Ames profiles on Before It’s News: “Roger Stone is a Libertarian prankster fighting the two-party stranglehold; and Donald Trump is a right-wing populist shaking up the system because by gum, he just doesn’t care and he doesn’t need to care,” Ames writes. “That’s one, very dumb, very gullible way of putting it.” Another way of describing Roger Stone, according to Ames, is “Dick Nixon dirty trickster, fascist fan of Roy Cohn, lobbyist for some of the worst dictators in the world.”

Stone met Trump through Cohn in NYC around the 1979 Reagan campaign, but was brought into the world of politics in the early 1970s, at the age of 19, by Donald Segretti, who initiated the teenage Stone into the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Notably using American Nazi Party members to shift voters from the American Independent Party to the Democratic Party, among other dirty tricks, CREEP’s fellow members included Pat Buchanan, who once described recollections of Holocaust survivors’ as “group fantasies of martyrdom,” and G. Gordon Liddy, a bizarre man obsessed with pain tolerance and willpower who grew up with an avowed admiration for Hitler and later became ghostwriter for J. Edgar Hoover. Liddy would remark, “at assemblies where the national anthem is played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm.”

After Watergate, Stone linked up with notorious lobbyists Charlie Black and Terry Dolan—another publicly anti-gay but closeted gay man who died of AIDS—to found the National ConservativePolitical Action Committee (NCPAC) as a revision of the old Barry Goldwater campaign. Both Black and Dolan were former YAFers of the fascist songbook era.

Other than helping Ron “Stormfront” Paul to his first election victory in Texas, the NCPAC formed Conservatives Against Liberal Legislation (CALL, later renamed Conservatives Alliance), connected to Carto’s neo-Nazi outfit Liberty Lobby. In turn, CALL created the National Coalition for America’s Survival, which included the reincarnation of the grandaddy of them all, the America First Committee, headed up by Art Jones, an infamous neo-Nazi.

Stone also formed a heavyweight power-broker consulting firm with Black, Paul Manafort, and Lee Atwater (later BMSK), which started out on the Reagan campaign and Donald Trump’s casino business, and later became notorious for representing the apartheid-supported army of witch-burning opportunist Jonas Savimbi in Angola.

However, Stone came into his own by fixing votes. His methods were honed in New Jersey during the 1980s, where he employed a “National Ballot Security Task Force” to patrol majority-black and latino precincts while wearing what the local NAACP president described as “Gestapo armbands.”

Holocaust Denial and Nativism

Throughout the 1990s, Trump was Stone’s most well-known client, and his casino industry hijinks, including manipulation and sabotage of Native tribes, are infamous. In 2000, Stone pitted the Don against Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party ticket, but the Trumpster backed out after having pointed out, ironically, that fascists were supporting Buchanan’s campaign. Later that year, Stone would become infamous for orchestrating the “Brooks Brothers Riot,” which shut down the presidential election recount in Miami-Dade, prompting New York Rep Jerald Nadler to call out “a whiff of fascism in the air.”

After riding high with Bush, Stone’s went in for a change, and he turned to the libertarians, eventually sparking a relationship with libertarian candidate Gary Johnson that would involve Roy Cohn, the mafia, and the white nationalist Tanton network. Continuing forward, Stone went on a neo-fascist media hub called Red Ice Radio hosted by Hitler fan, Henrik Palmgren, to chat about Cohn and the “legitimate threat of domestic communism” during the McCarthy era. Stone’s visit came at the tale end of an intense season ofguests such as “white man march” activist Kyle Hunt, Norse reconstructionist Stephen McNallen, and Holocaust denier Dennis Wise.

Some of Stone’s libertarian intrigues surrounded Scott Israel’s campaign for the Sheriff’s office of Broward County. Last year, the Sheriff’s office told the South Florida Gay News it would cost nearly $400,000 to release the office’s internal homophobic emails. This year, the department faced a major scandal when four Ft. Lauderdale cops were caught regularly sending racist texts including sexualized murder fantasies and creating a promotional Klan video.

Since leaving the Trump campaign, Stone has pitched a possible run for Senator under his home ticket, the Libertarian Party of Florida. The only other party candidate is a surreal character who calls himself Augustus Sol Invictus—a goat sacrificing, eugenics spewing, fascist-symbol-using Thelemite.

