Authoritarian3 Bak

220 includes creeping fascism THERE IS NO TWO = BAK

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

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see LIE

see legal suppression

see activist suppression

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see secret police

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see fascism

SEE MALE

SEE STRICT FR

BAK 11 25

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trump othergop calling for mass execution of hillary dem staffers?! 2 22

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Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.

And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.

Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But it is not just government officials whom Trump suggests be targeted for extrajudicial killings. Mere shoplifters should be killed too. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving,” Trump said to cheers at the California Republican Party convention in September.

Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

More than crazy bluster

This rhetoric may seem like crazy bluster, which is no doubt why many people appear prepared to ignore it. But put in its historical context, what Trump is doing is echoing views that are part of a long tradition of illiberal and outright fascist thought. For fascists have always seen the use of violence as a virtue, not a vice.

First, this is the natural result of the way that fascist communities define themselves. According to Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and for a time the official legal theorist of the party under Adolf Hitler, one builds and maintains a community by identifying and vilifying its enemies. And in this kind of highly polarized environment, the threat of violence always hangs in the air.

Second, among fascists, machismo is much admired. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose own outrageous rhetoric has also encouraged violent behavior by his supporters, simply “beamed” when Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him for his masculinity.

Trump often acts as a sycophant for Putin too, and machismo also is a big part of Trump’s own public persona.

Third, fascists are obsessed with purity. They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs.

But in the real world, people are too intermixed for this to occur naturally. True purity of community is an aspiration that can be made real only through violence and subjugation. Hence the Holocaust,genocide and ethnic cleansing, and other more limited attacks on minority and immigrant populations.

Violence as noble and intoxicating

Fascists, then, see violence as noble and intoxicating. For example, Julius Evola, a far-right intellectual active in Italy from 1920 to 1970 and the author, among other things, of “Fascism Viewed from the Right” and “A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth,” writes that violence “offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero that sleeps within him.”

Today, Evola is a favorite of the alt-right, and he suggests that a hero’s death is preferable to a life built on liberal compromise. “The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero,” Evola writes, “even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.”

The ultraconservative Catholic authoritarian and opponent of the French Revolution Joseph de Maistre, who is recognized as one of the intellectual forefathers of fascism, goes even further.

“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death,” Maistre writes. Indeed, without an executioner, the man who kills other men, Maistre claims society could not exist. For violence is necessary to satisfy “men’s natural desire to be destructive,” he writes; it leaves them feeling “exalted and fulfilled.”

Patriot Front – labeled a ‘white supremacist group’ by the Anti-Defamation League – marches in Washington, D.C., in May 2023.

Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Social disruption and destruction

These comments make clear that fascists see violence as something to be used for more than just personal retribution and intimidation. It is to be used to create wider social disruption and destruction. Not only are individuals to be subject to attack, but institutions and norms as well.

Consider “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” a work by two amateur historians popular on the far right.

The book is actually a restatement of Evola’s theory of historical regression, set forth in his “Revolt against the Modern World.”

The idea is that history moves in cycles, the first one being the best and each one thereafter representing a further decline. The fourth cycle is the worst, and it ends only when all existing social institutions are destroyed. This, in turn, is an application of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that “one can build only in a space which has been previously razed to the ground.”

Then history will reset and cycle once again.

Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon admires these ideas so much he made a movie about them.

Trump appears to embrace these ideas too. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great,” he says.

Viewed in this context, not taking Trump’s violent rhetoric more seriously seems dangerous indeed.

Mark R. Reiff, Research Affiliate in Legal and Political Philosophy, *University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The MAGA movement suffered a long list of disappointments in the 2022 midterms, which found Donald Trump-backed candidates losing statewide gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and other swing states. But one MAGA candidate who performed extremely well in the midterms was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and he did it without Trump campaigning for him.

DeSantis ran a far-right reelection campaign, defeating Democratic nominee Charlie Crist (a former Republican and ex-Florida governor) by 19 percent. Florida, in fact, is the one place where Republicans really did enjoy a major red wave in the 2022 midterms. And some right-wing pundits, including author Ann Coulter, are urging the GOP to nominate DeSantis, not Trump, in the 2024 presidential election — assuming that DeSantis decides to run.

DeSantis doesn’t pretend to be moderate; being a far-right culture warrior is his brand. Journalist/author and scholar Henry A. Giroux analyzes DeSantis’ appeal in a scathing article published by Truthout on December 16, and he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. DeSantis, Giroux warns, is “fueling the emergence of fascist politics in the United States.”

“While some pundits have connected DeSantis’ politics to an emerging authoritarianism,” Giroux explains, “they still fail both to name the ongoing development of fascism in the U.S. and to recognize that it takes different forms in different societies and historical formations. They dismiss any talk of fascism by suggesting that its unique historical attributes, such as the genocidal use of concentration camps, have to be repeated precisely in order to assign the term fascism to present events. Fascism is never entirely interred in the past; it is a dangerous ideology that may go into remission but never disappears.”

Giroux continues, “Fascism is a recurrent and infinitely translatable phenomenon and often takes on the cultural and political attributes of the societies in which it appears. The refusal to acknowledge that fascism can appear in many forms, often lying dormant in a society until the emergence of certain forces unleash it, reinforces the willingness of many to retreat into silence or ignore the seriousness of the emerging fascist threat. Expressing ourselves in words, learning from history and making connections among disparate events all matter in the age of fascism.”

Giroux stresses that when one is analyzing fascism, it’s important to recognize patterns and understand how individual events fit into the big picture — events like DeSantis sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts or Trump having dinner with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

“Fascist politics saturate U.S. society,” Giroux warns. “Ultranationalism, the calls for racial purity, voter suppression, hyper-militarism, required loyalty oaths from higher education faculty, rampant censorship, a ubiquitous anti-intellectualism, and a full-fledged attack on social provisions and public goods make clear that democracy is in crisis. Yet, in too many cases, the larger significance of these incendiary calamities is missed because they are treated as separate from each other…. DeSantis’ publicity stunt of using migrants as political pawns was also disconnected in the mainstream and liberal media from his attempt to erase the history of the Jim Crow era as part of his larger project of a politics of disposability.”

Giroux continues, “For instance, little was said connecting this racist policy to DeSantis’ passing laws banning books about Black history and racial narratives from schools and libraries, along with limiting what teachers can teach about racism — a policy that clearly indicates how DeSantis is following in the footsteps of the Nazification of education in Hitler’s Germany.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a far-right authoritarian, has drawn a great deal of admiration among MAGA Republicans — including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.And Giroux outlines some parallels between DeSantis and Orbán.

“Following in the footsteps of Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian leader who has turned Hungary into a fascist country, DeSantis has waged a war on immigrants, targeted gay and transgender youth, purged voters, banned books in Florida schools, limited what teachers can say about racism and other critical elements of American history, and used state power to punish businesses, evident in his ruthless and vindictive attack on Disney,” Giroux observes. “He has also used policing to punish Black voters who disagree with his policies, courted Christian nationalists, supported a white nationalist agenda and waged a war on higher education. There is little doubt that DeSantis has turned Florida into a laboratory of fascist politics.”

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aha traitor = tyrant requires execution = violence

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MAGA Republicans have been attacking Robert Reich as a “coastal elitist” in response to an August 23 tweet in which the liberal economist, UC Berkeley professor and former secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration described far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a “fascist.” Reich’s MAGA critics have been arguing that his condemnation of DeSantis, former President Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans is painfully out of touch with Main Street America — and that Reich and other liberals and progressives simply don’t understand conservative values.

But Reich’s MAGA critics are ignoring or overlooking the fact that anti-MAGA arguments are hardly confined to the left. A long list of right-wing Never Trump conservatives, from attorney George Conway to The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes to Washington Post columnist Max Boot to former Nancy Reagan speechwriter Mona Charen to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (a former GOP congressman), have been attacking MAGA as a movement that favors far-right authoritarianism rather than traditional Reagan/Goldwater/McCain conservatism. And William Saletan, a writer for the conservative website The Bulwark, defends President Joe Biden’s anti-MAGA use of the term “semi-fascism” in an article published on September 1.

“Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to ‘semi-fascism,’” Saletan writes. “For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of fascism.”

Saletan stresses that refusing to accept democratic election results, which is what Trump and his followers did after the 2020 election, is an “authoritarian” act.

“A stickler might say that an attempt to overturn an election isn’t really fascist unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence, but Trump and his allies tried to use both,” Saletan explains. “Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like ‘a damned dictatorship.’ But in December 2020, after the Electoral College had certified Biden’s election, Giuliani — at Trump’s direction — phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize voting machines from states. Then, at Trump’s January 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: ‘Let’s have trial by combat!’”

Saletan adds, “Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators.”

The Bulwark writer cites other examples of “authoritarian” behavior from MAGA Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wondering how long it would be before “we get to hang” former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be executed for treason.

“The dictionary definition of fascism doesn’t just talk about autocracy,” Saletan notes. “It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-fascist. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to fascism a baseless ‘message of hatred.’ But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican presidential nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because ‘he’s a Mexican.’ And McEnany defended this attack…. You could argue that an out-and-out fascist would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a ‘complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’”

According to Saletan, “Trump’s cult” contains many “components” of fascism, including “paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state.” Another is “invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.”

“But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into fascism might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán,” Saletan writes. “As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, ‘There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.’ Orbán called this a ‘mixed-race world’ and concluded, ‘We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.’”

Saletan continues, “Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, [briefly?] calling the speech ‘a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.’ But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded. This past Monday, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán.”

READ MORE:The Republican Party belongs to Viktor Orbán: conservative columnist

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-embrace-foreign-authoritarian-leaders

pulldown menu?!

In the past two years, Tucker Carlson has repeatedly hosted global leaders with authoritarian tendencies and embraced anti-democratic regimes on his Fox News and Fox Nation shows.

In interviews with Hungary’s president Victor Orbán, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, and most recently, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, Carlson has pitched softball questions, praised anti-democratic ideas, and allowed lies about some of the regimes to go unchallenged. Carlson has also repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, excusing his regime’s aggression in Ukraine.

By promoting and celebrating anti-democracy leaders to his audience of over 3 million viewers, Carlson is whitewashing their authoritarian tendencies and inaccurately covering the implication of their policies. Reeling from the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, the majority of voters believe American democracy is already at risk. Carlson's embrace of authoritarian ideologies from around the world only further threatens its future.

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Russia

Fox News has a documented pattern of supporting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Tucker Carlson has clearly led this charge.

A month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Carlson praised Nigel Farage for saying, “Whatever we may think of him [Putin] as a human being,” he is “actually on our side.”

Video CitationFrom the March 30, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Media Matters has documented Carlson’s extensive history of pushing pro-Kremlin talking points on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

He has mocked criticism of the Russian president and downplayed the significance of his invasion of Ukraine. He also suggested the Biden administration backs Ukraine only because of Hunter Biden’s ties to the country and questioned the U.S.’s efforts to support Ukraine, asking, “Why do we care so much” about “Russia messing around in Ukraine or Estonia or Crimea or whatever?” and “Why wouldn’t we be friends with Russia?”

He even went so far as to throw a jab at his Fox News colleague Jennifer Griffin’s reporting on the region, accusing her of “lying” while not bothering “to do any reporting whatsoever.”

Putin leads an authoritarian state in which he cannot be prosecuted and officials in his government are protected under strict confidentiality laws. The country has cracked down on free internet access by limiting access to social media platforms, and critics of the Kremlin are labeled “foreign agents” and silenced. A Media Matters report from April 2022 found that Facebook videos featuring 5 pro-Russian segments from Carlson received more than 2 million views and nearly 200,000 interactions.

In 2019, Carlson asked on his show, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am,” in reference to the conflict with Ukraine. (Later in the show he claimed he was joking.)

Video CitationFrom the November 25, 2019 edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight:

In return for his fealty, the Kremlin has praised Fox and Carlson, amplifying segments of Carlson’s show on its state-run social media accounts and state-run television. A leaked Kremlin memo distributed to Russian media outlets instructed broadcasters to use as many clips from Tucker Carlson as possible.

Brazil

In June, Carlson traveled to Brazil to film a new documentary for his “Tucker Carlson Originals” series. While there, he interviewed Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who, since he assumed the presidency in 2019, has created a government in Brazil that is anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, and anti-woman, once even stating he would rather see his son “die in an accident” than have a gay family member.

Despite international attention on Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic regime, Carlson hosted the Brazilian president for a friendly interview, during which they promoted a variety of false claims and conspiracy theories. Bolsonaro and Carlson embraced their similar ideologies, with Bolsonaro praising Carlson’s show and Carlson suggesting Brazil gets its own Fox News Channel.

Video CitationFrom the June 30, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson and Bolsonaro pushed a number of other right-wing talking points.

Carlson cheered on Brazil’s pro-life and Christian ideology, and Carlson and Bolsonaro agreed “the left” in Brazil will be responsible for the downfall of the good, Christian-centric society. Carlson implied the same would happen in the United States.

Carlson falsely claimed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “arms Nazis,” saying Bolsonaro is not like him.

Carlson claimed Bolsonaro is a “liberal” and has “done nothing to stop civil liberties in Brazil” although the president is known to arrest and investigate his critics under a vague national security law.

Carlson and Bolsonaro repeatedly called a man who attacked Bolsonaro in 2018 “leftist” and claimed the stabbing was politically motivated although a judge ruled the attacker was mentally ill after he told investigators he was “acting on the orders of God.”

Bolsonaro shared false claims that he did not need the COVID-19 vaccine because he had previously had the virus.

Bolsonaro also promoted both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as effective COVID-19 treatments.

Bolsonaro repeated the generally discounted theory that COVID-19 was started in a “laboratory on the other side of the world.”

Responding to a Carlson question about the expansion of gun ownership in Brazil, Bolsonaro claimed an increase in civilian gun ownership is what caused a “drop in the number of people who are killed by firearms in Brazil,” though the president though in reality states where civilian gun ownership increased the most did not see crime fall by any significant amount in comparison to states with less growth of gun ownership.

Dubbed “Trump of the tropics,” Bolsonaro campaigned on heavy military presence, after years of supporting Brazil’s military dictatorship, and violent policing. He had a plan to appoint military leaders to top government posts and following the election he did just that. Bolsonaro also claimed he would not accept the results of the election if he lost and has “threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents.”

During the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil, Bolsonaro spread narratives meant to discredit the country's democratic voting system after his party’s candidates lost. He has begun to push for restricting votes to paper ballots only for the 2022 election, echoing Trumpworld’s conspiracy theories about compromised electronic voting machines.

On his first day as president in 2019, Bolsonaro targeted Indigenous lands by preventing new lands from becoming demarcated for protection and has since dismantled the country’s environment ministry through cutting the budget, and overseen increased deforestation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s failed policies resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. Bolsonaro spread false narratives about the pandemic, refused to follow the World Health Organization’s recommendations, and even blocked local or state governments that attempted to follow prevention advice such as implementing mask mandates. Federal police have investigated multiple people who criticized the president’s COVID-19 response in public media.

Hungary

Carlson’s coverage of President Viktor Orbán and his governance in Hungary has garnered a flurry of mainstream media press attention in the American press. He has interviewed Orbán, filmed an antisemitic documentary targeting philanthropist George Soros, and spoken at a conference put on in Hungary by a right-wing organization tied to the Orbán government.

Carlson has shown his enthusiasm for authoritarian ideas and frequently connects Hungary’s move to the right as an example the U.S. should follow.

Carlson suggested the U.S. adopt Hungary’s nationalistic immigration policies while calling immigrants “chaos and filth and crime growing all around us.”

He hosted Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto in an interview titled “Here's what America should learn from Hungary” in which they discussed Hungary’s extreme immigration policies.

Carlson suggested that without Orbán’s strict immigration policies, “there will be no more Hungarians” and claimed that “neoliberals” would rather “import a replacement population from the Third World,” once again pushing the fascist great replacement theory.

Carlson celebrated Orbán’s election victory in 2022, noting, “Orban described the victory as a win for sensible nationalism -- which it certainly is.”

Carlson claimed on his nightly show that calling Orbán a “facist” or “authoritarian” is “the greatest of all” lies. Orbán is widely known for minimizing democratic freedom in Hungary.

While in Hungary, Carlson claimed “left-wing NGOs” are vilifying Orbán for his facist policies and claimed it’s “insane” to consider Hungary less free than South Africa. He was referring the nongovernmental organization Freedom House’s 2022 list saying Hungary was “partly free” due to “antimigrant and anti-LGBT+ policies, as well as laws that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)” created by Orbán’s government.

Carlson has repeatedly promoted Orbán’s policy ideas and supported his political career while repeatedly pushing for similar change to come to the U.S. In an introduction to one his interviews with the Hungarian president, Carlson claimed the U.S. media frequently lies about Orbán and “how repressive Hungary is.” Carlson went on to imply Hungary is a more free nation than the U.S., saying people who “loudly and publicly attack Joe Biden’s policies” are “silenced” and “might very well have to hire armed bodyguards” and falsely claiming “opposition figures here [in Hungary] don’t worry that they’ll be hurt for their opinions.” Carlson commended Orbán’s conservative policies and bashed U.S. leaders who “vilified” him for them.

Video CitationFrom the August 5, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

The admiration goes both ways. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary in May, Orbán described Carlson as a “friend” and told his audience that Carlson’s show should be “broadcasted day and night.”

Orbán recently gave a widely condemned speech during which he railed against “race mixing,” prompting one of his closest advisers to resign. He has downplayed Hungary’s involvement in the Holocaust and promoted antisemetic stereotypes as propaganda.

Orbán’s government has pushed far-right legislation, including banning LGBTQ representation in educational materials and media for kids and passing extreme anti-migrant legislation that goes against the European Union’s policies. Orbán has also undermined free and fair elections in Hungary and tightened his control over national media.

Mainstream media in the U.S. have closely covered Carlson and Orbán’s close relationship. The New York Times has published multiple articles drawing connections between Orbán and the political right in the U.S., and the relationship has inspired a number of think pieces by other media outlets.

El Salvador

Carlson has also interviewed Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on his Fox News show. Carlson focused on Bukele’s promise to curb gang violence in the country by increasing police funding and military presence while also applauding Bukele’s conservative stances and pushing for similar policies in the U.S.

Bukele claimed his solution for MS-13 gang violence is to “give more funds to the police, apply tougher dynamics, get the criminals, and put them in jail” and compared El Salvador’s crime rates to those of popular Fox News target Chicago, saying under his new tactics, crime in the country has fallen below that of the city.

Carlson applauded Bukele’s efforts and called the supposed solution to crime rates “obvious.”

In the past, Carlson has repeatedly referenced MS-13 when fearmongering about supposed white replacement and immigration in the U.S.; most well-known was his claim that Biden would release gang members into U.S. neighborhoods. Carlson also defended Trump when he made comments about immigration from “shithole countries,” even suggesting that El Salvador was indeed a “shithole country” or it wouldn't need immigration protections.

Carlson focused his interview with Bukele on his response to gang violence in El Salvador, praising him for cracking down through police and military power. However, Bukele policies has resulted in human rights violations in many of El Salvador’s jails including torture and death of prisoners, according to Amnesty International.

According to the Journal of Democracy, Bukele’s measures to limit judiciary independence following his rise to power in 2019 were a “serious blow to Salvadoran democracy” and his actions include “classic authoritarian behavior.” He claimed electoral authorities and the media were part of a voting fraud conspiracy during the 2021 election despite his party winning a legislative supermajority. As a candidate, Bukele avoided public debates and press interviews during the campaign, which left many to believe he was “intolerant.”

Since his election, Bukele has used the country’s military to bully opposition into voting for his budget and disbanded an anti-corruption body. Bukele has used his supermajority power to consolidate his power, firing high level judges and the attorney general. After his attacks on the judicial system, the top court in the country announced sitting presidents will be able to run again, even though El Salvador’s constitution states otherwise.

Poland

Carlson also interviewed Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and claimed Duda is an example of leaders “who actually care about their people” and who “defended their populations against international interference.” The interview included staples of Carlson’s conversations with conservative foreign leaders including comparisons to the United States, promotion of conservative and Christian ideals, and blatant lies.

VideoCitationFrom the September 27, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson started the interview by describing Duda’s efforts to stop the European Union from resettling refugees in Poland in 2015 as fighting back.

When asked about the power of technology companies in Poland, Duda stated the government has never introduced any kind of social media restrictions. Buth in 2021 the government planned to create a “Freedom of Expression Council” as a workaround to social media platforms’ power to ban accounts in the country, shortly after Twitter suspended Trump’s account. They ended the interview discussing the importance of pro-heterosexual family and Christian conservative ideals in government.

Video fileCitationFrom the September 27, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Duda has eroded judicial independence in Poland, forcing out sitting judges by establishing age limits and taking control over judicial appointments. An outspoken homophobe, Duda is known for his so-called “Christian values.” His administration has banned gay parents from adopting children, and under his regime “LGBT-free zones” have appeared across the country. Duda himself has called LGBTQ rights a “more destructive” ideology than communism.

His anti-abortion laws prevent abortion in almost all cases — recently, a bill was introduced to ban abortions for cases of fetal abnormalities — and they have rallied pro-abortion protestors and political opposition against the president. Duda’s government has also cracked down on the free press by introducing a new law that makes it impossible for media entities to be controlled by anyone outside the EU and has amended laws to allow the government to choose the heads of state-run media organizations.

With similar ideologies taking hold in the U.S., Fox News is giving Tucker Carlson free reign to embrace authoritarian leaders from around the world. Carlson has gone out of his way to promote false and conspiratorial narratives that have been repeatedly debunked while pushing these ideas onto his audience.

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an 2 22 bill blum

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

The initial creation of movements;

The rooting of the movements in a political system;

The acquisition of power;

The exercise of power; and

Radicalization or entropy, the stage at which movements reach their most extreme heights, or exhaust themselves and fizzle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cult of traditionalism.
A rejection of modernism (cultural, rather than technological).
Acult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
A framing of disagreement or opposition as treasonous.
A fear of difference.… Fascism is racist by definition.
An appeal to a frustrated middle class—either due to economic or political pressures from both above and below.
Anobsession with the plots and machinations of the movement’s identified enemies.
A requirement that said enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
A rejection of pacifism. Life is permanent warfare.
Contempt for weakness.
A cult of heroism.
Hypermasculinity.
A selective populism,relying on chauvinist definitions of “the people” that it claims to speak for.
A heavy usage of Newspeak—impoverished vocabulary, elementary syntax and a resistance to complex and critical reasoning.

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

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

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Donie O'Sullivan is a reporter for CNN. His beat appears to be American conspiracy theories. He was on Anderson Cooper's show last night with reporting on a QAnon conference last weekend during which former Donald Trump adviser and pardoned traitor Michael Flynn said a Myanmar-style military coup "should happen" in America.

That some people in this country long for purifying violence to "reinstate" Donald Trump to his "rightful place" is not what got my attention, though. What did was Donie O'Sullivan's editorial remark at the end of his report. This is what he said:

I spend a lot of time reading these pro-Trump forums, reading these QAnon forums online, and speaking to Trump supporters, and I will say of all the conspiracy theories we hear, this talk from Americans about a coup, cheering a coup, and hoping for a coup, in the United States is one of the most chilling things I hear.

Before I go on, I should say O'Sullivan appears to be an immigrant. (I think he's Irish, given his accent.) As such, I don't expect him to be as attuned to American political culture as I'd expect a native-born American to be. Indeed, as a non-native, I'd expect him to be more attuned to the American civic religion than native-born Americans generally are, because fealty to the civic religion is so often demanded of immigrants.

This civic religion believes military coups and their consequent dictatorships cannot happen in the United States.Ordinary Americans do not want them, moreover, because it would be against their civic religion. You can't quite tell from the written version of his remark, but when you watch the clip, you can hear O'Sullivan put a little more stress on "American" when he says he's chilled to hear Americans, of all people on this earth, talking "about a coup, cheering a coup, and hoping for a coup, in the United States." Implicit point: this is what Trump has done to the globe's oldest democracy.

I suspect some of O'Sullivan's remark was showmanship. (He does work for CNN, after all.) But I think some of it, maybe most of it, reflects the conventional wisdom in Washington—that it's shocking to hear Americans talk this way. It's not shocking, though. It's familiar and quite normal when you know where to look.Fact is, lots of Americans believe they are God's chosen people. They believe the end of the world is coming, according to God's divine plan. They believe the US Constitution is a covenant with them only, and that a genocidal purge will preface Christ's return.

This is the End Times I'm talking about, a story about global events culminating ic that "reinstates" the King of Kings to his rightful place. It's a story millions of Americans tell themselves and their children. It's a story in which the messy and hard-to-understand world around us is no such thing.Instead, it is polarized as conflict between God's friends and God's enemies. The only difficulty is decoding the signs and symbols God lays out. Reality isn't real. Reality is a sinful illusion. What's real is the trail of secrets leading the chosen safely to The End. Argument, language, reasoning—they don't matter. Only they can know The Truth.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that religion is off-limits. Therefore, the conventional wisdom in Washington does not see, because it will not see, that tens of millions of Americans already believe democracy is getting in the way of God's plan,that democracy is—and I mean this seriously—desecrating the sacredness of the US Constitution. As one critic put it, the Venn diagram showing the overlap of QAnon believers and white evangelical Protestants (and related groups) is actually a circle. When you stand with God against His enemies, you have God's permission to hate.

That's their religion. No, it's not a cult. It's more than that. It's deeper than that. The hate felt by the former president's supporters during four years' worth of political rallies is the same hate for America as it stands, not as they desire it to stand, that right-wing religious radicals have felt since post-Civil War America. That's when Charles Darwin's theories and what they determined about humanity's place in God's divine scheme first gained traction in the United States.Every single intellectual development—from evolution then to Critical Race Theory now—has been met with such hate. I don't understand why the conventional wisdom looks away from history.

Because it's easier, I guess. It's easier to maintain the myth of the civic religion; to be shocked by Americans talking about a military coup; to blame the former president for imperiling the world's oldest democracy. It's easier to respect religion without scrutinizing it too much, and risk discovering it's steeped in hate, which might force the conventional wisdom in Washington to take responsibility. On this one-year anniversary since Trump gassed Americans out of the way for a photo-op of him holding a Bible in front of a church, we need the truth. And that's never been easy.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Targeting the Left

In the face of the recent protests, the politicization of DHS operations that defined Trump’s first three and a half years in office, primarily through immigration enforcement, has soared to new heights. Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, the two men leading the department — both illegally occupying their posts, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office — have repeatedly leaned into Trump’s argument that antifa poses a profound danger to national security, despite evidence produced by their own office and other federal law enforcement agencies that groups on the far right present the most persistent and ongoing domestic terror threat in the country. Under their leadership, DHS immigration enforcement personnel, including Border Patrol and ICE agents, were deployed to Portland, Oregon, a site of ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, against the wishes of local elected leaders. The move was repeatedly criticized for exacerbating rather than calming the unrest.

Federal Agents at Protests Renew Calls to Dismantle Homeland Security

The ascent of Wolf and Cuccinelli is part of a broader hollowing out of leadership at DHS, which has effectively left in place only those who are loyal to the lone survivor of Trump’s original 2016 brain trust: Stephen Miller.

“The Democratic Party for a long time historically has been the party of secession — what you’re seeing today is the Democratic Party returning to its roots,” Miller told Fox News talk-show host Tucker Carlsonin July, when asked about the protests in Portland. “The mayors of these cities that have engaged in these kinds of lawless rebellions against federal law, against immigration enforcement, have engaged in unprecedented activity, andthis administration, for the first time in history, has taken action to restore immigration enforcement after five decades of bipartisan betrayal of the American worker.” He added: “This is about the survival of this country and we will not back down.”

Though best known for his war on immigrants, Miller’s political awakening is in fact rooted in bone-deep anti-leftism. “One of Stephen Miller’s main strengths and his original philosophy was about attacking the left,” Jean Guerrero, an investigative journalist and author of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda,” told The Intercept. “The focus on the left is the logical conclusion of Miller’s ideology.”

In her account of Miller’s upbringing in southern California, Guerrero details how a teenage Miller came up under David Horowitz, a man who renounced his ties to groups like the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s and devoted the rest of his life to a war on the political left. In college, Guerrero explains, Miller’s anti-leftism became bound up in great replacement theorizing, which in turn laid the foundation for his views on immigration and border security. “It boils down to the idea that the United States faces an existential threat in the form of the Democratic Party partnering with Muslims and other people of color,” Guerrero said. “He saw the immigration system as a way of realizing this white nationalist agenda.” In 2015, as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller encouraged reporters at Breitbart’s right-wing news site to write about “The Camp of the Saints,**” a racist French novel rooted in great replacement theory.

In addition to describing immigrants in grotesquely dehumanizing terms, the book argues that the downfall of Western civilization can be traced to the political left, particularly the “anti-racists,” “agitators” and “anarchists,” who stand in solidarity with refugees. For Guerrero, it is these passages that sound increasingly relevant today. “A lot of people talk about how it demonizes people of color, which it does,” she said. “But one of the most striking things to me is the echoes in the rhetoric about anti-racists in the book and what we now see in Trump’s reelection rhetoric, describing anti-racist protesters as agitators and anarchists and trying to paint the entire left as a mob that wants to destroy this country, which is essentially the white genocide theory.”=

The Proud Boys, a far-right pro-Trump group, gather with their allies in a rally called “End Domestic Terrorism Against Antifa” in Portland, Ore., on Sept. 26, 2020. Photo: John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. blood of commies w/ kyle t shirt?

Stand Back and Stand By

Among the most troubling of the president’s actions is his courting of armed, right-wing paramilitary groups and his confidence that the nation’s security forces are not apolitical institutions, but rather eager and engaged supporters of his “law and order” agenda.

“Stand back and stand by,” Trump told the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist street-fighting gang, during Tuesday night’s debate. The comment was widely seen as an order from the commander-in-chief to an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group, including among the group’s own leaders and members. Trump also weighed in on the killing of Michael Reinoehl, a self-described anti-fascist, by law enforcement in Oregon last month. In an interview published by Vice News shortly before his death, Reinoehl said he shot and killed Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of far-right group Patriot Prayer, days earlier in an effort to defend a friend. An eyewitness has claimed that Reinoehl was gunned down without warning. Referencing the killing in Tuesday night’s debate, Trump said law enforcement “took care of business.” He previously called the killing an act of “retribution.”

Proud Boys Rally Fizzled but Portland’s Cops Went on the Attack

Trump has similarly defended Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old fan of the president and the police accused of murdering two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounding a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Echoing the president’s line, documents obtained by NBC News this week revealed that DHS personnel were directed to make sympathetic comments about the accused shooter and told that the media was falsely painting Patriot Prayer as a racist organization. Both Danielson and Rittenhouse have achieved martyr status on the far right. Their names were invoked again and again at a Proud Boys rally in Portland last weekend. Though small in numbers, the rally was drenched in the rhetoric of civil conflict and allegiance to the president and the nation’s security forces. “Thin Blue Line” flags were ubiquitous at the event, as were the letters “RWDS,” short for the words “right-wing death squads.”

The blurring of lines between his support in right-wing paramilitary groups and law enforcement agencies has been a consistent feature of Trump’s presidency. In July, Vice President Mike Pence’s visit with Philadelphia’s police union also featured members of the local Proud Boys chapter. Meanwhile, violent “Back the Blue” protests in Arizona have featured participants fantasizing about the murder of their leftist political opponents. In an exchange Tuesday night, Trump pressed Biden to name one law enforcement agency that’s come out in support of his campaign. Biden did not.Trump, meanwhile, has enjoyed extensive support from law enforcement unions across the country, from those representing Border Patrol agents and ICE deportation officers, to the Fraternal Order of Police.

“He’s been wooing the security forces his entire term,” Stanley said. As Tuesday night’s debate wrapped up, Trump explicitly encouraged his supporters to head to election polls and be on the lookout for suspicious activity in what he predicted would be “a fraud like you’ve never seen.” Courting paramilitary groups and loyal security services, calling the integrity of the election into question, and urging his supporters to take it upon themselves to respond are “classic fascist tactics,” Stanley argued.

“He’s been using fascist tactics, unquestionably, and he’s already transformed many of these things into policy, particularly around immigration,” he said. “Now he’s turning to his political opponents, so now we’re really facing the concern about transformation into a fascist regime.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/policing-the-digital-frontiers-is-india-weaponizing-technology-to-silence-civil-society/

on June 15, 2020, Amnesty International andCitizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, uncovered a coordinated spyware campaign that targetednine Indian human rights defenders between January to October 2019.

In the world’s largest democracy, these types of incidents are a concern especially when viewed alongside the government’s broader crackdown on dissent. Under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led government, India has gained global notoriety forsilencing critical voices throughfrivolous defamation suits,arrests and detentions of citizens engaging in peaceful protests, and theimprisonment of journalists.

The activists were sent multiple emails, containing links to malicious software, disguised as important communications. If downloaded, the software would infect a user’s phone or computer withNetWire, a piece of commoditymalware designed to cause extensive damage to data and systems or to gain unauthorized access to a network.

Eight of the individuals targeted had been calling for the release of those indicted in the Bhima Koregaon case dating back to 2018 when, in the wake of violent attacks against Dalit communities in Maharashtra, police arrested several activists known for their advocacy work on behalf of these communities.

Unanswered questions about Pegasus in India

Three of the individuals targeted with Netwire were also targeted earlier in 2019 in the now infamous NSO WhatsApp hack, a spyware attack in which at least two dozen academics, lawyers, Dalit activists and journalists in India were targeted with Pegasus), a spyware that canextract a user’s private data, including passwords, contact lists, calendar events, text messages, and even voice calls. Some variants of it can even turn on a phone’s camera and microphone to capture activity in the phone’s vicinity.

The individuals were informed about this attack by Whatsapp, who contacted and alerted them that their phones had been under state-of-the-art surveillance for a two-week period in May 2019. This hack was part of a wider attack that targeted at least 100 members of civil society around the world and led to Whatsapp suing the NSO group in a US court.

Following the revelation of the Pegasus attacks in November 2019, NSO defended itself saying that it only sells its technology to “licensed government intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Consequently, several of those targeted in India wrote to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology asking whether the government had authorized the use of this spyware. Unfortunately, the Indian government’s Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Information Technology refused to give a straight answer to this question, only claiming that “no unauthorized interception” had taken place. Subsequently, the government sought to shift the blame on Whatsapp, insinuating that the tech platform had allowed the breach to take place and had not informed it about it. Embarrassingly, Whatsapp responded stating that it actually had informed the country’s nodal cyber response agency when the attacks had first taken place.

Illegally intercepting or accessing computer devices is recognized as a criminal act under international law and India’s Information Technology Act. If the hackers were private actors, it is concerning as to why the Indian government has not yet released details of any criminal investigations against them, despite sufficient evidence of a crime having been committed against its own citizens. The alternative scenario, if it happens to be true, is doubly concerning. State surveillance through the use of spyware not only violates India’s own laws around the interception of private communications but also poses a huge threat to free expression, privacy and freedom of thought.

BJP surveillance measures

While less invasive forms of surveillance have been used by different ruling powers through the decades in India, the BJP’s measures are excessive, to say the least. In December 2018, the Ministry of Home Affairsgave ten agencies blanket legal authority “to intercept, monitor or decrypt information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer.” This order was challenged in the Supreme Court to which the governmentresponded with a statement that “the veil of privacy can be lifted for legitimate state interest.” The order continues to be enforced, pending a final judgement by the apex court.

In May 2020, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting floated and closed a bid for a tool to provide “fact verification and disinformation detection on social media platforms.” According tomedia reports, this was the eighth attempt by this government, since it came into power in 2014, to “explicitly and directly monitor social media”. This latest attempt at mass surveillance is currently beingchallengedin court by the Internet Freedom Foundation. Given the Supreme Court’s 2017 ruling on privacy being a fundamental right, there is hope that this attempt too will be thwarted.

It is important to note that these attempts to monitor citizens’ lives are being made in the absence of a personal data protection law, which if enacted in line with international human rights standards, could offer some protection against these repeated attempts at surveillance. Unfortunately, the data protection bill introduced by the BJP-led government in 2019, which is currently undergoing joint parliamentary review, fails to meet such standards. It seeks to give the government unrestricted access to personal data on vaguely worded grounds of sovereignty, violating key legal safeguards around necessity and proportionality, as enshrined in international law and recognized by the Indian Supreme Court as intrinsic to safeguarding the right to privacy. There are further concerns that this is a backdoor attempt to provide legislative backing to the State’s passive surveillance activities online, which are currently conducted outside the remit of the law, merely through executive action, and thus escape meaningful oversight. Understandably, the bill has faced massive pushback from civil society, and even the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Privacy has expressed concern.

A global trend

These attempts to monitor and police digital spaces are not unique to India alone –digital authoritarianism is on the rise around the world, especially in countries where rising nationalism, combined with weaker rule of law has emboldened governments to crackdown on dissent, increasingly with the aid of technology supplied by dubious corporations eager to make a quick buck.

Spyware, one of the most invasive surveillance tools, has managed to evade regulation at the international level so far, largely because surveillance is a topic that governments are not keen to discuss, mostly due to diplomatic, political and national security reasons. Consequently, the lack of an international framework to regulate its production, sale and use coupled with an increasing interest by repressive regimes in the private lives of their critics, has led to an uptick in the use of spyware, as tracked by Citizen Lab. Concerned by this troubling trend, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression released a report, calling on governments to “establish an immediate moratorium on the global sale and transfer of private surveillance technology until rigorous human rights safeguards are put in place to regulate such practices and guarantee that governments and non-State actors use the tools in legitimate ways”. The US State Department has also released guidance to “assist U.S. companies seeking to prevent their products or services with surveillance capabilities from being misused by foreign government end-users to commit human rights abuses.”

These are steps in the right direction, which have taken effect largely due to the tireless advocacy done by civil society organizations who are bravely calling out human rights abuses, pushing for rights-respecting legislation and engaging in strategic litigation. Countries seeking to prevent the decline of democracy must support these groups, in India and elsewhere, by engaging them as trusted partners in the fight to keep the internet equal, open and free.

Written by Ayesha Khan

This postoriginally appeared on Global Voices

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an 920

only winner of last night's 'debate' was dictatorship and oligarchy

Thom Hartmann Common Dreams

September 30, 2020

What we saw last night was the dictator's playbook.

Tell violent white supremacist racists to "stand by" and encourage them to s...

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omfg

declares vote void in advance, camp look at electors, will not pledge peaceful trans

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/get-rid-of-the-ballots-trump-badly-bungles-a-question-on-whether-hell-accept-a-peaceful-transfer-of-power/

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trump Praises “Good Genes” of White Audience, Cites Eugenics Theory

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trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

AlterNet Staff September 23, 2020

John Heilemann, the national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, explained how President Donald Trump has already laid out his “roadmap” to cheat in plain sight for the upcoming…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-fascism-ascends-2020-election-may-be-the-crisis-of-democracy-that-opens-the-door-to-a-coup/

quite long refused to say that he would make a peaceful transition, and threatened to “get rid of the ballots”—loses the popular vote on Nov. 3 to Joe Biden, as polls currently indicate, he appears poised to dismiss millions of mail-in votes. He would likely do this through the courts that he has assiduously packed over the past three years, particularly via the Supreme Court seat he and his fellow Republicans are intent on seizing just prior to the vote. The legitimacy of both our system of elections and the foundational courts that embody the rule of law will have been not just undermined, but potentially destroyed.

Fascism, historians tell us, has only ever arisen in mature democratic states, and the main condition that permits it to seize power is a crisis of legitimacy for its major democratic institutions. The election of 2020 may well bring the crisis that does the trick for America.

Many observers—notably including authors Jason Stanley and Jared Yates Sexton—have remarked that the nation’s path under a Trump presidency has much more than a passing resemblance to the descent into fascism that has befallen other societies, the best-known examples being prewar Germany and Italy. The correlations are powerful:

Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal, and has been from the start. His opening salvo in the campaign—the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race poll-wise and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans—labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease—was classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. This became more refined and pronounced over the course of his presidency, as when he attacked four women Democratic congressmembers of color: “If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave!”
Trump’s palingenetic ultranationalism is his central theme. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidency and its neverending campaign, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.”) That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis—that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but in the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.
Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
Trump constantly proclaimed America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world during the 2016 campaign, and insists that this occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians. During his presidency, the crises varied according to Trump’s political needs—an immigrant caravan’s arrival on the border with Mexico was portrayed hysterically by Trump during the 2018 midterm elections as an existential threat, while this year, America is in grave danger (according to Trump and his fellow Republicans) from a largely imaginary “antifa threat.” The coronavirus pandemic that the world knows his incompetence allowed to kill 200,000 Americans—not so much.
He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
Trump’s contempt for weakness (another classic fascist trait) is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability, and more recently to his decision not to attend a ceremony at a World War II gravesite near Paris because the American soldiers there who had died in the war were “losers” and “suckers.”

Some of have argued—myself included—that Trump is not a fascist ideologue in the classic mold, but rather a living model of a right-wing-populist demagogue. But fascism, properly understood, is itself a species of right-wing populism: one that has simply turned metastatic, a cancer raging out of control in the body politic. If, as it seems, he is nonetheless leading America into fascism, it would be a distinction without a significant difference.

But, as one Twitter wag adroitly observed recently: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.” Conservatives (see, for example, claims by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and right-wing pundit that the threat of white nationalism is a hoax concocted by Democrats) and centrists have unsurprisingly dismissed such observations as undue alarmism and hyperbolic exaggeration. But then, movement conservatism, as I explored in some depth more than 15 years ago, is in many regards the source of the problem, as it has been the all-too-hospitable host for the fascist cancer. Centrists and some liberals, meanwhile, seem so emotionally wedded to a belief that underneath our ongoing chaos all these things are still normal that they’re incapable of comprehending that there is nothing remotely normal at all about them.

Even within a certain bandwidth of progressive thought—primarily Glenn Greenwald and his million-plus-follower Twitter cohort—the response to the rise of a fascist threat to American democracy is greeted with a kind of sneering dismissiveness. Recently, that was how Greenwald and Co. reacted when Max Berger, the cofounder of the Jewish anti-Israeli occupation organization If Not Now, tweeted: “The most surreal part of living through a fascist coup is that we’re not even talking about it as such.”

Greenwald quote-tweeted Berger in reply:

Liberal stars have spent 4 years convincing their followers of 2 claims:

1) Their domestic opponents are Nazis, fascists, and White Supremacist Terrorists.

2) Russia is lurking everywhere, an existential threat to US democracy.

Ponder what that means for how they’ll wield power.

Greenwald’s colleague at The Intercept, Lee Fang, appeared to chime in later that day:

What motivates the ruling class is a routine desire for maintaining power and self-interest. But political storytellers need lurid emotionally driven narratives, so the far left invents a white supremacist elite in charge of the country, just as the far right imagines a pedo cabal.

This line of argumentation is nothing new for Greenwald, who has previously dismissed concerns about the rising tide of white nationalism by suggesting that the politicians and activists raising those concerns were analogical to the right-wing “neocons” who used Islamophobic rhetoric to bash Muslims after 9/11. In these tweets, he’s extending that argument to suggest not only that the threat of white nationalism is an imaginary concoction existing solely as a club to bash the right, but that Democrats are the realfascists, or at best loony-tunes conspiracists, as does Fang.

This is nothing short of an outright denial of established facts. The reality we are confronted with daily—that the United States (and the rest of the world, with no small assist from Russian interests) are awash in a tide of white nationalism and its attendant violence, and that moreover this tide has been enabled, encouraged, and empowered by Donald Trump, both on the streets of America and within his administration—is not something that can be erased with a sneer.

Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.

Trump’s response all along has been to dance a tango in which, after sending out a signal of encouragement (such as after the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017), he follows up with an anodyne disavowal of far-right extremists that is believed by no one, least of all white nationalists. Whenever queried about whether white nationalists pose a threat—as he was after a right-wing terrorist’s lethal attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, when he answered: “I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”—Trump has consistently downplayed the threat of the radical right.

More recently, the appearance at the very least that Trump is deliberately encouraging a violent response to his political opposition has been growing. When far-right militiamen have gathered in places like Richmond, Virginia, and Lansing, Michigan, to shake their weapons in an attempt to intimidate lawmakers and other elected government officials, Trump has tweeted out his encouragement. When a teenage militiaman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, two fatally, Trump defended him while mischaracterizing the shootings. When far-right conspiracy theorists created a hoax rumor that antifascists and leftists were responsible for the wildfires sweeping the rural West Coast—resulting in armed vigilantes setting up “citizens patrols” and highway checkpoints, sometimes with the encouragement of local police—Trump retweeted a meme promoting the hoax.....

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The precipice is here’: Conservative explains why Trump’s love for dictators is only getting worse

Alex Henderson September 24, 2020

When the United States allied itself with fascist dictators during the Cold War — from Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile to Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay — the rationale for supporting…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/this-is-exactly-how-it-happens-foreign-reporters-warn-us-is-sliding-into-totalitarianism-and-could-be-sleepwalking-towards-a-kind-of-cold-civil-war/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trumps-climate-denial-will-gains-strength-is-americans-are-in-denial-about-his-neo-fascism/

piking temperatures, melting glaciers, rising seas, catastrophic hurricanes and unprecedented wildfires are clear signs of a climate emergency caused by humans. Denying the awful reality makes the situation worse. The same can be said of denial about the current momentum toward fascism under Donald Trump.

Trump’s right-wing base and leading Republicans are in lockstep with both types of denial. They embrace the most absurd claims about climate, such as Trump’s recent comment during a visit to fire-ravaged California that “I don’t think science knows, actually.” And they refuse to recognize or deplore his autocratic moves.

On the left, hardly anyone doubts the climate crisis. And there’s widespread recognition that Trump’s presidency is a full-blown emergency. But—with justified enmity toward the neoliberal corporatism and militarism of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party—some question or pooh-pooh the importance of ousting Trump with Biden.

Yet no one can credibly dispute, for instance, that Trump is increasingly aligned with white supremacy. Or that Trump is enabling more repressive actions by “law enforcement” and the courts. Any ambivalence about defeating Trump goes against the left’s historic responsibility to fight tooth and nail against the extreme right.

winning that fight is a victory for humanity as a whole. It also allows space for the left to function instead of being crushed.

But—after nearly four years of the Trump presidency—a normalization process has made denial a real hazard.

“The current ‘encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal.’ “

The bookHow Fascism Works, by Yale professor Jason Stanley, describes the dynamic this way: “Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of ‘fascism’ seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines. Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of ‘extreme’ terminology continually move.”

Even now, despite all that Trump has done and is threatening to do, some progressives still have trouble wrapping their minds around the reality of the neo-fascist threat right in front of us in real time. The current “encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal.”

One of the clearest voices about the intertwined perils of the climate emergency and the Trump regime is longtime Green Party activist Ted Glick, who has devoted decades of his life to organizing against climate disaster and a political system with corporate power dominating both major parties.

Nearly 20 years ago, Glick was the Green Party nominee for U.S. senator in New Jersey. In 2007 he went on a “climate emergency fast” (water-only for 25 days) to protest the federal government’s failure to take action on global warming. In 2010, he hung banners inside a Senate office building that said “Green Jobs Now” and “Get to Work,” risking up to three years in prison.

“There are an awful lot of reasons why it is so important for Trump to be defeated and removed from the White House, but I continue to believe that the most important one is the climate crisis,” Glick wrote last week.

“There is no question but that the climate issue is very much connected to many other issues, among them the issues of jobs, poverty, immigration, health care, racism, and war and peace,” he pointed out. “That is why the concept of and the organizing for a Green New Deal must be central not just to the climate movement but to the movement of movements which, alone, can make it happen once Trump is out of the White House.”

And Trump will only be out of the White House four months from now if Biden receives enough votes in swing states this fall.

Glick’s conclusion rings true: “Removing Trump is the prerequisite for everything else. Those who don’t get that on the left should really ponder what will happen to the world’s disrupted ecosystems and the billions of people reliant on those ecosystems under a second Trump administration and beyond. We must do all we can in the next two months to literally save the world.”

Climate change is an emergency. And so is Trumpism. Flames are approaching what’s left of democratic structures in the United States.

Stopping the advent of fascism doesn’t offer any assurance of being able to create the kind of society and world that we want. But failing to stop the advent of fascism would assure that we won’t.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/there-has-to-be-retribution-trump-openly-endorses-extrajudicial-s-of-suspects-by-law-enforcement/

no lnx pix twt vid

discussing the recent police killing of a self-described anti-fascist suspected of fatally shooting a far-right activist in Portland, Oregon, President Donald Trump openly endorsed extrajudicial executions in a Fox News interview Saturday, declaring that “there has to be retribution.”

“I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him,” the president told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, referring to Michael Forest Reinoehl. “This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something—that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

Trump’s comments came days after an ordained minister who lives in an apartment complex near where Reinoehl was shot and killed by members of a law enforcement task force earlier this month in Lacey, Washington said it was not at all clear that Reinoehl was armed when police gunned him down.