Due to his connections to the extensive “immigration reform” network of John Tanton, there is speculation that, before leaving, Stone left the Don with the numbers of 11 million “illegals” to deport before departing. As the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explains, Trump’s immigrant policy is “almost indistinguishable from the policy proposals made by John Tanton, a white nationalist who founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform and essentially created the modern nativist movement.” This is the same platform admired by the neo-fascist National Policy Institute’s Richard Bertrand Spencer, Tanton’s close friend, who sees it as a major step toward “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”

Whiff of Fascism?

Beyond simply co-opting the platforms of white nationalists, the Trumpster’s own “whiff of fascism” moment might have been that time when his campaign circulated an add with an American flag just transparent enough to view an image of a Nazi war re-enactment. His campaign apologized and retracted the image, but have remained defensive about most other innuendos and outright threats. For example, at a rally in Rochester, New Hampshire, the Don fielded a question asking, “When can we get rid of [Muslims]?,” infamously responding, “We are going to be looking at a lot of things.” Like a schoolboy, Trump later whined that “it was the first time in my life I got in trouble for not saying anything.”

Or perhaps one could detect a whiff when Trump suppressed journalists like Jose Diaz-Balart in Texas and Jorge Ramos in Iowa, telling the former, “You’re finished” and the latter to “go back to Univision.” When the brutal beating of a Black Lives Matter protestor at a Trump event was met with the statement, “maybe he deserved it,” it seemed as though Trump’s campaign had more clearly presented itself in relation to fascism, defined by journalist Arun Gupta as “a cross-class project of national renewal based on psycho-sexual appeals of racial purity and militarism, aimed against sections of the working class and bourgeoisie alike.”

There are more substantial underpinnings, however, which require a more thorough investigation of the content of fascism, itself, as well as Trump’s own flare for revolutionary rhetoric and violence. That much will be forthcoming in the next column.

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‘The Nazis Next Door,’ by Eric Lichtblau

By DEBORAH E. LIPSTADTOCT. 31, 2014

In the wake of World War II, America recruited a few leading German scientists in order to advance our space and military programs and to keep these valuable assets from falling into Soviet hands. This is the broadly accepted script about Nazis in America. In fact, as Eric Lichtblau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, relates in “The Nazis Next Door,” we welcomed approximately 10,000 Nazis, some of whom had played pivotal roles in the genocide.

While portions of this story are not new — see Annie Jacobsen’s book “Operation Paperclip,” for example — Licht­blau offers additional archival information in all its infuriating detail. (He conducted some of his research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, on whose supervisory committee I serve. I had no role in his selection as a fellow at the center.)

America began reaching out to leading Nazis months before the Germans surrendered. In March 1945, while the war still raged, the American spy chief Allen Dulles conducted a friendly fireside chat in the library of a Zurich apartment with the Nazi general Karl Wolff, the closest associate of the SS leader Heinrich Himm­ler for much of the war. The Scotch-­lubricated conversation convinced Dulles that Wolff, despite his ties to Himmler and his role as a leader of the Waffen SS, was a moderate who deserved protection. When prosecutors sought to try Wolff, one of the highest-ranking SS leaders to survive, at Nuremberg, Dulles worked to have his name removed from the list of defendants. While Wolff was in Allied custody, he was permitted to take a yacht trip, spend time with his family and carry a gun. Nonetheless, he complained that what he endured was “much more inhumane than the extermination of the Jews.” He said the Jews had been gassed in a few seconds, while he did not know how long he would be held. (His imprisonment lasted four years.)

While Jews languished in the camps after Germany’s defeat (“We felt like so much surplus junk,” one survivor said), the United States gathered up Nazi scientists. Had only leading scientists been enlisted, it would have been distasteful if understandable. But of the more than 1,600 scientists brought over, some had pedestrian skills. Others had developed the chemicals for the gas chambers, or conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Even the State Department protested.

But we did not stop with scientists. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. sought out spies and informants who had participated in genocide. For these agencies, engaging in murder was acceptable as long as the recruits did not lie about their record. Ultimately, most of these “informants” never provided any valuable information. Some even offered bogus reports.