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As the Washington Post reported, the witness alleges that “Reinoehl was clutching a cellphone and eating a gummy worm as he walked to his car… That’s when officers opened fire without first announcing themselves or trying to arrest him.” The witness account contradicts the law enforcement narrative that Reinoehl “produced a firearm” when officers attempted to arrest him.

In VICE interview before he was killed by police, Reinoehl said he was acting in self-defense late last month when he fatally shot Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer.

Watch Trump’s remarks:

Lawmakers and other observers immediately raised alarm at Trump’s celebration of the police killing of Reinoehl, which the president explicitly characterized as retaliatory.

“State violence to advance the end of ‘retribution’ is death squad logic,” tweeted Brian Beutler of Crooked Media.

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Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) noted that “extrajudicial killings are something many Republican U.S. senators oppose if they happen outside of the United States.”

“But they won’t say anything about this,” Schatz added. “Every single member of the Senate who talks about the rule of law needs to speak up, or forever hold their peace.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-has-a-plan-to-steal-the-election-in-fact-he-has-at-least-5-of-them/

dirty tricks authoritarian

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920 an

omg

Full frontal attack on rule of law’: Trump sanctions top ICC officials probing US war crimes in Afghanistan

us mil in afgan, but also israeli palestine

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an 920

trump slammed for suggesting Barr must prosecute critics like Obama to become ‘greatest’

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 2, 2020

President Donald Trump is telling Bill Barr he must prosecute the president’s critics, like former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in order for him to…

stokes violence then sez only he can stop THOSE PPL:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-signal-to-his-followers-is-clear-violence-and-chaos-are-my-only-hope/

no twt vid link

prez trump’s signal to his followers is clear: Violence and chaos are my only hope

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon August 31, 2020

President Trump was having a normal one on Sunday morning, tweeting and retweeting 89 times over the course of three and a half hours. Many of them were tweets of polling numbers from obscure firms showing him in the lead after the Republican convention. But most of the tweets and retweets were incitement to violence among his true believers and complaints about “Democrat cities,” an ongoing mantra which he seems to think is a slam dunk to get him re-elected.

He repeatedly insulted and mocked Joe Biden, of course, and Portland, Oregon Mayor Ted Wheeler will undoubtedly have to change his phone number after the president of the United States posted it on Twitter so his followers could call and demand his resignation.

He also showed support for one of his fans in Wisconsin:

[]

It was a manic tweet spree and one that couldn’t have show the president’s state of mind any more clearly. Biden has said Trump is “rooting for violence,” and I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue with that.

In fact, Trump’s surrogates are saying it right out loud. Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump whether she agreed with White House counselorKellyanne Conway’s assertion that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” Lara answered, “Well, I think it paints a very clear picture.” She might as well have said, “You go, boys!”

On CNN on Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., agreed with Trump that the shootings by a 17-year-old Trump fan last Tuesday night in Kenosha were understandable:[]

What the president did was he offered to surge manpower and resources so the violence could end. The governor did not accept that that day, that night tragically two people lost their lives because citizens took matters into their own hands. I’m not for vigilantism. I’m not sure that’s what was happening. People felt, because the governor — local officials were looking for help.The governor did not accept the help, and so there was not the resolve to end the rioting, and so people took matters into their own hands, and that’s what ended up happening. People die.

Johnson is confused about everything, as usual. Trump publicly berated Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers for failing to call in the National Guard hours after Evers had already done so, telling his followers that Evers wasn’t protecting the city. Johnson basically said that people felt they needed to take matters into their own hands because the president had lied to them and told them the governor wasn’t protecting them. Yet somehow he’s against vigilantism. Everything about that is a grotesque inversion of anything one could call “law and order.”

Trump was at it again later on Sunday, tweeting in response to a press conference by Wheeler, the Portland mayor. Trump called him a “dummy” and ranted on, saying, “He would like to blame me and the federal government for going in, but he hasn’t seen anything yet. We have only been there with a small group to defend our U.S. courthouse, because he couldn’t do it.”

Conway’s little gaffe in which she admitted that the White House and the Trump campaign believe street violence is good for them illuminates the president’s fanning of the flames. He has finally grasped that he cannot unilaterally sending in a bunch of federal cops, as he did in Washington to stage his photo-op last June. Instead, he’s not-very-subtly signaling to his gun-toting fans that they are going to have to take action on their own if they hope to scare people into voting for him. Leave the propaganda to him, just ramp up the chaos.

He tweeted that MAGA “protesters” who came to Portland in a caravan on Saturday night were “Great Patriots!” and later explained why their behavior was understandable:

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wondered on Twitter whether “suburban voters look at these pictures and say, ‘yes, where I belong is in the same political coalition as men who crowd into pickup trucks w/guns, as in Bosnia 1998 or a Third World dictatorship?'” (Those huge flags flying behind them reminded me of men crowded “into pickup trucks w/guns,” as in news photographs of ISIS fighters.)

It’s a jarringly familiar sight, but it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in America before.

There was an actual shooting that night and someone died. It’s unclear what exactly happened. But it is very clear that this kind of confrontation is something that Trump and his henchmen are actively stoking for political gain.

As I wrote on Friday, this is hardly the first time Trump has deployed crude, racist fear-mongering. He’s been doing it for years, going all the way back to the full-page Central Park Five ad. If it isn’t marauding gangs of Black teenagers, it’s Muslim terrorists or Mexican rapists or left-wing anarchists. There’s always some bogeyman coming to get you.

The only thing he knows how to do is point a finger at “the other” and then promise people that he’s the only one who can save them. He feels confident that he’s got the troops to back him up, one way or the other. He gave an interview with Breitbart back in 2019 in which he made this explicit:

You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

Yes, it would be very bad. The question is whether or not anyone will believe that Donald Trump is the man who can save America from all this mayhem he is creating. After all, he’s been promising to do that ever since he came down that elevator. Here he is at the 2016 Republican convention:

I guess that’s yet another promise he’ll fulfill after he makes America Great Again — Again.

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https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177013

Trump’s Claim He’ll Send Sheriffs to Polling Places is Revealing in a Lot of Unintended Ways

Breaking News

tags: Republican Party, voting rights, Donald Trump, Vote Suppression, voter intimidation

“Are you going to have poll watchers?” Hannity asked his friend during an interview clearly aimed at pulling viewers away from simultaneous coverage of the Democratic convention. “Are you going to have an ability to monitor, to avoid fraud and cross check whether or not these are registered voters? Whether or not there’s been identification to know that it’s a real vote from a real American?”

“We’re going to have everything,” Trump replied. “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals. But it’s very hard.”

This, understandably, raised eyebrows. The president would send law enforcement to police polling stations? It’s a scenario that seems analogous to elections conducted by Eastern European strongmen, not by an elected official in the United States.

There are a few things to keep in mind about this claim, though.

The first is that, like so many of Trump’s wild assertions, he has made it before. In August 2016, he gave a speech in Altoona, Pa., in which he pledged to combat what he presented as endemic fraud in the state.

“We have to call up law enforcement. And we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching,” he said then, later adding another familiar refrain, that “the only way they can beat [me] in my opinion — and I mean this 100 percent — is if in certain sections of the state they cheat, okay?”

When he made the claim at the time, though, there was a significant roadblock to the plan. The Republican Party had been restricted from dispatching poll watchers to precincts for more than 30 years, the result of a lawsuit filed by the Democrats in 1981. Why? Because the Republican National Committee was using “poll watchers” in an effort to intimidate non-White voters....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-donald-trump-has-constructed-a-legal-infrastructure-of-fascism/

the debate over whether Donald Trump is a fascist is no longer confined to a narrow segment of the far left. It is now out in the open. Even mainstream columnists like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg and the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor and influential Democratic politicians, such as Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, have come to use the “F” word to describe our 45th commander in chief.

Although it is an emotionally loaded and often misused term, fascism is as real today as a political and cultural force, a set of core beliefs and a mode of governance as it was when Benito Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and declared himself dictator six years later.

Nor is fascism a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Churchwell’s article is aptly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.” In it, she offers a working definition of fascism, noting that fascist movements, both past and present in America and abroad, are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:

"[N]ostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; thedelegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualismand attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhoodand collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain ‘bloodlines’ over others.”

Anyone who has studied Trump’s campaign rhetoric or watched the brutality of federal law enforcement officers deployed against protesters in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, can plainly see the features at work.

But what about the legal structures that have permitted Trumpian fascism to take hold in a nation known for its resilient democratic institutions and traditions?

Like other fascists before him, Trump’s path to power was made possible not by outright violations of the law, but by fundamental flaws in existing law, embedded in Trump’s case in the U.S. Constitution and key federal statutes that were in place long before he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his initial presidential bid.

These are the loopholes and voids in American democracy that were waiting for a would-be strongman like Trump to exploit. Although there are many such loopholes, Trump has benefitted from nine in particular.

1. The Electoral College

The Founding Fathers who drafted the Constitution were visionaries and revolutionaries. But they were also wealthy white men of property, elitists, and in many instances, slaveholders, who deeply feared the potential “tyranny” of majority rule.

Instead of designing a system of direct democracy that would allow the people to choose their president by a national popular vote, the founders established the Electoral College, which allocates to each state a number of electors equal to its combined (Senate and House) congressional delegation. (The District of Columbia was accorded three elector votes by the 23rd Amendment, ratified in 1961.) When Americans go to the polls, they don’t actually elect the president. They vote instead for a slate of state electors, who cast the real votes.

Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Paper No. 68 that entrusting the selection of the president to electors rather than the people would ensure that presidents were chosen by “men most… likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations,” and guarantee “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

History has proven Hamilton and the founders wrong. On no fewer than five occasions, we have installed presidents who won the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote: John Quincy Adams in 1824; Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876; Benjamin Harrison in 1888; George W. Bush in 2000; and Donald Trump in 2016.

Trump lost the 2016 popular vote by a greater margin (roughly 2.8 million votes) than any president in U.S. history. His fascism represents a tyranny of the minority unanticipated by the founders, but made possible by the system they devised.

2. The Constitutional Design of the Senate

Under the Constitution, all states are allocated two senators, regardless of population. In 2016, Senate Democrats won far more votes nationally than their Republican counterparts. Nonetheless, the GOP emerged with a solid majority in the upper chamber.

Since his inauguration, Trump has used the Republican-controlled Senate to further minority rule, ramming through two conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and many more appointments to the lower federal bench. Trump also benefited from the GOP’s hold on the Senate in his impeachment trial, securing a quick and easy acquittal. Seeking to protect the president at all times, Senate Republicans blocked any witnesses from being called.

3. Abuse of Executive Orders

Although the Constitution vests Congress with the power to pass legislation, presidents can issue executive orders pursuant to grants of congressional authority, or under their inherent powers. Every American president has issued at least one, dating back to George Washington’s 1794 proclamation aimed at suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion. Unless overturned by the courts, executive orders have the force of law.

Ultimately, it’s not the quantity of executive orders that matters, but the quality. If executive orders run afoul of Congress’ law-making powers to a great enough degree, they are a conduit to autocracy.

Among Trump’s most odious mandates are his Muslim travel ban of 2017; his 2018 order establishing a task force to evaluate the “operations and finances” of the beleaguered Post Service; his 2019 order imposing additional sanctions on Iran in the aftermath of his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement; and the order issued this past May, purportedly for “preventing online censorship.” Critics charge the censorship order has nothing to do with free speech, but was motivated by Trump’s desire to exact revenge against Twitter for removing some of his more unhinged, conspiracy-driven posts.

On August 8, Trump announced additional orders designed to break the congressional stalemate over a new stimulus package to combat the economic devastation wrought by COVID-19. The new edicts may look benign at first glance, but they include a directive slashing the $600 per week in enhanced unemployment benefits approved by Congress in March to $400, with cash-strapped states being held responsible for doling out one-quarter of the amount. Another order calls for deferring the Social Security payroll tax, a step that could severely undermine the delicate balance sheet of the Social Security Administration in the middle of a pandemic.

4. The National Emergencies Act

Passed in 1976 as a post-Watergate reform to rein in presidential power, the National Emergencies Act has in practice been a failure, in large part because it doesn’t define what constitutes a national emergency. The act accords the president complete discretion to issue an emergency declaration, as long as the president specifies at least one emergency power contained in an existing federal statute that will be used to address the declared emergency.

In February 2019, Trump invoked the NEA to redirect $2.5 billion in federal funds for construction of his shameful wall along the border with Mexico, citing an obscure section of the United States Code dealing with deployment of the Army’s “Ready Reserve” units. In July 2019, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling decided along ideological lines, overturned a lower-court decision that had blocked the funding transfer. In October 2019, Trump vetoed a bipartisan bill that Congress had passed to repeal the emergency decree.

What emergency will Trump declare next? How about a crackdown on the “fake news” media? A 1934 law still on the books allows the president to shut down or take control of “any facility or station for wire communication” (arguably, the internet in the digital era) upon his proclamation “that there exists a state or threat of war… or other national emergency.”

5. The Scapegoating of Immigrants

The most heartless and dangerous policies adopted thus far by the Trump administration arguably lie in the area of immigration. Nothing says fascism more than dispatching federalized National Guard troops to the border, as Trump did in 2018, or incarcerating undocumented immigrant children in makeshift detention camps, or withholding federal funds from so-called sanctuary states and cities.

Trump’s policies may be especially oppressive, but they haven’t sprung from thin air. In the larger historical context, they fall well within the boundaries of America’s deep-seated nativist traditions. From the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the “red scares” of the 20th century, the “Operation Wetback” mass roundups of the Eisenhower administration, the expedited deportation hearings instituted by Bill Clinton and the deportation records set by Barack Obama, our immigration laws and policies have been driven by political expediency, paranoia, scapegoating, racism and economic exploitation. Trump has simply taken advantage of them to consolidate and appease his electoral base.

6. The Transformation of the Department of Homeland Security Into a Mobile Paramilitary Force

Since its creation in 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has grown to become the third-largest federal agency, with more than 240,000 employees. More than 60,000 DHS employees work as law-enforcement officers assigned to the Border Patrol, the Federal Protective Service and other units.

The DHS operates at the direction of the president. In July, DHS forces were dispatched to Portland, where they bombarded protesters with tear gas and pepper spray, savagely beat protesters, and abducted some in unmarked rented vans. Rather than reprimand the agency for its excesses, Trump has promised to use similar tactics in other cities. He has also threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send the U.S. military to quell protests elsewhere.

7. Abuse of the Pardon Power

The Constitution gives the president broad authority to grant “reprieves and pardons” for federal crimes. Presidents since George Washington have exercised the power, sometimes controversially.

No president has used the power to reward political cronies, misfits and crooks more than Trump. In 2017, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the notorious Arizona sheriff, after he had been convicted in federal court of criminal contempt. In 2018, he pardoned the far-right pundit Dinesh D’Souza, who had pleaded guilty in 2014 to making an illegal campaign contribution. In 2019, he pardoned three U.S. military officers accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. And earlier this year, he commuted the prison sentence of his longtime adviser and associate Roger Stone.

In the manner of a dedicated fascist, Trump has even claimed the “absolute right” to pardon himself if the need ever arose.

8. Eroding Justice Department Independence

No fascist takeover can be complete without the steadfast loyalty of government prosecutors to the nation’s supreme leader. Until the arrival of Trump, every president since Nixon had respected the operational independence of the Department of Justice. The DOJ’s independence, however, is not enshrined in the Constitution or protected by federal statutory law. It is a norm that the president, as head of the executive branch, can breach at will.

Trump has worked hard to break the DOJ. When he fired Jeff Sessions, his first attorney general, in November 2018, he replaced him with Bill Barr, a hardline proponent of the “unitary executive,” a theory of governance that espouses a wide-ranging expansion of presidential power. Since then, as Intercept columnist James Risen has charged, Barr has “turned the Justice Department into a law firm with one client: Donald Trump.”

9. Voter Suppression

In the run-up to the 2020 election, Trump’s new appointee as postmaster general, a former donor named Louis DeJoy, is shutting down local post offices and reducing overtime pay for postal workers under the guise of cost-cutting to sabotage the agency that will be charged with delivering a critical mass of mail-in ballots in the fall. Combined with other suppression techniques that are already in place—strict voter ID laws, voting roll purges, the closing of polling stations, etc.—a grand plan is taking shape to cast doubt on the vote tallies in crucial swing states.

As the plan unfolds and the election’s legitimacy is called into question, Trump and his allies can be expected to summon the Supreme Court to ride to their rescue in a replay of Bush v. Gore, the infamous judicial coup d’état that handed the 2000 presidential election to the GOP. Alternatively, Trump could try to push the election to the House of Representatives, where the outcome would be determined according to the arcane procedures of the12th Amendment.

Whether Trump can pull off such a scheme remains to be seen. One thing, however, is certain: If Trump wins another term, the fascism we’re seeing in America today will pale in comparison to the fascism we’ll see tomorrow.

Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-the-1971-stanford-prison-experiment-prophesied-americas-authoritarian-backslide

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one of 4 horses, related to all but esp militarization, esp on climate refugee; note sublethal used on nat aM dapl remote ppl of color now pepperball explodes to head of activist, press lost eye? state of exception/margin periphery comes to Portland

yikes primary 7/20 portland secret police

:{:{}:

combo of militarization and criminalization (of undoc immigrant, periphery, then sanctuary city, BLM ACTIVIST AND PRESS SUB-LETHAL WEAPONS)

why did portland get hit 1st by secret police vs seattle autonomous zone? why released when they invoked rights? guy in video had black hard hat?

Washington enacted a measure in June 2019 in favor of sanctuary cities, similar to California and Oregon laws which are among the strongest statewide mandates in the nation.^[186]

Seattle^[187]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/an-official-resigns-from-the-trump-administration-after-witnessing-the-presidents-slide-toward-authoritarianism/

during his years in the federal government, Kyle Murphy was heavily focused on security and foreign affairs: Murphy, now a senior associate for Center for Strategic and International Studies, served with the Defense Intelligence Agency and was a National Security Council director for West Africa. But recently, Murphy resigned from his position as a DIA senior analyst — and he did so to speak out against the injustice that nonviolent George Floyd protesters suffered in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. on June 1.

“I was among the thousands of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters teargassed in Lafayette Square and nearly knocked to the ground by the downdraft from a military helicopter hovering over Pennsylvania Avenue,” Murphy explains in a piece for Just Security.“In the course of my work, I have watched autocratic leaders around the world employ similar tactics — actions that often precede broader uses of violence against domestic opposition.”

The June 1 events in Lafayette Square, Murphy argues, were not an “anomaly,” but a pattern typical of President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian approach to dissent.”

“I left government service after more than a decade because I lost faith in the courage of the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to refuse unlawful orders from the president,”Murphy notes. “They effectively labeled me and other Americans expressing our views in a peaceful assembly as enemies. They authorized troops to use overwhelming force and set a dangerous precedent by enabling the president to ignore state and local officials’ objections and deploy federal forces in response to popular protests."

murphy cites Gambia and Burkina Faso as two examples of African countries where he has seen “authoritarian leaders attempt but ultimately fail to subdue populations deeply committed to advancing democratic values” — and he compares Trump to authoritarians in parts of Africa. The use of force against nonviolent protesters in Lafayette Square on June 1, according to Murphy, underscores “the president’s disdain for democratic values” and “should be put in the context of a continuous slide toward authoritarianism.”

“I see grave similarities between events in our country and the processes by which autocratic leaders have brought their countries to the brink of civil conflict and beyond,” Murphy laments. “Each day, Trump’s approach looks more like the autocrats I warned about as an analyst. I am alarmed by the decision to send federal forces to Portland and additional cities over local objections — as well as the abusive approach of those forces to protesters in operations well beyond their normal jurisdiction.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/experts-explain-the-**4-main-psychological-factors-that-drive-trumps-rabid-fan-base/

no lnx

a looming question in today’s political climate is: Why do Donald Trump’s devotees continue to support him despite the carnage of his well-documented failures? Although we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic that is surging and not contained, Trump seems to maintain a base support of 35% to 40%. What are the psychological factors that influence or underpin his supporters’ attraction to him? And might this provide some perspective on how to change these supporters’ minds?

Multiple psychological factors seem to influence and explain his supporters. We have divided these factors into four major categories: Rebelliousness and Chaos; Shared Irrationality; Fear; and Safety and Order.

Rebelliousness and Chaos [DISRUPTOR? BROWNSHIRTS HOODLUMS?]

Some Trump supporters have a strong desire for rebelliousness and chaos, and view Trump as the perfect vehicle for achieving their personal goals. These supporters tend to become “anti-establishment and anti-government,” even when it is against their best interest. Many are unhappy with their station in life and believe chaos in the political system will bring them important gains. They seek immediate and sweeping changes and believe a rebellious attitude and rebellious behavior are what is necessary. They would rather have chaos, even dangerously or regressively so, than the status quo.

These supporters believe in Trump’s professed anger and rebelliousness, while often ignoring the content of the issues at hand. Trump’s talk of“draining the swamp” [SHORTHAND FOR DESTROY DC POWER PPL? NEWT CALLED DISEASE?] and of eschewing “political correctness” is attractive to them. They react emotionally and irrationally in embracing Trump’s decisions to create chaos, such as by sending federal troops into American cities to provoke hostile conflict with protestors. They enjoy and thrive upon Trump disavowing norms, rules, and laws. Rebelliousness and chaos can be a major psychological influence, but it can have serious negative consequences such as undermining the chance for real change.

Shared Irrationality

The Dunning-Kruger effect. Some people are under-informed and misinformed and are completely unaware of their lack of information. They tend to overestimate their level of knowledge and hold onto that position. They develop “illusory superiority” from their inability to recognize their true lack of knowledge. In other words, some people think they know more than they do and hold firmly to their opinions. These people are resistant to change their political thinking because they believe they are the knowledgeable ones. Trump and some of his supporters have this psychological phenomenon in common; they are unable to remedy their own limitations of knowledge and their inaccurate thinking.[QANON?]

Magical thinking.This is the belief that one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or words can bring about effects in the world. Or, similarly, that one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, or words can cause something to happen. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between one’s internal, personal experience and the external physical world. This often emerges from an inability to distinguish fully between emotions and logical thoughts. Relying totally on emotion or “gut reactions” results in magical thinking. Trump engages in magical thinking almost constantly. This is especially dangerous regarding the pandemic: “It will disappear very quickly,” “We have it under control,” “We may have some embers or some ashes…” Many supporters engage in magical thinking and are encouraged and validated by Trump, leading them to align strongly with him.

Obsession with celebrity. Some people are obsessed with celebrities and reality television. Trump entertains them and amuses them. Some supporters are always waiting to see what outrageous thing he says or does next. These supporters are happy as long as they are being entertained by him. They act as if life is a “game” or a “show” that is somehow disconnected from the difficult realities of everyday life, but it is not.

Shared omnipotence. This is a fantasy based in childhood experiences during our earliest years–due to our complete dependency upon parenting persons–that if one can find the “right” leader, then everyone can live harmoniously together forever. While this dynamic is often seen in romantic relationships, especially during the early infatuation period, this exact same dynamic can be seen in political relationships as well. In this case, some people believe that Trump is the “right” leader who can take them to a place of harmony and never-ending happiness and success. This is an infantile fantasy that is unrealistic and unachievable because it is not rooted in the real world of adult life. Even so, a childhood fantasy can be intense and not easily given up.

Fear

Brain reactivity to threats. Research shows that some people have an exaggerated fear response to threats. When presented with specific perceived threats–immigrants, democrats, protestors, socialism–conservatives’ brains light up in activity and experience a need to seek safety. Trump actively encourages his supporters to experience exaggerated fear responses, such that their brains remain energized.

Fear mongering. Terror management theory explains why fear mongering works. When people are reminded of their mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they reflexively defend those who share their world view and their natural and ethnic identity. Tribal identification is an outgrowth of fear mongering. Racism and bigotry are related to fear. Trump appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists and murderers.” This fear mongering by Trump is aimed at supporters who are vulnerable to racist and bigoted thinking because it fits with their world view. Another major fear among Trump supporters is falling behind financially and losing the economic capacity to control their lives and protect themselves. A third major fear among Trump supporters is of socialism and believing that capitalism is being threatened and even destroyed. Trump is very adept at focusing on these specific fears among his supporters, using key words and names to trigger and stoke their emotional concerns NEWT]. Trump supporters believe that he is capable of protecting them from their fears. And when they feel protected, they overlook his offensive and outlandish behavior.

Conspiracy theories. Certain people are attracted to conspiracy theories because of their vulnerable personalities and even by mental illness. Life is complex and perplexing and at times dangerous. It is not simple or safe. Research shows that feelings of anxiety make people think more conspiratorially. A conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem much more straightforward and controllable. Fantasies that remove fear and doubt can be especially attractive, even if they are unrealistic and irrational. People who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events, to attribute intentionality where it is unlikely to exist, and to have lower levels of critical thinking. Trump has voiced many conspiracy theories: Spygate, Obamagate, Deep state, Trump Tower wiretapping, and others.

Security and Order

Social dominance orientation. People who score high on social dominance orientation prefer an established societal hierarchy. They are attracted to Trump because he promotes and normalizes the belief that high-status people and groups should be dominant over low-status people and groups. Trump’s clear distinction between groups on top of society (Whites) and those “losers” on the bottom (immigrants, Blacks, and Latinos) is a classic social dominance view. Individuals who are high on social dominance orientation are typically domineering, tough-minded, disagreeable, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. As such, these individuals have an attraction to authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism. Several traits characterize authoritarianism: deference to authority, aggression toward outgroups, a hierarchical view of the world, and the belief that the world is dangerous and threatening. Some people believe in having an authoritarian leader because they feel protected and safe by a strong, powerful presence. Trump’s authoritarian leanings are highly attractive to these supporters. Interestingly, research studies have shown the joint power of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation to predict far-right-wing voting in the United States and Europe.

How To Change Supporters’ Minds...

hong kong postpone elections one year //

calabrisi

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-supporter-and-co-founder-of-the-federalist-society-says-the-presidents-latest-tweet-is-grounds-for-impeachment

Cody Fenwick July 30, 2020

Steven Calabresi is not among the usual slate of conservative critics of the president. He doesn’t appear on MSNBC to lambast the Republican Party or write denunciations of the White House for The Bulwark. But in a new piece for the New York Times on Thursday, he offered a blistering rebuke to President Donald Trump’s suggestion on Twitter that he may seek to delay the November election.

Calabresi started with his Trumpist bona fides, confirming that he’s not inclined to criticize the president:

I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment.

Then he continued, cutting to the heart of the matter:

But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.

The United States has never in its history delayed a presidential election, he pointed out, and there’s no justification to do it now. Calabresi noted that it’s not even within Trump’s power to delay or cancel the election, and it’s up to states whether they want to use mail-in ballots, which the president has decried.

But unlike some political commentators who dismissed the president’s comments because he lacks the official capacity to carry them out, Calabresi took Trump’s threat seriously.

“President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election,” he wrote. “Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.”

Republicans in Congress — the people necessary to make good on the threat of impeachment that Calabresi raises — should follow his lead and hold the president’s feet to the fire. They ought to tell him: Back down or be replaced.

no lnx

---

aha-let authoritarian putin bolson etc homophobe ppp? white male xian straight is normal, all else is deviant

mind you, human rights violations in ICE covid, baby jails and secret police in portland

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/pompeo-panels-human-rights-report-pushes-radical-isolationist-anti-rights-anti-scientific-religious-agenda/

~ Amnesty int'l

Human rights advocates denounced as “dangerous” a draft report released Thursday by the U.S. State Department’s controversial Commission on Unalienable Rights that paintsproperty rightsand religious liberty as “foremost among the unalienable rights that government is established to secure” while casting doubt on other liberties, including reproductive freedom.

“Make no mistake: this report was not designed with principles of equality, justice, and rights in mind. Instead, it serves as another stepping stone in the White House’s radical, isolationist, anti-rights, anti-scientific, religious agenda,” Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), said in a statement.

“The Commission on Unalienable Rights is a thinly veiled religious fundamentalist panel, and the people on it should have absolutely no say about the human rights of people all over the world,” Sippel declared, calling the panel “a dangerous distraction from the fact that this administration does not believe that all people are equal and entitled to human rights."

[twt]

"This administration has shown time and time again that their concern with human rights is not about defining rights; it has to do with whose rights are being protected,” she added. “And when it comes to women and girls, and LGBTQI persons, equal protection of our human rights is not guaranteed under this administration, and this commission is just another attempt to deny women and others their rights.”

Critics of the commission, including CHANGE, have soughtto disband it with a lawsuit arguing that the biased views of its members could advance discrimination against certain groups. The panel was announced in July 2019 by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who unveiled its new report in a speech in Philadelphia Thursday, introduced by Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, who chairs the commission.

The commissioners write in the report that they, “like our fellow Americans, are not of one mind on many issues where there are conflicting interpretations of human rights claims—abortion, affirmative action, and capital punishment, to name a few.”

The panel’s treatment of reproductive rights in the report drew a rebuke from Planned Parenthood Action on Twitter Friday:...

an 720

From the full Editorial Board of the Washington Post:

THERE ARE no doubt thousands of people in federal prison who deserved a presidential commutation more than Roger Stone. But after President Trump’s intervention on Friday, Mr. Stone will serve none of his prison sentence. The president may have had the power to help his longtime friend. But that does not make it any less a perversion of justice — indeed, it is one of the most nauseating instances of corrupt government favoritism the United States has ever seen.

***

The United States is supposed to be a place in which laws apply equally to all. And while it never has — and never will — live up to that ideal in full, no modern president before Mr. Trump has so clearly renounced it. The president seems to be doing his best, within the confines of the U.S. constitutional system, to emulate the gangster leadership of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man whose ruinous reign Mr. Trump has always admired. If the country needed any more evidence, Friday confirmed that the greatest threat to the Republic is the president himself.

---

DN 7/6/20 new terror law --> authoritarian

duterte PI

---

mma 720 week in dumb fragment, but fascist pattern:

Carlson told his audience,“You will need a protector. That protector must be the Republican Party.” Carlson also called Black Lives Matter protests a disease: “Minneapolis was our Wuhan.”
There are now 10 QAnon-supporting congressional candidates who have made it to the November elections -- and every indication is that more are on the way.
Sarah Sanders said that Trump doesn't get credit for his COVID-19 response: “He got government out of the way."
Ben Shapiro claimed that the hit movie Get Out is racist against white people. Shapiro also said that Trump tweeted a video with his supporter shouting "white power" because the sound was off on his computer.

6/20 big ramp up on militarization and criminalization eg

omg in wake of milley and sec at st john 180, this pow #3?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-nominee-for-key-pentagon-position-accused-is-an-islamophobic-conspiracy-theorist-who-called-obama-a-terrorist-leader/

trump nominee for key Pentagon position accused is ‘an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called Obama a terrorist leader’

Written by Alex Henderson June 16, 2020

President Donald Trump has nominated retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata for a key position in the Pentagon, but Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to CNN, have vowed to oppose the nomination in light of Tata’s history of hateful anti-Islam rants.That includes Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the leading Democrat on the SASC.

In 2018, CNN reported, Tata described Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of” and called former President Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader” for — as he saw it — being overly pro-Islam. Tata was vehemently critical of the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran and claimed that it came about because ofObama’s “Islamic roots.” Obama, Tata claimed, did more to “help Islamic countries than any president in history.”

Anthony J. Tata

@ajtata

If true, and it appears to be, #Obama and #Clinton are guilty of sedition and/or treason 18 U.S. Code 2384 #MAGA #trump2020 #ComeyMemos #Kanye2024 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384 … https://twitter.com/_vachellindsay_/status/988616258022076416 …

8:31 PM - Apr 23, 2018

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Anthony J. Tata's other Tweets

In addition to Reed, Senate Democrats who have told CNN they will oppose Tata’s nomination include Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Gary Peters of Michigan. Warren told CNN, “An Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called President Obama a ‘terrorist leader’ should not be #3 at the Pentagon. Anthony Tata is by far Trump’s most unqualified and ill-suited senior defense nominee.”

In May 2018, Tata attacked former CIA Director John Brennan and tweeted, “Might be a good time to pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call. #Treason #Sedition #crossfirehurricane #Obamagate.”

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Replying to @KFILE

The "Manchurian candidate" Obama conspiracy article shared and endorsed by Tata claimed that Obama let ISIS grow on purpose in Iraq and Libya, saying the "deviousness of the Obama sedition runs deep."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …

Democrats on key Senate committee oppose Pentagon pick as more inflammatory tweets emerge

Several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Monday that they would oppose the nomination of retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata to oversee the Pentagon's policy shop.

cnn.com

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Tata accused Obama administration remembers of treason several times, saying former CIA chief John Brennan should "pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter...

DOH! / aha: do nothing congress was an actual thing, commented on (repeatedly?) by Maddow in comparison on recent GOP led senate (recall mtg right after BO where (openly vs leaked?) declared we will pass nothing even if we favor it); so lack of any gov't action that could help ppl is blamed on dems; plus a MAN of action will get it done whatever it takes, HARD vs soft dems/fems

EVANGELICAL:

:{:{}:

male is active, indep, fem is passive/dependent (thus must be obedient, submit to dominion of strict father, king of castle, breadwinner); sexuality is evil and must be controlled; function is to make baby, thus abortion (means of liberation) is an abomination

@realDonaldTrump

Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet thesesame weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/fox-news-removes-unethical-digitally-altered-images-of-police-brutality-protests-in-seattle

ok he was there, but a week before?

---

aha authoritarian dic wants/needs to use force to win, bonus turmpista base will reward him for WINNING over THEM; thus photoshop gunman into BLM seattle;

:{:{}:

trump tools are Fox and twitter; soc med optimizes fear and anger: he makes base afraid of THEY will use violence.[they are irrational, inferior, so the only way they can win is to take our stuff/jobs.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-has-no-grand-strategy-and-hes-going-all-in-with-losers/

ms 13 // antifa// new blk panthers

---

aha 620: i have blamed soc med for dissemination of BS, but just realized how much relies of manipulation of words (god/devil term, POV, selection is deflection of reality, but even more pix and video).

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/propaganda-fox-news-photoshops-gunman-into-stories-about-seattles-autonomous-zone

no pix url

Propaganda’: Fox News photoshops gunman into stories about Seattle’s autonomous zone

Image via Screengrab.

Written by The New Civil Rights Movement June 14, 2020

Legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern noticed that Fox News added a man carrying a military-assault rifle into images of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) on Friday. The CHAZ is a police-free area currently occupied by protesters police violence.

---

aha dics have to neuter courts so their crimes and corruption can go unpunished, but also use law to crush dissent:

cdv antifa

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-and-his-regime-have-again-turned-crisis-into-an-opportunity-to-advance-their-neofascist-authoritarian-agenda/

In his 1838 Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln warned:

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

In the year 2020, the United States in the Age of Trump has arrived at one such moment. Donald Trump is an authoritarian and a neofascist. Such a description does not need the modifiers of “apparent” or “would be” or “impending” or “inclinations” or “autocratic.”

That language is all too often deployed by journalists and others to soften the hard blows of the full and horrible reality that the United States is a failing democracy where Donald Trump is now only barely restrained in his anti-democratic behavior by the country’s now much weakened political norms, institutions and culture.

In his response to the protests and people’s uprising that was sparked by the savage killing of a black man named George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, Donald Trump has fully graduated from “would-be tyrant” and “apparent authoritarian” to full-on membership in such a category of ignoble leaders,

just as Derek Chauvin snuffed out the life of George Floyd, Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy.

Because he is mentally unwell and lives in his own malignant reality, worships power in the service of his own fabulism, narcissism, ego and greed, lacks empathy and concern for other human beings, and is an authoritarian and a neofascist, Donald Trump is only capable of destruction. Healing and creation are anathema to him.

As such, Donald Trump’s response to the protests was to slur those Americans who are sickened by police thuggery and brutality and are therefore moved to force positive social change as being “thugs.” Trump also summoned his paramilitaries and street thugs to defend him at the White House by participating in “MAGA Night.”

Trump threatened to enforce martial law by invoking the Insurrection Act through which he would deploy at least 10,000 active duty soldiers to crush and “dominate” protesters.

Trump also threatened to attack the protesters outside of the White House with the Secret Service and their “ominous” weapons and “vicious dogs.” The protesters outside of the White House were shot with rubber bullets, choked with tear gas, and beaten by police and other law enforcement forces at Trump’s and William Barr’s command. Why? So that Donald Trump could have a photo op where he could look “strong” as he walked from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church across the street in what was a Christian fascist authoritarian spectacle.

The resulting images were supposed to be akin to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” but instead Trump and his coterie looked like something out of an Ed Wood movie.

Donald Trump’s reaction to these protests was so dangerous and reckless and likely illegal that the country’s most senior military and civilian leaders decided to ignore his orders to unleash the United States military on the American people.

Lost in this maelstrom of events is how Donald Trump and his regime have again turned crisis into an opportunity to advance their neofascist authoritarian agenda. In response to the George Floyd protests, Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr declared “antifa” to be a “terrorist organization.” Such a designation means that offering material support to antifaor perhaps even being a “member” is now a very serious federal crime.

In a master stroke unnoticed by most Americans, the Constitutionally guaranteed rights to protest, free speech, and criticize elected officials are imperiled. In total, by declaring “antifa” a terrorist organization Donald Trump has criminalized dissent by the American people (and others) against him.

The facts:

Antifa is not an organization. It is an organizing strategy and an ideology.

As Billie Murray, professor of communications at Villanova University and an expert on rhetoric and social justice, explained to Salon in a phone conversation, “Antifascism is self-defense. They believe they are protecting their community, they are defending their community from fascist organizing and violence.”

Murray also clarifies the false equivalencies that are often made by too many reporters and other members of the commentariat when they discuss and write about “antifascists”:

We have a history of fascist violence that has led to world war. You are forgetting your history when you are assuming that fascist organizing is just a bunch of crazy people. You allow it to be a non-problem in your mind.

Too many people assume that fascism died in 1945. We won the war. Mussolini is gone. Hitler’s gone. Franco’s gone. We’re good. That is absolutely not true.

The first antifascist groups started in the late 1940s by Jewish people who were walking around Germany and seeing fascists on the side of the street touting the same things that Hitler did. Those Jewish people said, “We were soldiers in this war. We won this war and this guy is still on the corner saying such things!”

Clearly, we did not get rid of all of fascism because it’s an ideology. You are never going to completely eradicate it even with a world war. I think people assume that fascism died and, therefore, is no longer a problem.

Then, when you have antifascists on the scene, you can say, “Well, what are they even fighting for? They must just want to engage in violence. They just are being crazy and they’re just crazy just like those other people.”

We talk about these right-wing fascists as being “hate” groups or something like that because fascism is supposed to be dead.

Contrary to Trump’s and Barr’s and the broader right-wing echo chamber’s lies and fantasies, antifa is not responsible for the violence which took place during the protests following George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police. The FBI’s own data shows that violent acts such as arson, other property crimes, and physical assault was committed by local criminals who took advantage of the chaos, as well as “boogaloo” and other right-wing extremists.

As with “Obamagate,” “antifa” is an empty phrase, a type of signifier that can be made to mean whatever Trump and the right-wing disinformation machine want it to mean in the service of criminalizing Democrats, liberals, and progressives as somehow being “un-American.”

Trump and his agents use of “antifa” also represents the type of conspiracism and propaganda now rampant among American conservatives and other members of the right wing — and the resulting damage it has caused to American politics and society.

Writing at Business Insider, Sonam Sheth details how:

Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights who released a report last year on how disinformation would affect the 2020 election, told Business Insider thatefforts to frame the George Floyd protests as “a violent leftist conspiracy” bear “all the earmarks of current-day disinformation.”

“The now-familiar elements include profuse social media posts of dubious provenance, flat-out falsehoods by President Trump, and deft amplification by right-wing figures on Fox News,” said Barrett, who is also the author of a newly released report on content moderation.

The theory that antifa is behind organizing the riots is the most prominent piece of misinformation flying around about the demonstrations, according to Zignal Labs, which tracked and analyzed certain types of mis- and disinformation connected to the protests.

Out of 873,000 pieces of misinformation linked to the demonstrations, 575,800 mentioned antifa, Zignal Labs told The New York Times.

The allegations gained traction after Trump tweeted on May 31 that antifa and other left-wing radicals were responsible for the violence. But they started bouncing around social media days earlier, according to The Times, which found more than 6,000 Facebook posts linking antifa to the protests that garnered 1.3 million likes and shares from May 25 to June 1.

On Thursday, the hashtag #exposeAntifa began trending on Twitter as the president and his allies continued amplifying the theory.

Legal scholars and others have warned that Trump’s decree against antifa is “unconstitutional“. That may in fact be true. However, Donald Trump, an authoritarian and neofascist, has no respect for the rule of law. “Unconstitutional” is increasingly no longer a useful analytical category.

What role does Trump’s and the broader right wing movement’s misrepresentation and weaponization of “antifa” fulfill?

By criminalizing antifa (which literally means “anti-fascist”), Donald Trump is announcing that he is a fascist. He is doing this through the façade of fighting against “terrorism.”

Trump and the right wing’s lies about antifa legitimates violence against Trump’s political enemies. The logic is simple: To support Donald Trump is to love America. Anyone who stands against Donald Trump or otherwise opposes him is, by definition, a member of antifa and a “terrorist.” It is good and right that terrorists are to be subjected to violence and ultimately destroyed to keep America “safe.”

Trump’s recent comments about Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old man who was pushed to the ground by members of the Buffalo Police Department, suffering a fractured skull while his blood poured out of his ear on to the sidewalk and police officers walked over him like he was human trash, is one such example.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump said via Twitter that: “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”

Trump and his followers feel no human care of concern for “protesters” like Martin Gugino because they are supposedly antifa members. In Trump’s authoritarian worldview protesters are enemies of the state who are to be destroyed.

Other Republicans have been even more clear and direct in their public claims that antifa members should be hunted down and killed.On Twitter, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz recently said, “Now that we clearly see antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?”

The criminalization of dissent by labeling anti-fascists as “terrorists” is a preview of how free speech and other rights will increasingly only apply to Donald Trump’s right-wing Christian followers.

Such an escalation is taking place in how the FBI and local police are now interrogating people who they detained during the protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police.

The Intercept reports how:

Joel Feingold was in his apartment in Brooklyn when he heard the sound of police beating protesters outside of his building Wednesday night. Having spent much of the week in the streets joining the waves of demonstrations against police brutality currently sweeping the nation, Feingold rushed outside. He was swiftly tossed to the ground by a senior New York City police officer in a white shirt, thrown in a police van, and placed under arrest along with four other individuals for having ostensibly violated a recently imposed curfew on New York City residents.

Feingold and the others were taken to the NYPD’s 78th Precinct, where they were told that they were being cited for violating the city’s 8 p.m. curfew. It was there, Feingold told The Intercept, that they were interrogated by the NYPD and the FBI about their political beliefs and their reasons for participating in the nationwide protests — subjects that should, under the Constitution and local NYPD rules, be off-limits from law enforcement inquiries following an alleged curfew violation.

The Intercept continues:

After being processed and taken to a cell, Feingold said he and the three men he was locked up with were approached by two men in plainclothes. “One of them is from NYPD intelligence and the other is an FBI agent,” he said. Feingold said a third officer confirmed the affiliations of the two men as they were being discharged.The FBI agent’s line of questioning was clearly focused on his political views.

“We want to know who’s hijacking your movement and making it violent,” Feingold recalled the agent saying. “That is what he said verbatim.”

The FBI’s involvement in protest interrogations is part of an emerging pattern, New York City civil rights attorneys say, that seems to have followed Attorney General William Barr’s designation of the leaderless movement against fascism known as antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly alleged that outside agitators affiliated with the movement are stoking violence and unrest across the country.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party’scriminalization of dissentby targeting antifa is also best understood as part of a much larger effort to undermine America’s multiracial secular democracy.

This effort consists of: Voter suppression, voter theft, and gerrymandering; attacks on the free press and journalists as being “enemies” and “fake news”; targeted harassment and threats against those reporters, journalists, professors, and other public voices deemed to be enforcing “political correctness” against conservatives and Trump supporters; Trump’s use of white supremacist and other right-wing paramilitaries and extremists to enforce his will through violence and intimidation obedience to Trump’s political-religious cult; legal threats against the news media if they dare to criticize Donald Trump; and an effort to punish Twitter and other corporations if they disobey Trump’s orders.

Donald Trump and his Republican Party also command a massive disinformation propaganda machine consisting of Fox News, the OAN network, social media, radio, television, print, film, websites and other digital means of circulating right-wing lies and propaganda more generally.

Writing in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt previewed the type of authoritarian movement that Donald Trump now commands:

Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.

There are many examples where Trump and his propagandists have created an alternate reality for members of their movement. These include: “antifa” and “Obamagate” and “Benghazi”; Trump was a “victim” and “exonerated” by the Mueller investigation; a “deep state conspiracy” exists against Donald Trump; and Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden are the real “criminals” and “traitors” in the Ukraine extortion scandal and subsequent impeachment.

The truth and empirical reality as they exist must be silenced if the power of Trump and his movement’s malignant reality is to endure. Dissent is not allowed because the truth threatens the artifice of Trump and his movement’s “greatness.”

* * *

For three weeks, by the many hundreds of thousands (if not more) the American people have been protesting, struggling and engaging in both symbolic and corporeal politics where channeling the power of George Floyd’s death, they have faced down rubber bullets, tear gas, police batons, National Guard troops, militarized police, and literal loss of life and limb, in an effort to force a better and more just America into existence.

These protesters in this nationwide and now global people’s uprising against social inequality in its many forms are also braving death from the coronavirus. This is also true of black and brown and other Democratic Party supporters who have shown in Wisconsin and Georgia that they will wait for hours and days to vote — even during a pandemic — to remove Donald Trump, his regime and the Republican Party from power.

The birth of this new and better America will be painful. Those who engage in such a patriotic struggle are hope warriors.

Donald Trump, his Republican Party, and the other members of the right-wing power elite (and the corporatocracy) have been temporarily disoriented by these weeks of protests and people’s uprising.

Their response will be crushing. The empire always strikes back. Trump and his enforcers’ efforts to criminalize dissent will be amplified. The American people must not let themselves be cowed.

On Election Day 2020, the American people have a choice to make. Will they save the United States and its democracy by voting for Joe Biden, or will they commit national suicide by reelecting Donald Trump?

The American people will have to be their own heroes in the centuries-long story of defending and improving American democracy. In doing so they should heed journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers’ recent warning and advice that, “because truth is the foe he most fears, he has banned it from his administration and his lips. Yes, Bernie, you are right: the man in the White House has taken all the necessary steps toward achieving the despot’s dream of dominance. Can it happen here? It is happening here. Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes. We may be running out of luck, and no one is coming to save us. For that, we have only ourselves.”

---

https://theconversation.com/trumps-use-of-religion-follows-playbook-of-authoritarian-leaning-leaders-the-world-over-140050

It was a striking moment: Donald Trump, Bible in hand, posing for photos in an apparent moment of political theater made possible by the dispersal of protesters through the use of tear gas.

:{:{}:

The president’s visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church, known as “the Church of the Presidents,” came immediately after giving a Rose Garden speech framing himself as “your president of law and order” and threatening to send federal troops to “restore security and safety in America.” The next day, Trump made another high-profile visit to a place of worship, this time Washington’s St. John Paul II National Shrine.

Coming at a time of social turbulence, critics accused Trump of following authoritarian-leaning world leaders by sidling up to religion to reinforce an image as a strongman defending a particular brand of tradition. Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington Mariann Budde said as much, commenting that Trump used the Bible at St. John’s “as if it were a prop or an extension of his military and authoritarian position.”

As a scholar who has researched the interaction of politics and faith for decades, I know how potent religion can be as a political tool.

A powerful tool

Religion creates meaning in our lives by articulating values about how we relate to one another. But just as it can unite us, religion can also be a source of division – used to “other” people who are not of the faith and don’t share the same traditions and rituals.

When enough people perceive – or can be convinced – that traditional elements of the social fabric are at risk, religious signaling through the use of symbols and images can help would-be authoritarians cement their power. They present themselves as protectors of the faith and foes of any outsider who threatens tradition.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sunbathes with a cross on display over his bare chest. Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images]

In Russia, this phenomenon is seen in President Vladimir Putin’s forging of a strategic alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. For his part, Putin presents himself not just as a commanding leader, but also as a devoutly religious Russian. When he appears shirtless, for example, the large cross he wears around his neck is always visible. Meanwhile, the Church promotes traditional moral values and maintains a distance from the rest of the worldwide Orthodox Christian community, thereby separating the “truly Russian” from the outsider. In their most recent collaboration, Putin and the Church proposed amendments to the Russian constitution that would enshrine Russians’ faith in God, define marriage as the union of a man and a woman and, tellingly, proclaim “the great achievement of the [Russian] people in defense of the Fatherland.” These changes, all of which are intended to reinforce Putin’s base of support, would be jarringlynationalistic additions to the constitution.