But these intelligence agencies remained their greatest protectors. In the 1980s, when the Justice Department began to hunt war criminals who had lied in order to enter this country, both agencies actively obstructed the investigations. They were also protected by White House officials such as Pat Buchanan, then a top aide to Ronald Reagan, who denounced the Justice Department’s “revenge obsessed” and “hairy-chested Nazi hunters” as dupes of the Soviets. And the largest group of Nazis who entered America simply slipped in through “the back door,” according to Lichtblau. They gamed the system and immigrated as “refugees,” starting new lives as thousands of people perished in the Allied camps.

Lichtblau brings ample investigative skills and an elegant writing style to this unsavory but important story. “The Nazis Next Door” is a captivating book rooted in first-rate research.

THE NAZIS NEXT DOOR

How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men

By Eric Lichtblau

Illustrated. 266 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.

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chomsky says Kennan on the job at consul? in Berlin until 12/7; suggested hitler was moderate between commies and right? booktv

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFpuJvLPbio&feature=related

eliz holtzman investigated cia use

nazi Am 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wURo1SaBMy4&feature=related

http://hubpages.com/hub/The_Bush-Nazi_scandal_by_John_Loftus_former_Federal_Prosecutor

Extract from "Former Federal Prosecutor John Loftus confirms the Bush-Nazi scandal" published on October 31. 2003

"These long buried US government files demonstrate that the Bush family stayed on the corporate boards of Nazi front groups even after they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were helping the financial cause of the Third Reich. It was all about the money. Nazi Germany is where the Bush family fortune came from, and where the Harrimans, and the Rockefellers increased their fortunes to obscene proportions.

Of course some of them were quite rich to begin with. The Harriman railroad monopoly helped create the Rockefeller oil monopoly in the 1800's. Their despicable price fixing schemes earned them the press label "the Robber Barons." 

My favorite Republican Teddy Roosevelt ruined their rapacious profits with his anti-monopoly and anti-trust legislation.

The Robber Barons bribed Congress (it happens) into passing a loophole, the Web-Pomerene Act of 1918 which legalized cartels and monopolies outside the borders of the United States. This loophole law let the Robber Barons loose to prey on a helpless world already ravaged by the human and and financial cost of WWI.

Averil Harriman (patriarch of the famous Democratic family) promptly broke another American law by secretly financing the Bolsheviks while American, British and White Russian troops were still fighting against the infant communist revolution. (The FBI "ARCOS" files on Harriman's connections with the Soviets are quite a read). Harriman bribed Lenin into letting him take over the Czar's cartels, which exported managanese, iron ore and other raw materials. Harriman shipped the Russian raw materials to his German partners, the Thyssens, who had been secretly bought out by the Rockefellers.

The Rockefeller's lawyers, the Dulles Brothers, had deliberately and systematically bankrupted the German economy with the Versaille Treaty. German currency was almost worthless after WWI, and so the Dulles brother's favorite clients, the Rockefellers, were able to buy the stock of nearly every German company for a song. The great sucking sound that preceeded the Great Depression was the whistling of Wall Street money out of America into Germany, Russia (and as a side deal, Saudi Arabia). Two generations later, we are still paying for it.

The Robber Barons did not call it an international crime. They called it synergy. Harriman's Soviet cartels would deliver the raw materials, Rockfeller's high-tech German companies (the Thyssens) would process the manganese into steel for Harriman's railroads. To save transportation costs, the Robber Barons looked for a middle ground in eastern Poland for a future factory site. It had to be in the coal fields of Silesia, on the banks of the Vistula river, where a canal could be dug to ship materials in cheaply from Russia. The Polish town was named Oswieczim, later known to the world by its German name: Auschwitz.

It was not a killing factory then, although slave labor was always contemplated for the maximum profit factor. Auschwitz was designed to process Silesian coal into tar additives necessary for Russian aviation fuel. It was a high tech German chemical factory built to balance out Harriman's Russian-to-Germany export trade.

The Rockefeller-Harriman front company that financed Auschwitz was called Brown Brothers Harriman. It is still around today. Our President's great granfather, Herbert Walker, founded the company, and appointed his impecunious son-in-law Prescott Bush to the boards of several holding companies, all of which became Nazi fronts. The Walkers and Bushes never really liked the Nazis, anymore than Harriman liked the communists. To the robber barons, they were just dogs on a leash. One day the dogs broke their chains, and Hitler and Stalin got loose. Fifty million people died as a result of a bad investment.