Putin benefits from this insider-outsider dynamic in advancing his goal of restoring Russia to his vision of its past territorial glory. In justifying the Russian incursion into Crimea, Putin argued that the region had “sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.” Defending and expanding Russian territory is a much easier sell if it is framed as the defense of the holy.

Religious imagery

We see a similar dynamic in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s grip on power relies in large part on his embrace of a version of Hindu nationalism that elevates Hindus as “truly Indian” insiders and singles out Muslims as outsiders.

Like Putin, Modi wraps himself in religious imagery. He makes high-profile visits to remote Hindu temples while electioneering and never wears green because of its association with Islam.

Then-prime minister candidate Narendra Modi visits a shrine on horseback while electioneering in 2014. Strdel/AFP via Getty Images

Modi’s Hindu nationalism cements his popularity among devout Hindus and builds public support for anti-Muslim policies, such as stripping the only majority-Muslim state in India of its autonomy and enacting a controversial new law preventing Muslim migrants from attaining Indian citizenship.

Trump as savior

Trump has stumbled in attempts to portray himself as personally devout, declining to name a favorite passage from the Bible and stating that he has never sought forgiveness from God for his sins.

Nevertheless, public opinion polls have consistently shown that white Christians comprise the core of Trump’s base, although there are recent signs of a dip even among this key group.

And while it is important to note that many white Christians do not support Trump, 29% of evangelicals go so far as to say they believe he is anointed by God.

Where Trump succeeds is in presenting himself as a Christian nationalist, much as Putin and Modi style themselves as the stout defenders of their countries’ dominant religions.

One way Trump achieves this end is by making statements such as this one on the campaign trail earlier this year: “We’re going to win another monumental victory for faith and family, God and country, flag and freedom.”

In their new book “Taking America Back for God,” sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry contend that many of Trump’s white Christian supporters see him as their long-awaited savior – not just the protector of traditional religion, but also the defender of a bygone way of life.

In that imagined past, white men ruled the roost, families went to church every Sunday and outsiders knew their place.A deep-rooted desire for a return to that past may have been why Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan has proved so potent. As Yale scholar Philip Gorski has argued, that phrase can be interpreted to mean “making white Christianity culturally dominant again.”

As such, we should not be surprised that in the current moment of crisis Trump is attempting to use religion to reinforce differences between his supporters and his opponents. Like Putin, he is posing as the defender of a particular version of a glorious past. And echoing Modi, he is doing this by building support through the denigration of the outsider.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-moyers-its-happening-before-our-very-eyes/

At 98, historian Bernard Weisberger has seen it all. Born in 1922, he grew up watching newsreels of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler as they rose to power in Europe. He vividly remembers Mussolini posturing to crowds from his balcony in Rome, chin outthrust, right arm extended. Nor has he forgotten Der Fuehrer’s raspy voice on radio, interrupted by cheers of “Heil Hitler,” full of menace even without pictures.

Fascist bullies and threats anger Bernie, and when America went to war to confront them, he interrupted his study of history to help make history by joining the army. He yearned to be an aviator but his eyesight was too poor. So he took a special course in Japanese at Columbia University and was sent as a translator to the China-Burma-India theater where Japanese warlords were out to conquer Asia. Bernie remembers them, too.

In time, we became colleagues on a series of broadcasts about the 20th century. As we compared the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler in an episode titled The President and the Dictator, Bernie kept reminding the team that the most cunning demagogues “are never more than a few steps from becoming dictators.” Not surprisingly, the subject came up again when Trump was elected. No, we didn’t think he was Hitler, or the Republicans Nazis, but both of us acknowledged a deep unease over the vulnerabilities of democracy, which had led to Trump’s election in the first place. Inspired by Bernie and unnerved by Trump, I decided to take a deeper look at democracy under stress and began reading what is now more than a dozen books on Europe in the 1930s. The most recent is a compelling and chilling account of Hitler’s First Hundred Days, by the historian Peter Fritzsche – a familiar story revisited by the author with fresh verve and insight.

Hitler was a master of manipulation, using propaganda, violence, intimidation, showmanship, and spectacle — and above all, fear. By demonizing “the other” – Jews, social democrats and communists – Hitler won the hearts and minds of the masses, consolidating his power, and turning Germany into a one-party Nazi state.

i had just finished the book when I received a short email from Bernie, who had been watching on television the events following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. He wrote, “All this open talk by Trump of dominance is pretty undisguised fascism. He’s inciting chaos to set the stage for the strong man to ‘rescue’ the nation.”

There was no doubt who would be Superman riding to America’s rescue. When Trump promised to end what he called “American carnage” – a crisis of “poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, crime and gangs and drugs” — he did not ask for our help. He did not ask that we put our faith in each other or in our democratic values or even in God. Donald J. Trump would be our savior, the new Messiah — because “I alone can fix it.”

Bernie’s note triggered a recollection, sending me across the room to retrieve from a file drawer an essay written two years ago in The New York Review of Books by the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Reviewing three new books about ordinary Germans and the Nazi regime, he concluded: “With our system of checks and balances, full-blown authoritarianism is unlikely to happen here.”

I had admired Sunstein’s work for years and found reassuring his judgment that the rule of law would check a would-be tyrant. But many found that assurance disquieting.One dissenter was Norman Ravitch, emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. Responding to Sunstein, he wrote: “The normal concern of people of all sorts with their daily lives, family, work, leisure, and so on indicates that only those in certain areas of work and life could possibly notice the slow but relentless advance of authoritarian and totalitarian policies by the government. The Nazis knew how to appeal to people who did not have the ideological concerns but only normal human concerns. They knew how to conceal their real goals and how to make passive individuals active supporters.”

So does Trump. He understands that most Americans are concerned with little more than the economy, health care and jobs. They respond positively to politicians who promise action on these priorities, whether or not they know if those promises will ever be fulfilled. Ravitch pointed out that like Hitler and like Mussolini, Trump knows how to appeal to a variety of concerns with promises that can be both attractive and contradictory. Because no population is educated enough, sensitive enough, or ethical enough to see through the deception, “the danger is very great indeed. It may in fact be one of the chief weaknesses of democracy that democracy can lead to tyranny just as well or perhaps even more than other political systems.”

Two years have passed since that exchange between scholars, and in those two years Trump has doubled down. This president is no friend of democracy.

He has declared himself above the law, preached insurrection by encouraging armed supporters to “liberate” states from the governance of duly elected officials, told police not to be “too nice” while doing their job, and gloated over the ability of the Secret Service to turn “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” loose on demonstrators — to “come down on them hard” if they get too “frisky.

He has politicized the Department of Justice while remaking the judiciary in his image.

He has stifled investigations into his administration’s corruption, fired officials charged with holding federal agencies accountable to the public, and rewarded his donors and cronies with government contracts, subsidies, deregulations, and tax breaks.

He has maligned and mocked the disadvantaged, the disabled, and people of color.

He has sought to politicize the military, including in his entourage the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (dressed in combat fatigues), as his orderlies unleashed chemical fumes on peaceful protesters – all so that the president could use them as stage props in a photo op, holding up a Bible in front of a historic church, just to make a dandy ad for his re-election campaign.

He has purged his own party of independent thinkers and turned it into a spineless, mindless cult while demonizing the opposition.

He has purloined religion for state and political ends.

He has desecrated the most revered symbols of Christian faith by converting them to partisan brands.

He has recruited religious zealots for jobs in his administration, rewarding with government favors the electoral loyalty of their followers.

He has relentlessly attacked mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news” and “enemies of the people” while collaborating with a sycophantic right- wing media – including the Murdoch family’s Fox News — to flood the country with lies and propaganda.

He has maneuvered the morally hollow founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, into compromising the integrity of the most powerful media giant in the country by infusing it with partisan bias.

And because truth is the foe he most fears, he has banned it from his administration and his lips.

Yes, Bernie, you are right: the man in the White House has taken all the necessary steps toward achieving the despot’s dream of dominance.

Can it happen here?

It is happening here.

Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes. We may be running out of luck, and no one is coming to save us. For that, we have only ourselves.

india and brazil covid surge 6/3/20, brazil #2 behind US; west pt cadets (ceremony is still on?!) dn

620 an

The battle over free speech online is a volcano that’s ready to blow

Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute

Donald Trump threatened to close Twitter down a day after the social media giant marked his tweets with a fact-check warning label for the first time. The president followed th...

an 620

Ex-intelligence officials warn we are dangerously close to a complete unraveling of democracy Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Mon

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-trolling-has-turned-into-real-world-violence-what-his-voters-wanted-all-along/

Eager to get home to South Philadelphia before curfew — about an hour’s walk — I left Monday’s Black Lives Matter protest a few minutes before the police decided to tear-gas the peaceful crowd. The videos of the incident are terrifying — people desperately trying to scramble away from the painful gas, but trapped in the cloud by a fence and a hill that only a few could scramble over. It was a repeat of what is happening in city after city — most notably in Washington, where President Trump had a peaceful crowd gassed because they were getting in the way of a photo op — as police across the nation, evidently inspired by Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric, have begun violently crushing nonviolent protesters.

I had been with the protest for several hours, walking miles through the streets of Philadelphia, and can attest that it was a peaceful event. I witnessed one man arrested. But while things got tense and there was some shouting, it was the protesters themselves, not the cops, who took on the task of de-escalating the situation and keeping the crowd moving.

The crowd was peaceful, but perhaps more notably, it was packed with the kinds of people who have been offered up for decades now as hate objects by Fox News and other right-wing propagandists: A racially diverse group of leftist college-age kids, middle-aged hipsters, aging hippies, and earnest, clean-cut liberals handing out water bottles, all led by a young black woman with a portable speaker calling out the usual protest chants. These are the folks dangled in front of “heartland” America, day after day and night after night, as the “politically correct” villains who are coming to cancel Mom and apple pie and your God-given right to catcall women or tell racist jokes after you’ve had a couple.

Sticking it to these folks, often reduced to “the libs,” was the main reason Republican voters elevated Trump above all other possible Republican candidates in 2016. While the GOP clown-car assemblage of that campaign — Bobby Jindal! Carly Fiorina! Ben Carson! — were, like all Republicans since the era of Nixon and Reagan, happy to engage in coded race-baiting and misogyny disguised as piety, Donald Trump had the special appeal of not even bothering to speak in code. He channeled the base’s nakedly racist loathing of Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter and brown-skinned immigrants. He didn’t pretend that his misogyny was somehow in the service of Jesus Christ, dumping the charade of the chivalrous anti-choicer by describing women as “dogs” and mocking their looks if they dared question him. He ranted about “winning” and “draining the swamp,” and however generously the press chose to interpret those words, his followers understood he was talking about crushing liberals, a poorly-defined group they’ve been trained through decades of propaganda to despise.

Trump’s loutishness was always sociopathic and sadistic, but it’s clear that his voters instead chose to view it as thrilling and liberating, a chance to deliver some serious pain to the hated libtards who make them feel guilty for using racial slurs or suggesting that a rape victim “asked for it.” Some Trump fans, especially in the charming neo-fascist fringe that became known as the alt-right, immediately understood that Trump really meant it when he hinted that some cleansing right-wing violence directed against his enemies would please him greatly. To be clear, I agree that many of his supporters and apologists in the media honestly believed that the violent chatter coming out of his mouth wasn’t serious. It was just, in their reading, shock-jock tactics, an effort to bait liberals and then mock them for their angry reactions. It was, in fact, just an effort to “trigger the liberals.”

Now the trigger finger is placed on real weapons, and peaceful protesters (and journalists) are in the crosshairs.

No one should be surprised. Trump’s violent racism was entirely sincere, as should have been evident from his actual policy choices. This is the man who rolled back the Obama administration’s efforts to fight police brutality and who authorized programs to separate refugee families and put children in cages to punish their parents for the dastardly crime of Immigrating While Not White. The violence was always there, as rhetoric, as potential and as reality. Now it’s in our faces even more as any number of American cities, large, small and middle-sized, watch peaceful protesters get tear-gassed and beaten with batons, for no other reason than they belong to that amorphous group deemed “liberals” that Trump and his minions despise.

In my book, “Troll Nation,” I argued that conservatism, as an ideology, has lost the intellectual arguments on every issue of substance, from economic theory to the environment to race relations and gender politics. Now all conservatives have left is spite. That’s why “owning the liberals” is the main organizing principle of modern conservatism and its why the right eagerly chose Trump, a man devoid of any intelligence or impulses outside of bullying and whining, as its leader. They can’t win with rational discourse, I argued, so they’ve turned to trolling.

But trolling only gets you so far. The prospect that Trump and his supporters would escalate to authoritarian violence was always in the cards. They can’t win an argument with logic or facts, but they can pummel your face until you give in, and so here we are.

In Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, prospective Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden stopped by City Hall to speak to a small press gaggle, limited in size due to the quarantine.

He denounced Trump for “using tear gas and flash grenades” to clear a peaceful crowd outside the White House “in order to stage a photo op at a noble church,” accusing the president of being more “interested in serving the passions of his base than the needs of the people in his care.”

Let’s be generous and say that’s all true — but it’s a dramatic understatement. Trump doesn’t even see the majority of Americans who oppose him as people, which is why he literally treated the protesters like vermin to be eliminated in order to clear a backdrop for his photo op.

Outside City Hall, while Biden spoke, downtown Philadelphia was eerily quiet, as much from the coronavirus stay-at-home orders as from the post-protest lull. But a group of National Guard troops were stationed outside, guarding a statue of Frank Rizzo, the notoriously racist mayor and police commissioner of the 1970s. It was almost too on-the-nose, as 2020 symbolism goes: Law enforcement literally protecting a monument to white supremacy while innocent protesters are being gassed, beaten and abused in the streets.

As for MAGA nation, we got an eyeful of that in Philadelphia, too, with a group of baseball bat-wielding jackasses roaming the streets, despite the curfew, in the heavily gentrified neighborhood of Fishtown, clearly looking for anti-racist protesters to beat up under the pretext of preventing looting.

“I’m ready to fuck shit up. You know, I’ve been looking for a fight for the past six months,” a producer for a local radio station heard one of them saying. When they saw the producer filming them, he says, they beat him badly, sending him to the hospital.

Trump’s provocations are a central reason for all this violence. But we must also understand that the bat-wielding Red Hats, and people like them, chose him in the first place. He became president by way of an electoral fluke, but not without deep and strong support, and not by accident. Right-wing America increasingly understands it can’t win a rational debate and increasingly can’t win a fair election. (Only once since 1988 has a Republican presidential nominee won the national popular vote.) This surge of violence, egged on by Trump, is a direct reaction to that. Trumpism is showing its true face, and it’s the face of violent authoritarian rule. Our nation’s unanswered question is whether people who oppose that will rise up against it, in numbers big enough to overwhelm the efforts of an embittered, hateful minority to enforce their will through cheating, lies and outright violence.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-a-notoriously-stupid-fox-news-host-inadvertently-let-slip-trumps-corrupt-plan-media-reporter/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4673

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-a-notoriously-stupid-fox-news-host-inadvertently-let-slip-trumps-corrupt-plan-media-reporter

twt vi9d]

although President Donald Trump has used Twitter incessantly to promote himself, he has been furious with the social media outlet this week for fact-checking two of his tweets — so furious that on Thursday, he issued an executive order targeting social media companies and claimed that he did so to “defend free speech.” Twitter hasn’t removed any of Trump’s tweets, but flagged or hidden them as inaccurate or violent. While legal scholars have been asserting that the order cannot withstand legal scrutiny, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz stresses that it serves a useful purpose for Trump nonetheless — and that purpose has been identified by the “notoriously stupid” Fox News host Steve Doocy.

“President Donald Trump capped off a multi-day tantrum at Twitter for appending a mild fact-check to one of his false tweets by retaliating with the power of the federal government,” Gertz explains. “The executive order he signed Thursday is slapdash and incoherent, rooted in a false premise, hypocritical and potentially unconstitutional, legally unenforceable yet dangerously authoritarian, with sections that read like a Fox News screed. But to analyze the executive order’s flaws is to miss the point entirely.”

That purpose, according to Gertz, is “raising the cost of defiance until his perceived enemies break” — and the executive order “forces Twitter to expend resources fighting it, but if the company bends to Trump and does what he wants, maybe it will just go away.”

“Steve Doocy of all people — the notoriously stupid ‘Fox & Friends’ host who is one of the president’s favorite cable news personalities — (inadvertently) nailed it on Wednesday,” Gertz notes. “Social media companies would face ‘a big headache’ if Trump tried to repeal the section of federal law that the executive order targets, he exclaimed, so ‘they might think twice about putting a footnote on a tweet from the president of the United States.’”

Gertz emphasizes that with his executive order, Trump is “drawing a line between companies that defy him and are punished and those that work to benefit him and receive praise.” Trump, Gertz observes, “lauded Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for criticizing Twitter’s decision to fact-check him.”

“Zuckerberg is the poster child for what Trump wants from the head of a social media company,” according to Gertz. “The Republican political operatives he hired to run Facebook’s policy wing have carved out exemptions from the site’s rules for Trump and his media allies. Trump is making clear that it is in the interests of other social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube to adopt that same corporate strategy — and he will continue to raise the temperature until they do.”

aha 520 this id trump superweapon so can't afford to have even innoc factcheck link attached thus goes to war/retaliantion

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bunch // AN 520

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/donald-trump-just-issued-his-most-serious-threat-yet-to-free-speech

salon

'Totally asinine’: Legal experts pour cold water on Trump’s call to ‘strongly regulate’ social media companies

Alex HendersonMay 28, 2020

Although Twitter has been one of President Donald Trump’s favorite modes of communication, he is furious with the social media outlet this week for fact-checking two of his tweets: Twitter…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/kellyanne-conway-paints-target-on-back-of-twitter-executive-in-charge-of-fact-check-label/

authoritarian

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-goes-ballistic-over-twitters-fact-check-but-he-has-no-idea-what-hes-talking-about

That didn’t take long.

Around 5:30 PM Twitter slapped a label on two of President Donald Trump’s tweets, inviting social media users to “get the facts about mail-in ballot.” It’s the first time Twitter has placed what some are calling a “warning label” on any individual tweet.

And while others say it’s not sufficient – Trump lies remain and the label isn’t especially strong – Trump went ballistic just two hours later.

Despite the fact that Trump was engaging in voter suppression, he is accusing Twitter of “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election."

'They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post.”

Actually, his tweets are filled with lies and falsehoods, no fact-checking required.

But Trump did not stop there.

In yet another example of his belief that he is all powerful, Trump decreed, “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”

The President, who has never read the U.S. Constitution and little to no understanding of it, does not comprehend that he is using a private platform operated by a private company, and the only “free speech” guarantee is when the government “stifles” it.

Twitter can do what they want. And they have.

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cody f

Twitter finally took a minor step to address the deluge of distortions, lies, and blatant disinformation flowing from President Donald Trump’s account.

Now, following a pair of Trump’s bogus tweets sent Tuesday morning spreading lies about mail-in voting, Twitter has inserted an alert telling readers to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” as seen below:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/twitter-finally-takes-a-step-to-counter-trumps-online-disinformation

...[twet] Clicking the link brings readers to a page that addressed Trump’s falsehoods. It explained:

On Tuesday, President Trump made a series of claims about potential voter fraud after California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an effort to expand mail-in voting in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.

It continued:

Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would lead to “a Rigged Election.” However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud.

– Trump falsely claimed that California will send mail-in ballots to “anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there.” In fact, only registered voters will receive ballots.

– Though Trump targeted California, mail-in ballots are already used in some states, including Oregon, Utah and Nebraska.

While it’s important to rebut Trump’s attempt to manipulate the election and mislead the population about the integrity of American democracy, it’s easy to see how this solution from Twitter will raise further problems.

Conservatives will undoubtedly be outraged by the fact-check. Given how social media outlets have caved to faux and unjustified conservative outrage in the past, it’s easy to imagine that Twitter will respond poorly to these attacks.

It also creates the problem that the rest of Trump’s Twitter feed remains littered with disinformation and lies, including smears about President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden and a horrendous conspiracy theory insinuating baselessly that former Rep. Joe Scarborough murdered a congressional staffer. Correcting some lies and not others could create the appearance that Twitter is putting its seal of approval on misinformation.

Some, including Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), have advocated that Twitter ban Trump completely because of his abuse of the platform. Ultimately, someone like Trump leaves companies like Twitter in an incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible, situation. The best solution is to get reckless spreaders of disinformation out of power.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-knows-most-americans-dont-want-to-re-elect-him-so-hes-cheating-like-crazy/

amanda

despite his off-the-charts narcissism, Donald Trump knows on some level that the majority of Americans don’t want him to be president and he cannot win in a fair election. He didn’t beat Hillary Clinton in the popular vote in 2016 — she got nearly 3 million more votes — and only won because of the outsize influence of smaller, rural states in the Electoral College. He has only grown less popular since then and is now well behind former Vice President Joe Biden in most national polls, usually by a margin of 5 to 8 points.

But Trump has had a plan to win in 2020, ever since his re-election campaign kicked off the second he was inaugurated: Cheat like crazy.

Trying to cheat in the presidential election is, of course, what Trump was impeached for in December, which no doubt feels like ancient history, due to the rising death tolls and exploding unemployment rate over which our “very stable genius” of a president has presided since then. So here’s a refresher: Trump, anticipating (apparently correctly) that Biden would be his Democratic opponent, leveraged the power of the State Department in an effort to blackmail the Ukrainian president into publicly backing right-wing conspiracy theories about Biden, threatening to withhold military aid unless Ukrainian officials announced “investigations” into Biden. The idea was to create the 2020 version of “Clinton’s emails” by using phony investigations and innuendo to paint Biden as corrupt, even though there’s no evidence Biden did anything corrupt in his dealings with Ukraine.

Impeachment did a lot to shut down that scheme (though I have no doubt they’ll keep trying), but that doesn’t mean Trump has given up the hope that he can rig some kind of victory, even in an election when strong majorities of Americans oppose him. Since shamelessness and callousness are among Trump’s central qualities, he’s perfectly happy to exploit the coronavirus crisis to do it. Yep, that same crisis that he made exponentially worse with his negligence and open hostility to science — now he wants to use it to deprive American voters of their chance to kick him out on his keister in November.

For obvious reasons, a numerous states have decided to dramatically increase the ability of voters to vote by mail in November, especially after the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court forced in-person voting in April, leading to a spike in coronavirus cases in the weeks afterwards. No one can assume that the virus won’t still be a threat this fall, and it’s better to prepare now for the possibility that people won’t be able to vote in person in November.

but Trump is certain — and for good reason — that if more people get to vote, he’s likely to lose. So he’s freaking out. He’s particularly sweating the possibility that voters in swing states will be able to vote by mail in large numbers, since he knows his best chance of winning those states lies in making sure that as few people vote as possible.

“Breaking: Michigan sends absentee ballots to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday, in typical hyperventilating style. “This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”

He deleted and reposted the tweet later to reflect it was ballot applications that were sent, not ballots themselves, but kept the more disturbing false claim that it’s illegal to mail ballot applications to voters. He also threatened Nevada in similar fashion.

As Jack Holmes of Esquire pointed out, Trump is threatening two U.S. states in exactly the same way he threatened Ukraine: Claiming he will withhold funds authorized by Congress if the recipient doesn’t help him cheat in the 2020 election. This is election fraud and blackmail, but this time directed at Americans.

Not only are these tweets an effort to blackmail the states, but they are also a direct effort to scare ordinary citizens out of voting.

As political analyst Judd Legum pointed out in his newsletter, Popular Information, “Telling someone that an absentee ballot application they receive was sent to them ‘illegally’ could dissuade them from voting.”

Indeed, the tweets themselves are arguably voter intimidation, since Trump is literally trying to scare people into thinking they may be prosecuted if they fill out an application for a mail-in ballot.Voter intimidation is a federal criminal offense that could lead to jail time — except that Trump is hiding behind “executive privilege,” which has been used to argue against legal punishment for all his criminal behavior.

Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan literally warned the nation about this possibility during Trump’s impeachment hearings.....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/senators-and-legal-experts-speak-out-about-trumps-use-of-emergency-powers-report/

aha: transparency/moderation needed to undermine corruption:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/outrage-after-trump-quietly-fires-state-department-inspector-general-friday-night-slow-moving-coup/

no lnx

outrage after Trump quietly fires State Department inspector general Friday night: ‘Slow moving coup’

Written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams May 17, 2020

Democratic lawmakers and progressives erupted with anger after President Donald Trump on Friday night quietly removed the State Department’s Inspector general from his post, the latest example of the White House’s hostility to oversight and investigation.

“What checks and balances do we have left?” wondered journalist Andrew Kimmel. “The slow-moving coup continues to successfully—and quite easily—rid itself of any and all roadblocks.”

Brian Stelter

@brianstelter

If you went to bed early ??????? you missed another dismissal of another independent government watchdog. This time, it's State Department Inspector General Steve Linick...https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/15/politics/state-department-inspector-general-fired/index.html …

State Department inspector general becomes the latest watchdog fired by Trump

President Donald Trump on Friday fired State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, the latestin a series of dismissals of independent government watchdogs that have come in the wake of the...

cnn.com

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3:16 AM - May 16, 2020

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The president notified Steve Linick he would be removed from his post in 30 days—a timeline required by law to allow Congress time to look into the administration’s justification for the move—and would appoint Vice President Mike Pence ally Stephen Akard to the position.

Linick’s dismissal came shortly after reports surfaced that Linick was looking into possible misuse of political appointees for personal gain by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

As the Guardian reported:

According to a Democratic congressional aide, just before his abrupt dismissal Linick had opened an investigation into allegations that Pompeo had been using a political appointee at the state department to run personal errands for him and his wife, Susan.

House Intelligence Chair Rep. Elliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that the move indicates trump believes he and his administration are “above the law.”

“I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo,” said Engel. “Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called for the Senate to investigate the dismissal.

“If Inspector General Linick was fired because he was conducting an investigation of conduct by Secretary Pompeo, the Senate cannot let this stand,” Murphy tweeted. “The Senate Foreign Relations Committee must get to bottom of what happened here.”

The firing marks the third inspector general Trump has removed from office in the past two months.

As Common Dreams reported, the president in April removed Intelligence Community inspector general Michael Atkinson from his post after Atkinson was revealed to have been behind delivering the whistleblower complaint on Ukraine to Congress that led to Trump’s impeachment in December 2019. In May, Trump fired Department of Health and Human Services inspector general Christi Grimm in part for a report on the administration’s lack of preparedness for the coronavirus outbreak.

In a statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to the firings of Linick and the other inspectors general as “dangerous.”

“The President must cease his pattern of reprisal and retaliation against the public servants who are working to keep Americans safe,” she said, “particularly during this time of global emergency.”

Trump’s flouting of convention and norms, said the New Yorker‘s John Cassidy, is revealing the flaws in the American government’s system of checks and balances.

“What’s the point of an inspector general if the folks being inspected can fire him/her at will?” tweeted Cassidy. “Another weakness in the system that Trump has exploited.”

an 520

ironical that the One Strong Man can't do the tough harsh job when most needed?. also bolsonaro

putin’s Russia is handling the COVID-19 outbreak much like Trump’s America — badly

lock her up, rule of law

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/its-not-just-a-chant-at-trumps-rallies-or-lame-wordplay-in-his-tweets-its-his-call-to-fascist-rule/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/yale-philosopher-and-author-of-how-fascism-works-explains-why-the-pandemic-offers-trump-a-dangerous-opportunity-to-rule-by-decree/

a moment of reckoning is here. America must have committed great wrongs to be afflicted with the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump at the same time.

Authoritarians like Trump love disasters. Because they can only destroy and not create, authoritarians use such moments of misery and fear to expand their power.

Donald Trump is announcing that fact when he proclaims himself to be a “war president.” Such language is not just the superficial trappings of Trump wrapping himself in the flag and using empty words about “sacrifice” and “bravery” and “heroism.” It is something far worse and more sinister. As a “war president,” Trump is putting himself above the law and proclaiming the country is in a state of emergency.

I recently spoke with Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley, author of the books “How Fascism Works:The Politics of Us and Them” and “How Propaganda Works.” He warns in this conversation that the coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity for the Trump regime to further advance its campaign against the Constitution, democracy, human rights, human dignity and freedom across all areas of American society.

Stanley also explains how the fake coronavirus “protests” staged by Trump supporters in Michigan and other parts of the country exemplify the kinds of forces that have brought fascist and authoritarian movements to power, including Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Stanley explains that he sees America’s colleges and universities as key sites for teaching critical thinking and engaged citizenship — which is why gangster capitalists, neo-fascists and other right-wing forces are using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to further undermine the country’s system of higher education.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jason Stanley on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below....

At this moment there are rent strikes and other forms of protest taking place all across the United States in response to the economic calamity and destruction brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s response. Discontent is most certainly in the air.

If discontent isn’t in the air now, when is it going to be? Consider what has happened with the stimulus. Trillions of dollars have been given to the wealthiest individuals and the largest corporations. Did they think that people would not notice?

A vast fortune has been transferred to the richest Americans under so-called trickle-down economics — a theory which has been disproved, by the way. The idea is that giving money to the richest Americans is supposed to help average people. Let us see what happens when the average people determine if that is in fact the case. Hopefully, that moment will be one when people mobilize.

The 2020 election is quickly approaching. Nearly four years into Donald Trump’s rule, how is American democracy doing? Where are we in the story of Trump and American authoritarianism?

Propaganda is the denial of reality. For example, when Donald Trump says, “I’ve done the best job ever.” His surreal press conferences are another example. Trump has been able to use the coronavirus pandemic to transfer the country’s news media environment into one big authoritarian spectacle. He was able to be on television for two and a half hours a day for a month. Such a thing happens in authoritarian societies. Trump’s authoritarian rule is really a sign of the problem with the Republican Party. The United States is now in a situation where the minority party, in terms of representing the people’s will, has a lockdown on many of the nation’s institutions.

The problem with the United States is that it is already a flawed democracy. When there is such extreme partisan capture of our country’s institutions, does there really need to be a fascist or authoritarian takeover? With gerrymandering, voter suppression, control of the courts and making voting difficult in other ways, one does not need an explicit takeover and overthrow of democracy by an authoritarian movement to exercise almost the same level of power and control.

How do you make sense of this nightmare confluence of events, with the combination of an authoritarian regime and the coronavirus pandemic?

The concept of “emergency” is essential to fascism. Trump is able to use the pandemic to rule by decree. Another example of authoritarian takeover through “emergencies” is a Reichstag fire moment, such as how Hitler and the Nazis took control in Germany, where one manufactures the “emergency” and then claim a need to seize full power.

By comparison, the coronavirus is a real emergency. Authoritarian governments all over the world are using the pandemic as an excuse to seize more power. In the United States this has taken place with Trump and the Republicans using the pandemic as protective cover for massive corruption. With Trump’s purge of inspector generals there is really no independent oversight of his administration.

The public does not know, for example, where the money from the coronavirus relief bill is really going. As with other authoritarians, the coronavirus emergency is a way for Trump to enact his goals and policies much faster and with less oversight and possibilities for resistance.

Trump and his news media and representatives are consistently using the language of “war,” and describing Trump as a “war president” during this pandemic. Most mainstream commentators and analysts have failed to understand the true meaning and origins of that language. “War president” is another example of a logic where democracy no longer applies. Carl Schmitt — a political theorist and jurist whose thinking was foundational for the Nazi regime — described this condition as one of “exception,” where the leader can ignore the rule of law and other norms. How can we better explain what Donald Trump and his agents really mean when they talk about him as a “war president”?

You are absolutely correct. When an authoritarian or like-minded leaders and regimes want to suspend democracy, they use the language of “war.” Trump calling himself a “war president” enables him to do drastic things such as rushing bills through Congress without proper debate, hearings and public scrutiny. An emergency is a very dangerous time, and the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is a real emergency makes matters much more perilous and complicated.

Trump, the Republicans and many of their supporters have argued that older people and others who are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus should be willing to face death as an act of “loyalty” and “patriotism” to save “the economy.” How does this relate to authoritarianism and fascism?

This coalition of the business elite, right-wing Christian evangelicals, and white nationalists and other white supremacists is very dangerous. Fascism is ultimately a death cult.

Social Darwinism is the heart of fascism as well as the heart of capitalism. With the pandemic, and the way capitalism is a type of religion in America,the Darwinian idea of “survival of the fittest” is made even more central. The notion that “Life is always a struggle, the weak will die” is central to fascism. That idea is also common to certain ways of thinking about capitalism. Remember, Adolf Hitler’s book was called, “My Struggle” — that “struggle” was survival of the fittest. That is exactly what we are seeing in this moment with Trump, the Republican Party and the coronavirus pandemic.

Crisis is an opportunity for Donald Trump. Several weeks ago, Donald Trump announced via Twitter that the United States was ending all legal immigration because of the coronavirus emergency. Of course, that is part of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s white supremacist agenda.

Notice Trump’s verbiage when he describes the coronavirus: He calls it the “invisible enemy”. That language is an allusion to Jewish people. For centuries anti-Semites and other hate mongers for centuries have used such eliminationist, conspiratorial language. Trump’s announcement “banning” legal immigration — which was likely written by Stephen Miller — was also made on Hitler’s birthday. Miller has repeatedly signaled through his policies, language, emails and use of codes such as “14” and “88” in government documents and announcements a deep affinity with Nazis and other neo-fascists.

It is obvious that the Trump administration was going to move from stopping “illegal immigration” by nonwhite people and other stigmatized groups to then finding a way to stop legal immigration. Now Trump and Miller are using the coronavirus as an excuse to do just that. That Trump announced such a change on Hitler’s birthday should have been much bigger news. That the news media did not pick up on that date and the announcement, quite frankly, is shocking to me.

Who is Trump’s real audience? What other ways is he signaling his intent to them?

This goes back to the philosopher Carl Schmitt. The friend-enemy distinction is at the heart of fascist ideology.By summoning the logic of the friend-enemy distinction during a war or other type of dire emergency, then all actions by the leader or ruler are justified. The truth does not matter when you are fighting an enemy. There is no democratic way of dealing with the enemy or resolving the crisis or emergency. Science is not a solution. One must use any means available, be it fair or not fair. That’s what the friend-enemy distinction does. Again, it is Social Darwinism. Kill or be killed.

The anti-lockdown “protests” have featured armed right-wing paramilitaries and militias. What is their role in failing democracies and the emergence of fascism and authoritarianism?

Fascism involves the typed of paramilitary forces we have seen in Michigan and elsewhere during Trump’s time in office, and before as well.Trump has constantly called for his supporters to use force against their and his “enemies.” Trump is trying to organize armed paramilitary groups on his behalf if there is a contested 2020 presidential election or some other outcome he does not like.

Trump’s paramilitary forces are making violent threats against Democratic elected officials and other lawmakers. The armed militia that tried to take over the Michigan state capitol building by blocking the governor’s door is an example of such a threat.

Right now, we are seeing how many men with guns can be called out on to the street by Donald Trump and his administration. The United States military is controlled by civilians. But with Trump’s paramilitary forces and other armed groups, he can give them orders and then claim some type of plausible deniability. These types of armed militias and paramilitaries are given license to act by Donald Trump and other authoritarians.

The official leaders in a full-on authoritarian regime or failing democracy then deny responsibility for the violence. The history of fascism repeatedly shows that leaders such as Donald Trump inspire these militias and paramilitaries to act, and then Trump can say, “No, that violence and those groups have nothing to do with me. They’re not the government. Those are some random people on the street!”

What is the role of higher education in resisting fascism and authoritarianism, especially during this emergency?

One must locate the attack on colleges and universities within an international perspective. If you look at the other countries which are under the control of far-right leaders, such as Brazil, India or Hungary, they all have featured incredible attacks on universities and other sites of higher education and learning. Academic freedom has been overturned. Schools have been defunded. Universities and their professors, staff and students have been targets of right-wing violence. In these regimes, universities are being attacked for supposedly being hotbeds of left-wing ideology.

In the United States such attacks are being mainstreamed by the right wing, in terms of attacking colleges and universities by slurring them as sites of “cultural Marxism.”

In terms of dismantling resistance to fascism, how does that work?

If we cannot physically gather together it makes it harder to resist. Universities are sites of resistance, which is why they are always targeted by fascists and authoritarians. Universities are places for free speech, questioning the government and engaging with challenging ideas about the relationship between power and society.

What happens when there is an educational system which does not teach critical thinking and engaged citizenship? What types of citizens are being produced by such an educational system?

Those citizens will not be democratic, capable of understanding, nurturing, participating in and protecting a healthy democracy. Democratic citizens criticize the powerful. That is what they do.

The goal of these authoritarians and right-wingers in the United States is to reduce and replace critical thinking that is taught and learned in the humanities and social sciences with just a “great books” curriculum and job training. Any other type of education and thinking is to be vilified as “cultural Marxism.”

bit ranty recap but he's not wrong

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/donald-trump-and-the-pandemic-wannabe-fascism-meets-neoliberal-capitalism-and-it-could-hardly-be-worse

5/20

omfg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/on-putins-payroll-what-the-corrupt-move-to-drop-the-case-against-michael-flynn-really-means

dcj dc reptr

In a major step toward establishing a Trump dictatorship, the Justice Department moved Thursday to drop the criminal case against confessed felon Michael Flynn, the retired Army general and secret foreign agent who was Trump’s first national security adviser.

Instead of seeking equal justice under law, an extraordinary court filing demonstrated that Trump has one standard of justice for his enemies and an entirely different one for his allies. The court action shows how fully Trump has turned our Justice Department into his personal protection agency.

The 108-page court filing is rife with falsehoods and tortured interpretations of established facts, a mendacious necessity since Flynn twice confessed to multiple crimes under oath in open court. It argues that the lies Flynn told FBI agents were not “material” to the case against him. The trial court judge has already dismissed that as nonsense.

Flynn was secretly a well-paid agent of foreign interests while serving as Trump’s national security adviser.

It also argues that there was no legitimate reason ever existed to investigate Flynn, an astonishing claim since Flynn was secretly a well-paid agent of foreign interests while serving as Trump’s national security adviser. The claim is all the more remarkable because it is made by an ostensibly Republican administration after decades of Republican clamor about Russian spies and influence peddling.

Based on all this and more we can now reasonably refer to Trump’s Injustice Department.

Trump could have pardoned Flynn. “He was an innocent man,“. “I’m very happy for General Flynn.”

But a pardon would not have allowed Trump to mark his territory, signaling to any who dare challenge his assertions that he is above the law.

From President to Dictator

By demonstrating unfettered control over our Justice Department, Trump has achieved a critical step required for a transition from a president with limited authority to de facto dictator.

The motion to drop the Flynn case fits Trump’s fact-free declaration last summer that “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Our Constitution allows no such thing. You might think that Trump, who has been saying since 1987 that he should be president, would have read Article II, which is only 1,023 words. But either Trump never read Article II or he doesn’t care about the limits it places on him including the requirement that he “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Attorney General William Barr—better and properly called Attorney Specific to Trump—lacks unilateral power to dismiss the case against Flynn. Dismissal requires court approval under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Admitted His Crimes

Eminent lawyers stood beside Flynn when he confessed twice in open court to felonies. He allocated to crimes for which charges were dropped in a plea deal. Given this robust record of criminality, the Injustice Department’s action raises obvious questions:

Will Republican senators, notably lawyers Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander and Ted Cruz, at long last stand up for the rule of law or continue as moral jellyfish – blind, spineless and floating aimlessly in the waves of chaos and corruption flowing from the Trump White House?
Will Speaker Nancy Pelosi authorize House investigative hearings into Trump violating his oath to “faithfully execute” the duties of his office and endangering our national security?
If Trump persists with his refusal to cooperate with all House investigations, will Pelosi exercise the House’s Constitutional power to arrest recalcitrant witnesses, including Barr, and if appropriate to try them and upon conviction incarcerate them for contempt of Congress and other crimes?
Will Joe Biden pledge that if elected his Justice Department will fully pursue the Russian connections to Trump and his campaign until we find out why Team Trump has worked so diligently to hide the truth?

Justice Department Turmoil

The extraordinary court filing follows what must have been a ferocious, months-long fight inside Barr’s Injustice Department because some career prosecutors resignedfrom the case earlier to avoid sullying their reputations.

The Thursday motion was signed only by Timothy Shea, a Barr protégé installed three months ago as acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Missing from the latest court papers were the signatures of Jocelyn Ballentine, an assistant prosecutor, and Brandon Van Grack, a veteran espionage case prosecutor. Van Grack resigned from the case in a one-sentence filing just moments before the motion to dismiss was submitted to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of U.S. District Court.

Judge Sullivan can order Justice and its lawyers to explain these unusual actions. He could refuse to allow the case to be dropped or allow it, but with leave to refile the charges in the future. That would make Flynn vulnerable if Trump does not get a second term.

On Putin’s Payroll

Flynn and his company were on Putin’s payroll and worked for Turkish interests with deep ties to the Kremlin. Flynn was paid at least $680,000, some of which he lied about. At the time he was the president elect’s designated national security adviser.

After the allocation, Judge Sullivan told Flynn “arguably you sold out your country.” (Trump, on Thursday, called Flynn “a hero.”)

“All along, you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security advisor to the president of the United States,” Sullivan told Flynn. “That undermines everything this flag over here stands for,” Sullivan said.

“This is a very serious offense… A high ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while in the White House, very serious crime.”

That the Trump administration would shield a secret foreign agent who was the White House intelligence chief shows how important it is to Trump that he keep Flynn in his fold. Flynn made himself susceptible to blackmail by taking Russian money and lying about it, but it is not known if Flynn engaged in unquestionably traitorous conduct.

More Kremlin Connections

The Flynn case has its roots in Russian interference to help Trump win the 2016 election. So do other allies. Among these are the felony prosecutions of Roger Stone, Trump’s dirty tricks specialist, and campaign Manager Paul Manafort, a longtime foreign agent for dictators and Russian-speaking criminals and politicians.

Trump denies the Russians helped him become president. But America’s intelligence agencies, the bi-partisan chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the 418-page Mueller report and emails from none other than Donald Trump Jr. all make clear the Kremlin helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. The only issue on which the facts are not complete was whether Trump was a passive beneficiary or he knowingly worked with the Kremlin, whether obliquely or hand-in-glove.

The president’s eldest son was told in writing in June 2016 that the Kremlin wanted to help his father become president. Trump Jr. replied enthusiastically “love it” and then met at Trump Tower with Kremlin agents. The son then lied and denied, telling both Fox News and ABC News that no such contact took place. More than a year later, as The New York Times was about to expose these lies, the namesake son released the damning emails.

Economic Collapse and Riots

Trump has openly talked six times about being president for life.When criticized for such assaults on American Constitutional principles, Trump lamely claimed he was joking. He also said last June that he anticipates that after completing the maximum of two terms his supporters will “demand that I stay longer.”

Trump campaigned on a promise to destroy our government, an issue that has disappeared from the news after getting almost no attention during his campaign.

‘Country Goes to Total Hell’

That promise came after Trump told Fox News in 2014 how to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster… you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great,” he said.

On Wednesday, as the pandemic death toll surpassed 75,000 Americans he renewed his demand that the law be made history. Repeal would leave at least 20 million Americans with no health insurance.

Just weeks after assuming office Trump held an unannounced meeting in the Oval Office with Russia’s foreign minister and Russian ambassador and a “photographer” for the Kremlin-owned Tass news agency. The Russians revealed the meeting. They also disclosed that Trump gave them “sources and methods” intelligence, which is closely guarded to protect human and technological assets.

Trump Places Trust in Putin

In 2018 in Helsinki Trump declared that he trusts Putin fully, but not America’s intelligence agencies.

Trump has met alone with Putin and Putin subordinates through his presidency. He ripped up the notes of his translator after one meeting, a crime under federal law. He met alone with Putin for at least one lengthy conversation using Putin’s interpreter.

These actions demonstrate Trump’s disloyalty and unfitness to be president, yet Senate Republicans refused to hear testimony after the House impeached him last year. Senate Republicans then voted twice not to convict except for one vote by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, now the junior senator from Utah.

This latest abuse of power to protect a criminal crony who was on Vladimir Putin’s payroll and a secret foreign agent is more than an impeachable offense. Trump, Barr and Shea also sent a clear message: Team Trump harbors no regard for the rule of law, the foundation of our liberties and democratic freedoms.

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mirroring? some wacko called stay at home martial law:

5. ‘Tyranny’ depends on who governs, not how

In many of the events across different states, protesters objected to what they called “tyranny,” and held up the Revolution-era “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flag to symbolize their resistance to government rules. They were not objecting to President Donald Trump’s April 13 declaration that, as president, his “authority is total” over the nation.

Instead they were objecting to governors’ lockdown rules, which they highlighted as overreaching their power. Many protesters likened the government’s behavior to Nazis, with protesters adding “Heil” before Democratic governors’ names.

No male governor was targeted as viciously and overtly as female Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. A widely circulated poster depicted her dressed as Adolf Hitler, giving a Nazi salute beside a swastika. Other demonstrators talked about Whitmer as though she were mothering them instead of governing them, like one who insisted, “We’re not her children!”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-re-emergence-of-totalitarianism-and-why-some-extremists-prevail/

j sherman

“News” means two things, what’s happening and what’s surprising. In information theory, it means surprise.It’s not news that you still have air to breathe or that millions live in poverty. More of the same is not news because it’s not surprising.

By information theory’s standard, it’s no surprise that news reporting is all about surprise, shock and the extreme versions of everything. Extremist trolls are surprising and therefore newsworthy, dominating subtler interpretations of what’s going on.

There’s a fundamental human bias toward “trolltalitarianism,” domination by the extreme, trolling version of any idea. There’s a strong bias toward extremism built right into our powers of attention. We ignore what’s subtle, we perk up about what’s extreme. Even when an idea originates as subtle, what makes the headlines won’t be.

Newsmakers play upon the trolltalitarian bias from opposite extremes. Proponents of an idea will be tempted toward extremism in order to cut through the din. Conversely, opponents of the idea will want to paint it extreme as possible to make a salient caricature of it. Shades of gray turn black and white to capture our attention.

Trolltalitarianism is frustrating for those who hold a subtler version of an idea. Religion and spirituality take many subtle forms, but what we hear about are the extreme versions. Likewise, political views get oversimplified toward ideological purity, absolutism and impracticality, because that’s what shocks, sells, emboldens and worse, wins simpler hearts and minds. Extremist loud-mouths capture attention by appealing to people who don’t have the bandwidth to think subtler thoughts – people so harried by everyday life or so education-deprived that they can’t handle subtlety.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

It’s easy to point fingers at the extremists we oppose and to claim that our ideas are misunderstood but the problem runs deeper than that. It’s about attention, our extreme of consciousness and how it always shifts toward surprise. Trolltalitarianism isn’t about one extremism or another dominating but about the distracting allure of extremism in general.

Extremism is a relative term: Extreme compared to what? What’s the reference point by which you can claim that some other idea is extreme. Elsewhere, I’ve favored the term absolutism based on its original meaning “dissolved away,” in other words, ideas insulated from all possible challenges. Absolutism is often the means to extremist ends a way of making an idea shocking, new and threatening enough that it turns heads.

The term “extremism” is useful but doesn’t speak to the appetite for it, or its tendency to dominate the news. Hence, we need a term the way extremism prevails, for which I’d suggest trolltalitarianism.

Advances in media technology don’t cause trolltalitarianism; they exacerbate it. The problem originates in how attention works, again, the extreme of consciousness. We’re all living in the 21st century, ADHD.

We’re often told that we should be more grateful for what we have, more attentive to what’s already working in our lives. Still, among the things to be grateful for is our inattention to what’s already working. It frees attention to focus on problems yet to be solved, for things that can’t be handled by unconscious habit. Whatever keeps happening we handle unconsciously.Nobel prize-winning decision theorist Herbert Simon called this human trait “satisficing.” We don’t obsess over what’s sufficiently satisfying when there’s a squeaky wheel we grease it just enough to dampen the squeaking and then shift our attention to the next loudest squeaky wheel.We don’t optimize; we satisfice, shifting our attention away from the sufficiently satisfying.

As such, conscious attention is not a computer but something akin to a computer programmer. Anything that stays the same can be handled with unconscious habit, the equivalent of a computer algorithm. What rises to consciousness are matters as yet unsettled, the doubts that arise from surprising events. Consciousness stuffs as much as possible into unconscious habits, in order to free up attention for surprises.

Satisficing is efficient. We should all be grateful for our ingratitude. Still, it has a variety of perilous side-effects, chief among them our rubber-necking toward what information theorists call “surprisal.” Here’s another perilous side-effect.

These days, most of us feel pretty independent. We think we don’t need other people so much. Labor-saving technology means we don’t have to get people to do this, that and the other thing for us. We assume that we could go it alone if we had to.

Actually, we couldn’t. Our false sense of autonomy results from the reliability of our the people and things we depend upon. Lose electricity, the internet or public services during a government shutdown and you’ll soon notice how dependent you really are. When the habits of what service us, serve us reliably, we form unconscious expectations. We accumulate habits of unconscious dependence. We ignore what we depend upon.