The Robber Barons saw it coming. Their lawyers, the Dulles brothers, had a contingency plan. They had established three banks, one in Germany, one in Holland, and one in New York (the Union Banking Corporation, headed by the ever-useful son-in-law Prescott Bush). No matter who won World war II, the corporate stocks would be shifted around to whichever bank was in a neutral country when the war was over.

After WW II, the Dulles brothers' shell game deceived a gullible and war-weary world. The "neutral" Dutch bank reclaimed their German assetts as "stolen" by the Nazis, and the whole merry fraud continued. Prescott Bush got his Union Bank back from the US Government in 1951, despite its seizure in 1942 as a Nazi front. Prescott Bush and father-in-law Walker were paid two shares worth about $1.5 million in 1951 dollars. It was a petty payoff for a job well done.

Nearly 4,000 shares (98% of the Union Bank holdings) were held by Roland Harriman in trust for the Rockefellers. That's about three billion in 1951 dollars, more than 30 billion dollars in todays money. Most of it was reinvested in post-war Germany where they made even more obscene profits. After all, Germany was just as cash starved after World War II as they were after World War I. It was just another cycle in the Robber Baron's spreadsheet. Everyone made money off the Holocaust, except of course the Jews and the Allied soldiers.

A few decades later things had quited down and all the Nazi money finally came home to Wall Street. By 1972, one of Rockfeller's assetts, the Chase Manhattan bank in New York, secretly owned 38% of the Thyssen company, according to internal Thyssen records in my custody. Not a bad payoff for the Robber Barons. The Auschwitz investment paid off handsomely. The Thyssen-Krupp corporation is now the wealthiest conglomerate in Europe. WWII is over. The Germans won.

Also in the 1970's, Brown Brothers Harriman, perhaps coincidentally, convinced the ever pliant New York State Banking Commision to issue a regulation permitting them to shred all their records for the Nazi period. The Robber Barons, unlike the Swiss bankers, knew how to cover their tracks.

There were, of course, exceptions. Von Kouewenhoven, director of the Dutch Bank, discovered the secret Thyssen-Nazi connection after the war, and foolishly went to New York to warn his old friend Prescott Bush. His body was found two weeks later. It was reported with a straight face that he died of a heart attack."

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WED JUL 21, 2004 AT 02:53 AM PDT

Pete Coors' July Surprise, Part One

byNonpartisanFollow

Bob Schaffer likes to say that Pete Coors isn't conservative enough for the Colorado GOP.  But Schaffer, a principled conservative Republican in his own right (and also relatively easy for Salazar to beat in November), doesn't know Coors so well as he thinks.

Specifically, he hasn't read The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism, a book written in 1990 by award-winning investigative reporter Russ Bellant as an exposé of the Coors family's extreme right-wing causes.  According to Bellant, the Coors family, including Pete himself, has personally bankrolled a number of America's most hateful reactionary groups.  These include the Heritage and Free Congress Foundations (both founded by Pete Coors' father Joe); various KKK members; Laszlo Pasztor, a convicted Hungarian Nazi; and Roger Pearson, who was at one time the world's leading advocate of militant eugenics.

Here on DailyKos, I will examine in series each and every one of these allegations.  The goal: to spead the truth and keep faux-moderate Pete Coors from becoming America's most reactionary Senator.

Part One: Pete Coors and the Eugenicists

"When Ed Feulner became president of the [Coors-bankrolled] Heritage Foundation in 1977," writes Bellant, "Roger Pearson, a person virtually unknown in the United Stats outside of white supremacist groups and Washington's New Right networks, joined the editorial board of Policy Review, the monthly Heritage publication"(p.3).

Who was this Pearson fellow? Apparently he "was better known in Europe's racialist networks, where he had been a writer and organizer for the Northern League.  The Northern League, peppered with veterans of the Third Reich, was a bizarre pagan Nazi group active in the countries of Northern Europe"(p.4).