The same can happen in a relationship. When your partner is always there for you, you’ll tend to assume them. Ironically then, we notice our dependency most when what we depend upon disappears. We feel most dependent when we’ve lost what we depend upon. As the song says “You don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry.”

Combine these two side effects and you’ll get extremist versions of autonomy, for example, Libertarian and anarchist extremists, loud-mouths proclaiming their absolute independence.They don’t need other people, their burdens and their challenges. What use are fellow citizens who disagree with them? People who disagree with their extreme trolling opinions are dead wood, second class citizens little better than illegals. Liberty is a virtue we all value. Libertarianism extremism ignores liberty’s cost. For anyone to feel independent, what they depend upon must be kept reliable.

Is there a remedy for our innate trolltalitarian tendencies? Is there any way to counter the extremes of consciousness so we can hear the gray within the black and white fray?

Education perhaps which, at its best, cultivates greater tolerance for, and curiosity about ambiguity and subtlety. Or maybe we just have to wait until we get jaded by the din of attention-seeking extremism and tune it all out.

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https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/27/headlines/brazils_justice_minister_resigns_after_president_bolsonaro_fires_federal_police_chief

Brazil’s powerful justice minister has resigned, accusing far-right President Jair Bolsonaro of illegally firing the federal police chief. Sérgio Moro becomes the eighth Cabinet member — and the most high-profile — to depart in the 15 months since Bolsonaro took office. Moro once oversaw a vast anti-corruption investigation known as “Operation Car Wash” and prosecuted former President Lula da Silva for alleged corruption — charges that Lula says were politically motivated and designed to keep him from running for the presidency again. Moro quit Friday just hours after Bolsonaro fired the federal police chief, who was investigating Bolsonaro’s political allies and two of his sons.

Flávio Bolsonaro is under investigation for corruption and ties to mafia in Rio de Janeiro; another son, Carlos Bolsonaro, is charged with leading a “criminal fake news racket” that’s made threats against political opponents while spreading defamatory misinformation.

This all comes as President Bolsonaro faces widespread criticism for minimizing the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak. The death toll in Brazil has topped 4,000, and hospitals report being overwhelmed with sick patients.

TOPICS:

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an 420

investigative reporter Juan González: ‘This country is edging closer to neofascist authoritarianism’

Amy Goodman, Democracy

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-covid-19-crisis-is-accelerating-a-global-shift-to-authoritarianism/

no lnx

How the COVID-19 crisis is accelerating a global shift to authoritarianism

Written by History News Network April 27, 2020

I’ve spent the past few semesters teaching seminars on democracy, populism, and authoritarianism. It is not an exaggeration to say that the coronavirus pandemic represents a fresh challenge to democracy, not just in the United States, but across the world.

Events of recent years – Brexit, the election of President Trump, and the rise of nativist, populist movements in countries as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Brazil – had already led experts like Tim Snyder and Yascha Mounk to warn that the norms upholding liberal democracy are globally at risk.

There are some similarities between modern-day authoritarian movements and their 20th century predecessors. They frequently promote illiberal us vs. them sentiments that champion an idealized citizenry, engage in ‘blood and soil’ nationalism, assert a racial or religious identity, engage in post-truth politics, and reject expertise. But contemporary authoritarianism prefers majoritarian democracy to totalitarianism. As Ece Temelkuran shows in her book How to Lose a Country (2019), this is because authoritarian leaders want the imprimatur of popular support for their plans to reshape institutions like courts, bureaucracies, parliaments, and the media.

The rise of authoritarianism has shown that liberal democracy is not as robust as its adherents once thought. In How Democracy Ends (2018), David Runciman, professor of politics and history at Cambridge University, argues that the democratic institutions of many countries are no longer fit for purpose. Anger at economic inequality, neglect, and continued rhetoric about the supposed inadequacy of government, have left the structures upholding liberal democracy vulnerable to attack.

The coronavirus has accentuated this sense of fragility. Authoritarian leaders have seized the opportunity presented by the pandemic. The Chinese government has extended further the reach of its surveillance state. Vladimir Putin has used the pandemic as cover for his push to amend the Russian constitution and maintain his hold on power. In Israel, embattled prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the pandemic to shut down the courts and close parliament, maintaining his hold on power and delaying his looming trial for corruption. In Hungary, recently passed legislation granted prime minister Viktor Orban near absolute power. The Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro recently joined protests urging a military coup, continuing attacks on the nation’s courts and legislature he views as obstructions.

The lessons from these nations are germane for the United States.

Demands by the Trump administration for emergency powers to fight the pandemic, such as greater restrictions on border-crossings, immigration, and asylum claims, and requests by the Department of Justice for the right to detain people without trial or to suspend court proceedings in the event of a national crisis, have led to disquiet.In a recent podcast, Sarah Churchwell, professor of public humanities at the School of Advanced Study in London and the author of Behold America(2018), an intellectual history of America First, urged caution before granting emergency powers to an administration determined to hang onto power through the invocation of a wartime presidency.

Donald Trump has never hidden his authoritarian intentions. Indeed, the coronavirus seems to have amplified these tendencies. From the start, his administration sought to connect the pandemic to the wider interests of the White House.This process has played out in two different ways.

The narrative of the Trump presidency – the idea that it is under constant assault by the so-called deep-state – continues unabated. Initially, Trump claimed the coronavirus was a hoax designed to imperil an economy whose success he claims as his own and to sabotage his November re-election. Fear of fifth-columnists has guided decision-making. There has been a tendency to ignore expertise unless it reflects White House opinion. The federal government has not offered a unified response to the crisis. Task forces are mostly staffed by unqualified cronies. Nor is there a clear chain-of-command. The president speaks proudly of leading by gut-instinct, claiming he knows better than on-the-spot officials what different states and localities need.

But the coronavirus also gives the administration a chance to deepen the us vs. them narrative that characterizes the Trump presidency. The White House has continued its nativist culture-war policies, branding COVID-19 the ‘Chinese virus,’ and suggesting the pandemic is mostly a problem for urban centers and Democratic states. Daily press conferences offer the president a national platform for campaign boosterism and ritual denunciations of media opponents. States have had to compete with each other and the federal government for scarce ventilators and personal protective equipment like face-masks, goggles, and respirators.

Public opinion about the response to COVID-19 is beginning to reflect partisan divides. According to Pew Research, while most people support social distancing, 85% of Republicans believe the president had handled the crisis well; only 12% of Democrats think the same. Just 52% of Republicans consider coronavirus a major threat to public health, compared with nearly 80% of Democrats.

So does the handling of the coronavirus mark a failure of government policy? It depends what the administration wanted from the crisis. What appears a public health fiasco also resembles patterns of autocratic behavior seen across the globe long before the pandemic began: dismissal of expertise; railing against supposed enemies; and the exploitation of crisis to pursue self-interested goals.

Recent demonstrations against governors enforcing stay-at-home orders reflect these authoritarian patterns. This is not just because some protestors bear arms, wave Confederate flags and other white supremacist symbols, or carry presidential campaign banners. Supporters of the president fear the economic damage caused by the pandemic will undermine his 2020 reelection campaign. ‘Astroturfing’ by wealthy far-right activists, openly supported by Donald Trump and Fox News, is trying to create the illusion that there is popular support for overriding the advice of experts and reopening the economy, even if it sacrifices lives in the process.

Accelerating division is the point.If the pandemic has revealedAmerica as a ‘failed state,’ as George Packer contends in the Atlantic, we only appear to be a failed state for some.

an 420

how COVID-19 is accelerating the Republican Party’s descent into authoritarianism

Corey Hill

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see roy cohn for full txt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/sadism-crime-and-a-love-of-lies-what-3500-lawsuits-reveal-about-trumps-true-nature/

no lnx

Sadism, crime and a love of lies: What 3,500 lawsuits reveal about Trump’s true nature

Written by History News Network April 11, 2020

American presidents before Donald Trump had some record of public achievement in politics, government or the military before they were elected. Donald Trump lacked any of those credentials, but brought his astounding history of involvement in thousands of lawsuits to the nation’s highest office. This trove of cases from more than 45 years reflects Trump’s contempt for ethical standards and for the US Constitution and the rule of law, the foundation of American democracy.

As a perennial litigant, Trump weaponized the law to devastate perceived enemies, to consolidate power, to frustrate opposing parties, as former federal prosecutor and acclaimed author James D. Zirin illuminates in his compelling and disturbing history of Trump’s use and abuse of the law, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits (All Points Books)....

James D. Zirin: He has continued and I think he will continue. And I think therule of law has been seriously undermined.

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Our democracy has been seriously compromised because the framers of the Constitution never thought the system would work this way. Republican senators deserve part of the blame because of their need to retain power or whatever, they did not respect the oath they took to be fair and impartial judges of the facts and the law, but instead voted along party lines to acquit him.

Robin Lindley: Trump said sometime in the 90s, as you note in your book, that “I love to have enemies.” I think most of us wouldn’t feel that way and it seems pathological to me. What did you think when you found that quote from him?

James D. Zirin: Most politicians are controversial and have political enemies. I think Trump relishes that perhaps more than others and he loves to attack them personally. We know Biden is “Sleepy Joe” and Elizabeth Warren is “Pocahontas” and Bernie Sanders is “Crazy Bernie.” He has nicknames for everyone and he revels in trashing them rather than addressing the merits of anything they propose.

Robin Lindley: The mentality of an eight-year-old bully, it seems. You write that Trump’s experience in lawsuits reflects “his inmost ulterior motivation.” This comes out in your responses, but could you sum up your sense of his character, motivation, and morality based on your extensive research?

James D. Zirin: His virulent combination of anti-science, anti-law, ignorance, irrational conspiracy theorizing, instability, narcissism and vindictiveness has led us to national catastrophe. If he is re-elected, I fear for the republic and the American people.

Robin Lindley: As you demonstrate, Trump is an anomaly in terms of the adversarial system. Do you have anything to add on his abuse of legal process?

James D. Zirin: Look, the adversary system is the crown jewel of our legal system. We got it from the British. The idea is that you had lawyers on both sides who were partisan, who were like the Knights Templar who rode into battle on behalf of somebody or other in the Middle Ages. That has been the best way of getting at the truth. In contrast, in civil law countries like France or Germany, the judge conducts the inquiry. The judge might ask questions of the lawyers, but the lawyers don’t develop the evidence on both sides.

But adversary doesn’t mean enemy. What Trump has demonstrated is that we have a great legal system and we all have the benefit of it. But there are also limitations for the law and those limitations can be exploited by someone determined to beat the system, and that’s what Trump has done.

Robin Lindley. Thank you, Mr. Zirin and congratulations on your groundbreaking and compelling book on the life of Donald Trump through the perspective of his thousands of lawsuits. It’s been an honor to talk with you.

This article was originally published at History News Network

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-alt-right_n_5e7d028bc5b6cb08a92a5c48

long many lnx pix docs?

Far-Right Helped Create The World’s Most Powerful Facial Recognition Technology

Clearview AI, which has alarmed privacy experts, hired several far-right employees, a HuffPost investigation found.

By Luke O’Brien

04/07/2020

Advanced facial recognition technology poses a mortal threat to privacy. It could grant the government, corporations and even average citizens the ability to capture a photo of anybody and, with a few keystrokes, uncover all kinds of personal details. So when The New York Times published an exposé about a shadowy facial recognition firm called Clearview AI in January, it seemed like the worst nightmare of privacy advocates had arrived.

Clearview is the most powerful form of facial recognition technology ever created, according to the Times.With more than 3 billion photos scraped surreptitiously from social media profiles and websites, its image database is almost seven times the size of the FBI’s. Its mobile app can match names to faces with a tap of a touchscreen. The technology is already being integrated into augmented reality glasses so people can identify almost anyone they look at.

Clearview has contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, BuzzFeed reported earlier this year, and FBI agents, members of Customs and Border Protection, and hundreds of police officers at departments nationwide are among its users.

With the coronavirus pandemic increasingly throwing the country into chaos and President Donald Trump moving to expand domestic surveillance powers ? in theory, to better map disease spread ? Clearview has sought deeper inroads into government infrastructure and is now in discussions with state agencies to use its technology to track infected people, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Even if you’ve never heard of Clearview, you likely have an online presence — maybe a friend or a relative has posted a photo of you to Facebook — which means you’re probably in its database. Clearview’s CEO and co-founder, Cam-Hoan Ton-That, and his associates chose to mass-violate social media policies against scraping accounts to build an image warehouse of unprecedented size, as several outlets have noted recently.

What hasn’t been reported, however, is even scarier: Exclusive documents obtained by HuffPost reveal that Ton-That, as well as several people who have done work for the company, have deep, longstanding ties to far-right extremists. Some members of this alt-right cabal went on to work for Ton-That.

Clearview stated that it had immediately parted ways with some of these people when HuffPost reached out for comment for this story, but the pervasive links between the company and the alt-right can’t be simply dismissed as a few bad apples.

Big Brother, it turned out, was wearing a MAGA cap.

A Mysterious Hacker

Little is known about Ton-That, a 31-year-old Australian hacker who moved to San Francisco in 2007. He made a name for himself two years later by unleashing a computer worm that phished the login credentials of Gmail users. Ton-That showed no remorse after journalists traced the worm to him— he simply set up another phishing site.

By 2015, he had joined forces with far-right subversives working to install Trump as president. They included Mike Cernovich, a Trump-affiliated propagandist who spearheaded the near-deadly Pizzagate disinformation campaign; Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, a neo-Nazi hacker and the webmaster for The Daily Stormer; and Pax Dickinson, the racist former chief technology officer of Business Insider who went on to march with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In this far-right clique, two of Ton-That’s associates loomed larger than most thanks to their close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and Trump adviser: Jeff Giesea, a Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes, and Charles “Chuck” Johnson, a former Breitbart writer and far-right extremist who reportedly coordinated lawfare against media organizations with Thiel. And according to new documents obtained by HuffPost, Johnson appears to have received funding from Thiel for a startup that the Southern Poverty Law Center would label a “white nationalist hate group.” (Johnson has filed suit against HuffPost in Texas over a January 2019 article about his visits to members of Congress to discuss “DNA sequencing.”)

People involved with Clearview appear to have gone to great lengths to conceal their links to the company and each other. Johnson, for instance, does not appear on any of the incorporation documents and has left little public trace of his association with Ton-That beyond a Facebook post. But multiple far-right sources who know Johnson told HuffPost that he and Ton-That were in close contact at least as early as 2016, and that Johnson told them he was working with Ton-That on facial recognition.

Johnson told one source late that year that he viewed the technology as a way to potentially “identify every illegal alien in the country.” In early 2017, Johnson introduced Ton-That to another source, saying he was a gifted coder he’d hired to build the facial recognition tool. Around the same time, Johnson stated on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.”

Video and private messages obtained by HuffPost confirm that Johnson and Ton-That were collaborating on far-right schemes in 2016; by early 2017 at the latest, they were in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business. At least two people who worked for Johnson took jobs with and worked for Clearview until late March, when the company claims to have severed ties with them after HuffPost reached out with questions.

Thiel himself has an obvious interest in mass surveillance: Palantir, his data-mining behemoth, aggregates enormous amounts of personal information about immigrants and undocumented workers, and it provides the analytical tools for ICE raids. In 2017, Thiel became one of Clearview’s earliest investors. He did not respond to questions sent to him and his spokesperson.

Like other tech products scaled in dodgy ways, Clearview may have grown too big to rein in. Every time police use Clearview, they upload images of people they’re trying to identify ? even child sex abuse victims ? to Ton-That’s unregulated and ever-expanding database, where they are stored indefinitely.

No federal laws exist to govern the use of facial recognition. “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, told the Times.

Clearview also appears to spy on law enforcement searches. After a Times reporter had police officers run her photo through the app, the officers received calls from Clearview representatives asking if they were speaking to a journalist. The potential for abuse is vast.

“The fear is that the kind of authoritarian control this [tool] will grant will wind up in the hands of the wrong people,” said Liz O’Sullivan, the technology director at the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

Like, for instance, a Clearview contractor who is fond of disseminating Third Reich propaganda about Jews. The same extremist, with whom Ton-That now claims to have parted ways, was instrumental in helping sow disinformation from Kremlin operatives in 2016 to assist the Trump campaign. A Clearview “investigator” who appeared to work for the company until late March is part of a D.C.-based white nationalist crew that gathers in secret.

Yet another Clearview employee who left the company after an inquiry from HuffPost is a Croatian-born extremist who wrote in 2015 that he “wholeheartedly endorse[s] racism, racialism, ethnocentrism, Islamophobia, Eurocentrism and anti-Semitism.” Writing under a pseudonym on various blogs, he had embraced the possibility of balkanizing America, which could allow authoritarian states such as Russia or China to fill the power vacuum.

“For a stable and sustainable global order to exist,” he wrote, “the United States Government as we know it must be destroyed.”

A White National Convention

In July 2016, far-right extremists descended on Cleveland for the Republican National Convention. The alt-right’s intellectual figurehead, Richard Spencer, was there, as was Cernovich. So was Johnson, who at the time was running GotNews, a site that employed white nationalists to crank out race-baiting content for Trump supporters. Peter Brimelow, the publisher of the white nationalist VDARE, showed up. British political saboteur Milo Yiannopolous attended a “twinks for Trump” party that featured anti-Muslim speakers such as Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders.

One night, Spencer attended a dinner with Johnson and other members of the far-right at an upscale Italian restaurant. He found himself sitting at a table with Ton-That, a striking figure with long black hair. The hacker arrived at the dinner with Johnson after they’d caused a minor fracas. They’d harassed Michelle Fields, a former Breitbart reporter who’d had her arm roughly grabbed at a Trump rally a few months earlier by the candidate’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. At the RNC, Johnson chased after Fields in the street until her fiancé shoved him away. The incident was captured in a video uploaded to Johnson’s GotNews YouTube channel. In the background, you can see Ton-That with Johnson, laughing as Fields scrambles away. (Fields worked for HuffPost at the time.) Over dinner that night, the hacker was more subdued.

“He was smart,” Spencer told HuffPost of Ton-That. “He was into this esoteric reactionary sphere stuff. I remember he was talking about celibacy and the priestly order being celibate and thinking for the group and not having mundane concerns.He was into quasi-Catholic neo-trad[itional] reactionary type stuff.”

The neoreactionary movement, also known as “NRx” or “Dark Enlightenment,” is a geeky subset of the racist, misogynistic far-right that has festered in Silicon Valley’s libertarian circles for over a decade, especially within the cryptocurrency community. Its members revere Thiel, microdose LSD and gussy up totalitarian ideas with a pseudo-intellectualism that creates a moral pretext for them to undermine ? “engineer,” they might say ? democracy. With tech skills and access to vast wealth, they have an influence that has eluded the bookish young men in Spencer’s orbit. Ton-That had been affiliated with this neoreactionary confederacy since before the 2016 RNC.

The movement’s high priest, Curtis Yarvin, is a programmer who goes by “Mencius Moldbug” and has a cryptocurrency startup funded by Thiel. Yarvin, who seemingly endorses slavery and has written approvingly of apartheid, has argued the U.S. would be better off if ruled by a CEO-king. To make this happen, he advocates for a soft coup. Among neoreactionaries, Trump is often referred to as the “God-Emperor” who will restore order to an immigrant-flooded nation under the thumb of a progressive media-academic complex ? “global Jewry,” in neo-Nazi-speak.

Giesea, whose ties to Thiel go back decades, organized the dinner in Cleveland. As a student, he edited Thiel’s libertarian newspaper, The Stanford Review. He later worked for Thiel’s first hedge fund, and then for Koch Industries’ public affairs office. Thiel put up seed money when Giesea started his own company.

Ahead of the 2016 election, Giesea worked closely with Cernovich to help organize a social media insurgency that could direct the far-right’s energy toward a singular purpose: getting Trump elected. Their network amplified extremists, besmirched opponents and disseminated Kremlin-boosted disinformation.

Jeff Giesea talks politics in a Periscope video.]

In a “How to Fund the Alt-Right” guide posted online in 2016 under an alias Giesea used, donors were encouraged to give money to white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations. (“Not me at all,” Giesea said. “I don’t know who did that.”) The guide stressed the importance of anonymity and recommended donors use Bitcoin and PayPal, the online money transfer company founded by Thiel.

Spencer said Giesea donated $5,000 ? the maximum amount that didn’t require donor disclosure to the IRS ? to his white nationalist organization, the National Policy Institute, in 2016. (“No comment,” Giesea said.) Spencer told HuffPost that he later came to feel as if Giesea was trying to use the energy of the alt-right for political subversion and profit.

Auernheimer, the neo-Nazi hacker, described Giesea in a private Discord chat as a “major investor providing help to racists … a hugely connected dude … with lots of business interests who was supporting [T]rump stuff.” (“That’s not true,” Giesea said.)

At Giesea’s dinner in Cleveland, conversation turned, inevitably, to building the ethnostate, according to Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who attended the event and has since renounced far-right extremism. A group of Hispanic waiters in earshot looked on warily. Someone at the table apologized to them. The waiters laughed nervously. Then the extremists, Ton-That among them, set out into the night to put their plans into motion.

Chuck Johnson’s Online Hatefest

If you were a hip far-right elitist in 2016, the online place to be was a Slack channel Johnson set up for WeSearchr, a now-shuttered crowdfunding platform he had launched. In private messages between Johnson and McHugh from 2015, Johnson described a meeting with Thiel that year to pitch his crowdfunding idea.

“Thiel gave me all the money I need,” Johnson said. “[W]rote me a check on the spot.”

Thiel declined to comment.

WeSearchr raised bounties for alt-right causes and would soon earn the designation of “white nationalist hate group” from the SPLC.

Johnson had a well-deserved reputation as a troll, but he was also a central node in a web of extremists. And he had many enemies ? the social media companies that took away his platforms, the news outlets that exposed him, the liberal society that he was convinced had allowed minorities to get into Harvard at his expense.

“When I met Chuck, I wondered why we weren’t weaponizing people like him,” Giesea told BuzzFeed.

Giesea belonged to Johnson’s WeSearchr Slack. So did Cernovich. And so did Ton-That.

Altogether, there were about 400 people in the channel, according to McHugh, who was a member and provided HuffPost with several dozen messages from the channel. The group was a who’s who of racist political saboteurs and moneyed terraformers of society, with a sprinkling of alt-right celebrities like George Zimmerman, who joined the channel in June 2016 and was auctioning off the weapon he used to kill Trayvon Martin. Johnson, who had deemed Zimmerman a “great man,” published a GotNews post to drive up the price of “the mighty gun that slain the dindu.”

Far-right politics brought George Zimmerman and Chuck Johnson together, as illustrated by this social media post of the two discovered by Little Green Footballs, a blog that has been tracking Johnson for years.]

Ton-That shared his far-right views in the WeSearchr Slack, as well as online more broadly. He has since deleted his social media accounts, but archives of his Twitter exchanges from 2015 and 2016 show him spreading anti-liberal talking points and Islamophobia, as well as amplifying figures like Yiannopolous.

He was clearly reading/listening to pretty trashy conservative media, and/or pretty trashy conservative people.

Ben Wheeler, a coder in New York, about Clearview co-founder Cam-Hoan Ton-That

Ben Wheeler, a coder in New York who met Ton-That in 2015 through programmer pals, called out the Australian for tweeting far-right conspiracies in the run-up to the 2016 election.

“He had some very inaccurate takes on [Hillary] Clinton, he was clearly reading and talking to people in the Breitbart vein,” Wheeler wrote in a message to HuffPost. “[A]s an example of her corruption, he pointed to the ways he said the Clintons used Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to embezzle money. I looked that up and it was one of those almost certainly false claims from one untrustworthy source. He was clearly reading/listening to pretty trashy conservative media, and/or pretty trashy conservative people.”

One of these people was likely Andrew Auernheimer, the webmaster for The Daily Stormer, the most popular neo-Nazi website. Another member of the WeSearchr Slack channel and a close collaborator with Johnson, Auernheimer devoted ample time to boosting both Johnson’s crowdfunding platform and his extremist friends.

Aurenheimer told HuffPost that he had “never heard of” Ton-That.But in 2015, he appeared to interact publicly with him on Twitter to bemoan the number of liberals in academia, a conversation HuffPost was able to piece together by looking at replies to the two alt-right members that remain online.

Auernheimer spoke often of his desire to slaughter Jewish children, start a race war and destroy the United States. He landed in federal prison in 2013 on identity fraud and hacking charges. After his conviction was vacated on a jurisdictional technicality, he reentered society with a giant swastika on his chest. He declared himself a neo-Nazi on The Daily Stormer and called for government agents and their families to be assassinated. He left the country and vowed revenge on America. “I plan on coming back with an army, be it human or automaton,” he wrote. He now claims to be based in Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova aligned with Moscow and beyond the reach of U.S. extradition treaties.