Pearson was friendly with Hans Gunther, a "racial theoretician" working under Hitler.(p.4)  Pearson also wrote a pamphlet which said, "If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide"(p.4).  This wasn't a quaint eugenicist of past centuries, folks -- Pearson wrote this in 1966.(p.4)

And it gets worse. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Pearson "claims that the demise of ancient Greece was the result of a 'decline in Nordic blood,' adding that 'Nordic decay was heralded in by ideas of 'enlightenment' and individualism.'" Pearson has also "claimed that Nordics are 'the very peak of evolutionary progress,' far removed from 'the ape-like appearance of our original ancestors' who were more like 'Negroes and monkeys.'"

Pearson was eventually kicked off the Heritage magazine because of a 1976 Washington Post exposé of the World Anti-Communist League, the American branch of which was chaired by Pearson.(p.4)  According to the Post, the WACL was run by people including "terrorists, Nazis and Latin American death squad leaders"(p.4).  Pearson left the Heritage Foundation, but the Coors connection with his views didn't stop there.  The Coors Foundation contributed money to Pearson's Council on American Affairs in 1977 and 1978, after the Post article came out.(p.5)

The Pete Coors Connection

As usual, Pete Coors didn't have any direct connection to the Pearson group.  However, he hasn't renounced his father's decision to fund Pearson-allied projects -- and since he controls the family assets as of now, he is wilfully contributing to more Pearson eugenicist mayhem.

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ROGER PEARSON

Fascist ideologist Roger Pearson, a Pioneer Fund beneficiary ($568,000 from 1981-1991) and author of Eugenics and Race, published by Willis Carto's notoriously anti-Semitic Noontide Press, argues that the white race is endangered by inferior genetic stock, but with proper use of modern biological technology "a new super-generation" descended from "only the fittest" of the previous generation can be produced. The first nation to adopt such a scientific breeding program, Pearson contends, "would dominate the rest of the world."

In 1965 Pearson became editor of Western Destiny, a magazine established by Carto and dedicated to spreading fascist ideology. Using the pseudonym [link to deposition] of Stephan Langton, Pearson then became the editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966-67 to conduct "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question," which included articles such as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power," and "Swindlers of the Crematoria."

Despite Pearson's long history of association with neo-Nazi groups, he was appointed in 1977 to the original board of editors of Policy Review, a journal published by the respected Heritage Foundation, a conservative political research organization in Washington, D.C. Perhaps the clearest indication of Pearson's acceptance into the mainstream is the letter of support he received from then President Ronald Reagan, thanking Pearson for his "substantial contribution to promotion and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad."

Pearson and Cattell have been longtime associates. Cattell has published numerous times in Pearson's Mankind Quarterly and Pearson has published a number of Cattell's monographs.

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FREE CONGRESS FOUNDATION and LASZLO

PASZTOR (NAZI COLLABORATOR)

The Free Congress Foundation has had a convicted Nazi collaborator on its staff; a man who was forced to resign from the 1988 Bush campaign when his past became public knowledge.

Laszlo Pasztor actually served a prison term for being, during WWII, part of a Hungarian pro-Nazi group, the Arrow Cross (like the German Nazi Party, only in Hungary). His prison term also related to Pasztor's, during WWII, being a member of a Hungarian diplomatic delegation to Berlin after the Nazis installed the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross as the government of Hungary.

In an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 09/16/88, Pasztor was reported as being a "volunteer" at the Free Congress Research & Education Foundation. However, Pasztor had an internal telephone number at FCF (listed as extension 48 as of 01/21/90) and calls to the FCF main number were routinely connected through to Pasztor. Pasztor himself stated that for several years he generally worked in the FCF office complex Tuesday afternoon through Friday.

According to Pasztor, the FCF gave him office space for his work with the Paul Weyrich sponsored Coalitions for America, and that he routinely provided to Weyrich written reports of his activities. Weyrich at the time was president of FCF and national chair of of Coalitions for America. It is noteworthy that a Coalition for America brochure used a photo of Pasztor to illustrate the work of the Liberation Support Alliance.

Martin Lee in The Beast Reawakens refers to Pasztor as Weyrich's right hand man:

"In addition to homegrown agitators who dredged up anti-Semitic motifs that harkened back to the 1930s, some countries had to contend with groups that were led or supported by profascist exiles who repatriated from the West where they had carried on as vocal anti-Communists during the Cold War, often with CIA support. The Free Congress Foundation, founded by American far right strategist Paul Weyrich, became active in eastern European politics after the Cold War. Figuring prominently in this effort was Weyrich's right-hand man, Laszlo Pasztor, a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross organization in Hungary, which had collaborated with Hitler's Reich. After serving two years in prison for his Arrow Cross activities, Pasztor found his way to the United States, where he was instrumental in establishing the ethnic-outreach arm of the Republican national Committee.".

Pasztor's history with the GOP goes back before the FCF, however. When Pasztor came to the U.S. in the 1950s, he joined the GOP's ethnic unit, and later became the leader of the Nixon-Agnew campaign's ethnic unit. The ethnic unit was only active during election campaigns and, according to Pasztor, Nixon told him that if he won the election, he would form a permanent ethnic unit within the GOP. True to his word, after Nixon won, Pasztor was made the organizer of the the Republican Heritage Groups Council, and is considered to be one of its founders.

According to Russ Bellant, noted New Right researcher, it is difficult to get the names of the these ethnic federations' directors and "it required attendance at the Republican Heritage Group Council convention in May of 1985 to learn the names of the federation leaders. It was the convention that Reagan was addressing at the Shoreham Hotel.

"Some Republican Heritage Groups Council delegates were reluctant to talk; others were unstoppable. A pattern began to emerge from the conversations--that in setting up the Council, Pasztor went to various collaborationist and fascist-minded émigré groups and asked them to form GOP federations. It eventually became clear that it wasn't an accident or a fluke that people with Nazi associations were in the Republican Heritage Groups Council. In some cases more mainstream ethnic organizations were passed over in favor of smaller but more extremist groups. And it seems clear that the Republican National Committee knows with whom they are dealing. Reviewing the federations illustrates this point." (Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party)

UPDATE:Mr. Pasztor continues both his association with Paul Weyrich, and to be active in the Republican Party.

Mr. Pasztor was so kind as to sponsor ponsoring the attendance of Texas 14th District House Representative Ron Paul (R) at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation's Truman-Reagan Awards Dinner in November 2002 (refer to Mr. Paul'sthank-you letter to Mr. Pasztor, dated 12/19/2002). It is noteworthy that Mr. Paul publishes a weekly column, "Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk," on Mr. Paul's webpages (entitled "Project Freedom"), located on the house.gov webserver. I believe Mr. Paul owes his constituents some "Texas straight talk" about why he is accepting ANYTHING from a convicted Nazi who spent 2 years in prison after WWII for the crimes he committed in Hungary's "ethnic cleansing" programs.

Mr. Pasztor was also kind enough to giveLaura Bush a gift, for which she wrote him athank-you letter, as well. I believe the First Lady also owes an explanation regarding why she would accept a gift from a convicted Nazi who was such a loyal servant to Hitler and his Holocaust.

Mr. Pasztor continues to work with Paul Weyrich (for an example, see "Scoop®: Your Inside View to the Strategies and Activities of the Conservative Movement in Washington" (Issue 198 * September 11, 1998), published by The National Center for Public Policy Research. This "Scoop" documents the activities at the 09/09/1998 "Strategy Lunch chaired by Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and sponsored by Coalitions for America." One of the listings for this meeting is regarding a "foreign defense and policy meeting chaired by Laszlo Pasztor of Coalitions for America and Amy Ridenour of The National Center for Public Policy Research, and sponsored by Coalitions for America."

According to People for the American Way : "Much of FCF?s clout among the religious right centers around Weyrich?s ability to organize. Weyrich holds weekly a ? Weyrich Strategy Lunch,? sponsored by Coalitions for America. The lunch is held when Congress is in session and has 75 conservative leaders representing their organizations. These weekly lunches include regular briefings by leading Bush administration officials and key conservative congressional leaders."

Links / References:

Chronology of 1988 Bush Campaign Controversy: Coalition of American Nationalities (Republican and Bush Campaign responses to charges)Will Bush Purge Nazi Collaborators in the G.O.P.? (NYTimes Editorial by Russ Bellant)

Nazis and the Republican Party (Online Journal: Carl Binion)

Martin, Lee. The Beast Reawakens, Little, Brown & Co., p. 303

Bellant, Russ Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party.

(for more information about the Free Congress Foundation, visit PROSOCS: Free Congress Foundation

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