Andrew “weev” Auernheimer publicly declared himself a neo-Nazi in 2014 in a post on The Daily Stormer, which included this picture.]

Like Ton-That, Auernheimer also had an interest in biometrics. Around the time of the 2016 RNC, he told a friend that he was “working on facial recognition, specifically about black people.” When contacted by HuffPost, Auernheimer clarified that he’d been “building a racial, not facial, recognition project [that] took characteristics from the entire body, not just the face.” At the time, the system had been too costly to mount on drones, he said, but he planned to revisit the idea soon. Auernhemier could not provide any proof to support his statements. Ton-That told HuffPost that Clearview had nothing to do with the neo-Nazi.

“I never met him and he did no work for the company,” Ton-That said.

But Auernheimer had worked closely with Johnson for years, and he, too, claimed a connection to Thiel. A month after being released from prison in 2014, Auernhemier told a hacker friend in direct messages that he was “meeting with Peter Thiel’s right hand.” (Auernheimer denied making this claim, but HuffPost authenticated the messages with their recipient. Thiel didn’t respond to questions for this story.)

That same year, Auernheimer teamed up with Johnson to mine the leaked database of the Ashley Madison infidelity website for kompromat. They partnered again in 2015 to publish covertly recorded smear videos of Planned Parenthood officials. (Auernheimer told HuffPost he and Johnson “have nothing to do with each other” and are “radically opposed politically and socially.” HuffPost obtained numerous friendly emails they had exchanged.)

Johnson frequently collaborated with Giesea as well. In one especially inglorious caper, they arranged for Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers and Barack Obama’s Trump-supporting half-brother Malik to appear at the 2016 general election debates. “Malik Obama, getting him to endorse Trump, they brought him to Giesea’s apartment and just gave him cash,” Spencer said. “At least, that’s what Giesea told me.” (“I don’t recall any of that,” Giesea told HuffPost.)

When HuffPost reached Malik Obama in Kenya to ask if he’d taken money from Johnson and his associates to promote Trump, Obama responded by saying, “Donald Trump is the best president America ever had and Charles Johnson is my friend.”

But Johnson always had bigger plans than Malik Obama. He’d filled his black book with the names of far more important people whose coattails he could ride: Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas; xenophobic commentator Ann Coulter; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; high-profile attorney Alan Dershowitz — and Ton-That, whose technical ability offered Johnson a different pathway to power. They were the same age, with the same focus, fighting the same internet culture war.

In one WeSearchr Slack exchange, Johnson linked to an article about the aggressive stock trading habits of Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), calling her “one of the best day traders ever.”

“Of course,” Ton-That replied, “it’s a chink.”

They also agreed on target selection.The WeSearchr Slack members reserved a good portion of their animus for Gawker, a publication that had aggressively covered Thiel and his business interests. Thiel had furtively bankrolled numerous lawsuits against the blog ? the most notable being an invasion of privacy case filed by former professional wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea after Gawker published a portion of sex tape he was in.

The alt-right backed Thiel to the hilt. WeSearchr co-founder Pax Dickinson urged members of Johnson’s Slack channel to compile a list of Gawker employees and feed it to neo-Nazi trolls on far-right websites such as 4chan. “Let them do the contacting,” Dickinson wrote of the trolls, seemingly aware that his plan could lead to harassment.

Johnson had his own vendetta against Gawker, which had covered him critically and in one instance mocked him over a rumor that he defecated on a floor in college. Johnson had sued Gawker for defamation and later reached a confidential settlement with the blog. “In a just world, I’d have them killed,” Johnson said of Gawker and its CEO, Nick Denton. “But we are not there yet.”

Johnson, however, was in a position to crowdfund a WeSearchr bounty to sniff out plagiarism at Gawker, an ultimately fruitless quest. Ton-That, whom Gawker had also covered critically after his phishing scams seven years earlier, jumped at the chance.

“[W]ho else is working on gawker plagiarism & wants to collaborate?” he messaged the channel at the beginning of June 2016. “[I]’m scraping all their articles right now.”

On June 10, 2016, Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and put up its assets for sale. A few days later, Cernovich posted a photo of Ton-That and Johnson having a meal, both of them flashing the “OK” sign that has become a popular hand gesture for white nationalists in the Trump era.

Chuck Johnson and Hoan Ton-That flash the “OK” sign over a meal in 2016.]

When BuzzFeed confronted Ton-That about the photo, he claimed he was “only making the Okay sign in the photo as in ‘all okay.’” That August, Ton-That messaged the WeSearchr channel with an idea to crash a “funeral” party Gawker employees were throwing to mourn the demolition of their publication. “Wish I had a hulkomania shirt,” he wrote.

It was during this period of his life, ensconced among extremists online and off, that Ton-That began building the company that would become Clearview.

In 2016, the Australian hacker brought on two unnamed engineers to help him on the project, according to The New York Times. Ton-That refused to give HuffPost their names. One helped design a program to scrape images of faces from a range of sites and social media platforms, often in violation of their policies. The other created a facial recognition algorithm.

The Birth Of ‘Smartcheckr’

On election night, Ton-That partied with Johnson and Dickinson in New York amid a sea of red MAGA caps. Two days later, Johnson posted a news story from The Sun to his Facebook. It included a photo of Dickinson and Ton-That celebrating bawdily. “My business partners are in the Sun and I feel left out,” Johnson wrote.

Far-right extremist Pax Dickinson celebrates Donald Trump’s election in 2016 with Hoan Ton-That in New York City.]

Johnson was very likely referring to a business that was registered in New York a few months later and followed the same naming convention as WeSearchr: Smartcheckr. The company would eventually rebrand as Clearview, as Ton-That later told the Times.

In January 2017, Johnson indicated on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.” Soon, he was boasting to friends and acquaintances that he was working on a powerful facial recognition tool.

Chuck Johnson dropped hints on Facebook in January 2017 that he was working on a facial recognition project.

A person who used to be close to Johnson and requested anonymity out of concern for their safety told HuffPost that they saw him “with a whole bunch of really important people” at Trump Hotel in spring 2017, “and he was going on and on about this facial recognition software he had hired people to build.” Johnson, they added, was with one of these hires ? “some coding wizard” with long hair in a ponytail. “He kept introducing him as a prodigy who was building the software,” the source recalled. When HuffPost showed the source photos of Ton-That, they confirmed he was the man with Johnson. “If it’s not him, that’s his twin.”

Not long after the election, McHughgot a call from Johnson. “He told me they had a way to identify every illegal alien in the country,” she said. “He brought up facial recognition technology and demanded I call Stephen Miller because he knew Stephen Miller was a true believer.”

It’s unclear if Johnson ever spoke to Miller, the architect of Trump’s brutal immigration policy. But around the same time, Johnson was working behind the scenes with Giesea and Thiel ? a member of the transition executive committee ? to recommend alt-right candidates for science and technology appointments with the incoming administration, according to Forbes. A person close to Trump’s transition confirmed to Politico that Johnson participated in transition-related meetings.

By this point, Johnson had a well-documented track record of bigotry and dirty tricks. In 2015, he’d been permanently ? and noticeably ? suspended from Twitter after requesting funds to “take out” a Black civil rights activist. In 2016, he’d gone on an alt-right podcast called “Fash the Nation” to talk at length about the evolutionary traits of “Jews” and “Blacks.” (“They’re dumber,” Johnson said of African Americans.)

In January 2017, Johnson hosted a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session during which he was asked for his thoughts on “the Holocaust, WW2, and the JQ in general.” (The “JQ,” or “Jewish Question,” is a term anti-Semites, including Hitler, have used for over a century as shorthand for their conspiracy theory that Jews have too much control over society.) “I do not and never have believed the six million figure,” Johnson wrote. “I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic but I confess to having complicated views on the subject. I think the Allied bombings of Germany were a war crime. I agree with [Holocaust revisionist] David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real. Why were their [sic] swimming pools there if it was a death camp?”

Two weeks after Johnson’s Holocaust denial on Reddit, SMARTCHECKR, LLC was registered in New York. The address associated with it belonged to Richard Schwartz, who had been a top aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York City. Schwartz would later admit to being one of the founders of Smartcheckr.

Thiel was one of the company’s earliest investors. “In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” Thiel’s spokesman, Jeremiah Hall, said in a statement. Hall didn’t specify which founder he meant and did not respond to questions for this story.

Emails and messages obtained by HuffPost show that Ton-That and Johnson were in touch about Smartcheckr in 2017. In one email thread, Johnson and his associates at GotNews discussed a dogwhistle post they were putting together about a racially motivated mass shooting in Fresno, California, that had been committed by a Black man who was Muslim. Tyler Bass, a GotNews writer, wondered if there was an easy way to scrape “an entire Facebook page quickly ... the next time another American goes apeshit and before Facebook pulls it down out of shame.” He added Ton-That to the conversation, who replied quickly. “I’m working on this for smartcheckr,” the hacker wrote. “Plan to make these tools available for our guys.”...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/ex-ethics-director-under-trump-says-the-president-is-in-the-late-stage-of-an-authoritarian-coup/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-5-countries-including-the-u-s-are-abusing-the-coronavirus-crisis-to-undermine-democracy/

no lnx

How 5 countries — including the US — are abusing the coronavirus crisis to undermine democracy

President Donald J. Trump shakes hands with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he is introduced to the podium Sunday, Sept. 22, 2019, at a rally in honor of Prime Minister Modi at NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by The Conversation April 7, 2020

232

by Ramya Vijaya, Stockton University; Anthony Bebbington, Clark University; Austin Sarat, Amherst College; Chipo Dendere, Wellesley College; Gisselle Vila Benites, University of Melbourne; John Shattuck, Tufts University, and Paul Friesen, University of Notre Dame

Editor’s note: Emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic set the conditions for political leaders to use expansive powers. They are, as a result, a test of the government’s commitment to human rights and civil liberties.

Most of the travel bans, stay-at-home orders and business closures taking effect worldwide follow health experts’ advice on curbing the spread of this highly infectious disease. But other restrictions governments say are meant to protect people seem designed to curtail human rights, suppress dissent and consolidate authoritarian power.

We asked political scientists for a non-exhaustive list of where they’re watching the state of democracy.

Hungary

John Shattuck, Tufts University

The global pandemic claimed its first democracy on March 30 when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban won approval from his parliament to rule Hungary indefinitely by decree, bypassing lawmakers.

Orban’s new powers give him unlimited authority to fight the coronavirus by suspending parliament and all future elections, overriding the Hungarian constitution and imprisoning people for the new crimes of “violating a quarantine” and “spreading false information.”

Orban has been working toward authoritarianism for a decade. Soon after coming to power in 2010, he announced that Hungary would become something unheard of: an “illiberal democracy.” He has since used his leadership to undermine democratic institutions, including the media, the judiciary and civil society.

To mobilize support for this agenda, Orban has skillfully presented himself as the protector of Hungarians from real and exaggerated external threats. Today’s public health crisis is very real – but Orban is using coronavirus to suspend democracy in ways that will outlast the current emergency.

India

Ramya Vijaya, Stockton University

For two months before the coronavirus outbreak, India had seen sustained nationwide protests against the efforts by the Hindu Nationalist ruling party to marginalize religious minorities. These included an iconic peaceful sit-in spearheaded largely by Muslim women in the Shaheen Bagh section of Delhi.

On March 23 the Shaheen Bagh sit-in was cleared by police – part of India’s national COVID-19 lockdown.

Some Indians are nervous that Indian police will enforce the shelter-in-place rule. In February, officers used brutal force against anti-government demonstrators and turned a blind eye to – and in some cases seemingly abetted – a wave of mob violence that terrorized Muslim neighborhoods in Delhi.

More law enforcement on the streets during the coronavirus shutdown leaves many minority communities in India feeling less safe, not more.

India is continuing to harass and arrest its most vocal critics, raising fears that the government will use the pandemic chaos to suppress protests and civil society activism in the foreseeable future.

Zimbabwe

Paul Friesen, University of Notre Dame, and Chipo Dendere, Wellesley University

While reported cases of coronavirus are not yet significant in Africa, the pandemic is already emboldening several governments on the continent to flex their state powers in the name of protecting citizens.

Zimbabwe’s authoritarian-leaning government already inspired fear and distrust among citizens. Then, on March 30, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who came to power after the removal of Robert Mugabe in 2017, issued a sudden and strict 21-day lockdown, clamping down on nearly all movement and activities.

The total shutdown comes with no government bailout, and Zimbabwe is already in economic crisis.

Fear of government forces has so far proven effective in motivating most of Zimbabwe’s 15 million people to stay at home. But inevitably, many people will have to violate the lockdown to get food, water and other basics goods that are hard to access even in normal times.

Mnangagwa recently ousted Zimbabwe’s health minister as COVID-19 czar and appointed his military hardliner vice president to manage the pandemic response. That was a signal about the potential for use of force. With Zimbabwe forcing citizens to choose between eating and facing the wrath of the military, there could be a flare-up of violence.

Peru

Anthony Bebbington, Clark University, and Gisselle Vila Benites, University of Melbourne

Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra’s rapid response to COVID-19 – which includes a $26 billion stimulus package to aid both businesses and families passed shortly after a March 15 state of emergency decree – has been praised domestically and internationally for its sensitivity to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic.

Vizcarra is unlikely to use coronavirus to consolidate authoritarian power, but Peru’s history of impunity during previous states of emergency raises other concerns.

Civil society, human rights groups, journalists and even the Justice Ministry have flagged, for example, the risks of a new “police protection” law passed by the president of the Congress, Manuel Merino. It exempts officers and soldiers from criminal responsibility for any death or injury caused during the state of emergency.

Peru’s government also has a track record of using emergency powers to protect its mining industry against protests. Mined silver, gold, copper, zinc and other precious metals account for 12% of Peru’s gross domestic product, though many local people and environmental groups oppose these massive projects.

The possibility that the COVID-19 state of emergency could be abused by Peruvian police and mining elites to repress civil liberties merits monitoring.

United States

Austin Sarat, Amherst College

While the American Constitution says nothing about emergency powers, Congress has historically authorized executive action in response to financial, national security and health crises. These disaster-time measures, once passed, are seldom curtailed when these crises end.

As a result, President Donald Trump can now use 136 different statutory powers to deal with coronavirus. They include directing private companies to produce surgical equipment, taking “measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries … and between states,” physically confining the ill and shutting down or taking control of communications centers.

Civil liberties groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center have flagged certain uses of these powers, criticizing Trump for, among other things, imposing international travel bans and banning asylum-seekers.

They say the president is abusing the coronavirus crisis to stoke xenophobia and hostility against immigrants. As evidence, critics point to Trump’s insistence on calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.”

Emergency powers can be dangerous. They are, as the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once noted, “a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”

Ramya Vijaya, Professor of Economics, Stockton University; Anthony Bebbington, Milton P. and Alice C. Higgins Professor of Environment and Society, Professor of Geography, Clark University; Austin Sarat, Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College; Chipo Dendere, Assistant Professor, Africana Studies, Wellesley College; Gisselle Vila Benites, PhD Candidate in Geography, University of Melbourne; John Shattuck, Professor of Practice in Diplomacy, Tufts University, and Paul Friesen, PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/pure-retaliation-trump-fires-inspector-general-who-sounded-alarm-about-ukraine-whistleblower-complaint/

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‘Pure retaliation’: Trump fires inspector general who sounded alarm about Ukraine whistleblower complaint

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams April 5, 2020

Democratic lawmakers and government watchdogs on Saturday condemned President Donald Trump’s abrupt dismissal of Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general who informed Congress last year of the whistleblower complaint which kicked off Trump’s eventual impeachment proceedings.

Two months after being acquitted by the Senate, Trump on Friday night told lawmakers in a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees that he no longer had confidence in Atkinson.

“It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general,” the president wrote (pdf). “That is no longer the case with regard to this inspector general.”

Atkinson’s firing will be in effect in early May, 30 days from Trump’s announcement.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, condemned Trump’s decision, which he viewed as retaliation against Atkinson for informing Congress of the White House communications with Ukraine last year which were at the center of the impeachment hearings.

Trump’s dead of night decision to fire ICIG Michael Atkinson is another blatant attempt to gut the independence of the Intelligence Community and retaliate against those who dare to expose presidential wrongdoing.

It puts our country and national security at even greater risk. pic.twitter.com/Pnm7chdIkl

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) April 4, 2020

Disagreeing with then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire’s decision to take the whistleblower complaint to Trump’s Justice Department, Atkinson alerted Congress about the complaint regarding Trump’s conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,in which he asked Zelensky to publicly launch a corruption investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Daniel Goldman, who served as counsel to the House Democrats during the impeachment hearings, said Atkinson “followed the law with the utmost integrity” and accused Trump of seeking “pure retaliation, retribution, and reprisal.”

I saw Michael Atkinson up close. He followed the law with the utmost integrity. He did nothing to lose Trump’s confidence other than lawfully and properly expose Trump’s misconduct and the ensuing efforts to cover it up. This is pure retaliation, retribution and reprisal. https://t.co/GStcTOJn4J

— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) April 4, 2020

Trump was also rebuked by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.

“Inspector General Atkinson is known throughout the Inspector General community for his integrity, professionalism, and commitment to the rule of law and independent oversight,” said council chairman Michael Horowitz. “That includes his actions in handling the Ukraine whistleblower complaint, which the then Acting Director of National Intelligence stated in congressional testimony was done ‘by the book’ and consistent with the law.”

National security analyst Clint Watts wrote that Trump chose to fire Atkinson while Americans are focused on the coronavirus pandemic, which has spread to more than 278,000 Americans and has killed more than 7,000.

“While the world is rightly distracted by COVID19, we see leaders around the world with authoritarian tendencies subverting democracy. U.S. is no different,” Watts tweeted, suggesting a comparison between Trump and far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who secured dictatorial powers this week through an emergency law passed by Parliament.

Death of American democracy, one Friday firing at a time, people are usually fired for not doing their job, Atkinson was literally fired for doing his job and following the law. https://t.co/o1X719iEox

— Clint Watts (@selectedwisdom) April 4, 2020

At the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), deputy director Donald K. Sherman suggested the American public could soon learn that Atkinson’s firing may have been brought about by actions unrelated to last year’s whistleblower complaint and Trump’s impeachment.

Everyone is assuming this move is retaliation for something we know #Atkinson Atkinson did — sounding the alarm on the Ukraine whistleblower complaint— but what if it’s for launching an investigation into something we don’t yet know about? https://t.co/oF1TF60Tk4

— Donald K. Sherman (@donaldonethics) April 4, 2020

“The question we need to ask right now is what investigations or audits did Atkinson start in the last few months,” Sherman wrote. “Were any related to intelligence failures around coronavirus? Why would he be fired so abruptly AND placed on administrative leave?”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-is-preparing-the-ground-for-a-totalitarian-dictatorship-but-we-can-stop-him/

... see salon

Trump’s motives at this point are, for want of a better word, sinister. He appears to be using the playbook of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, readying the ground for an election that will have two candidates but only one possible outcome.What we are seeing in Trump’s nightly lies and obfuscations and denunciations of Democrats and the media is the beginnings of a Trumpian totalitarianism.

He has seized control of the political debate using his nightly virus press conferences, which are more frequent and last longer than his political rallies. He is gaining control over the media in his choices of whose questions he accepts, taking questions from friendly outlets and belittling outfits like NBC, CNN and PBS. (The New York Times and the Washington Post have stopped sending reporters to the briefings, covering them from outside the press room.) He has gone against rules agreed to by the White House Correspondents’ Association by allowing the alleged “reporter” from the OANN network to attend every briefing while representatives of other news organizations have to cycle in and out on a schedule set by rules according to social distancing needs.

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putin up for 36 yr term,into 80's, ast female cosmo also in 80's?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-cultish-authoritarianism-short-circuits-the-lizard-brain/

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How cultish authoritarianism short-circuits the lizard brain

Written by Mike Lofgren /Common Dreams March 15, 2020

The tendency of Republicans both to respond to and sow fear and panic has been with us for decades. Yet during the coronavirus pandemic, to anyone who bothers to look, we are seeing a new and strangely unremarked twist to their behavior, a development that gives valuable — and chilling — insight into Republican psychology.

During the early 1950s, Republicans stampeded themselves and much of the country into a state of hysteria over homegrown Communist subversion. That there were a few Communist spies is undeniable, but Republicans vastly overestimated their number. Senator Joseph McCarthy, the ringleader of the GOP vigilantes, was unable to uncover a single one, settling for ruining the reputations of innocent Americans.

Over the years, conservatives (I use the term interchangeably with Republicans) have swooned over various moral panics, such as the evergreen fear that gays will convert their children into perverts, or the imagined war against Christmas that secular humanists supposedly wage with the implacable ferocity of the Stalingrad campaign. Since 9/11, panic over Muslims has been a hardy perennial: the GOP faithful are forever on guard lest their city council should impose Sharia law on hapless Christians. Never mind that for the last decade, domestic right-wing terrorist incidents have greatly outpaced incidents committed by Muslims.

There is a reason for these inappropriately fearful responses that is related to brain physiology. Strongly conservative individuals literally have different brains than the rest of the population. MRI tests have shown that different centers of the brain light up more robustly in these persons than others, and their amygdala – the so-called “lizard brain” that controls the threat response – is larger than average.To what extent this characteristic is an inherited tendency and to what extent socialization alters the highly adaptable components of the brain is debatable.

This is not to say that there are not powerful evolutionary reasons for a fight-or-flight response: some threats in our pre-history (say, an approaching saber-toothed tiger) were real. So is the instinct not to walk casually amid automobile traffic. But when fear is exaggerated and the response irrational it can impede long-term survival, for the human species needs to confront and intelligently overcome risk in order to progress above the level of feces-throwing primates.

Some aversion instincts are deeply wired in everyone, regardless of ideology: such as the impulse to avoid the sources of suspected infectious disease. This is so heavily ingrained that the mere sight of some disgusting object, such as a rotting animal corpse, will trigger the immune system to produce more antibodies. This even can occur from looking at pictures of sick persons.

All the more surprising, then, is the nonchalant response of most Republicans to the coronavirus pandemic. You’d think it would stimulate their lizard brains to hyper-alertness, but no.

From the president, who once said the virus was a hoax (then predictably denied that he said what he said) to Rush Limbaugh, who claimed it was only a common cold, to Congressman Matt Gaetz (a man who habitually acts like the insufferable smartass all of us encountered in the eighth-grade), who showed up on the House floor wearing a gas mask to mock the Democrats’ concern, Republicans have demonstrated derision and indifference. Even the fact that many of them were exposed to, or even contracted, the virus at the annual CPAC convention has not improved their lackadaisical attitude. (That CPAC has transitioned from virally broadcasting noxious ideas to more literal virus spreading is an irony that future historians may note with bemusement.)

This behavior is not confined to GOP politicians and rabble-rousers. It began with anecdotal evidence that some Fox News-addicted elderly were not regarding the threat of the virus seriously and weren’t taking personal protective measures. But polls have also found that there is a statistically significant difference between the reaction of ordinary Democrats and Republicans to the outbreak. A whopping 72 percent of Republicans trust the “information” (sic) provided by President Trump, whose performance has been so abysmal, and so full of lies, that a child of eight could see through them.

What accounts for this astonishing behavior? I have written before about American conservatives’ authoritarianism, a trait that has starkly accelerated during Trump’s period of riotous misrule. This cultish instinct to blindly follow the direction of their leaders, and to conform their opinions to those of their own in-group, has become so strong that even in the face of disease it appears to have overridden even deep-rooted human aversion instincts, as well as their own habitual, hypertrophied sense of social fear.

The transcendent power of authoritarianism over immature minds can explain otherwise baffling incidents in history. Why did members of the Charlemagne assault battalion, Frenchmen who had no rational stake in Nazism or Germany, die suicidally in the rubble of Berlin, perishing to defend a Führer who considered France the hereditary enemy of Germany? Why do Republicans seem to think they have to scoff at a global pandemic in order to “own the libs?”

The GOP has not yet gone quite as far as the Charlemagne unit,but make no mistake: the core tenets of American conservatism in the age of Trump are genuinely crazy. If Republicans, goaded and cheered on by dangerous imbeciles like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, continue to maintain their grip of governmental power, the results will not be pretty.

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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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saudis targeting russian, frackers collateral damage!?

NB DESMOG TRACKING IMPENDING BANKRUPTCY? KEPT AFLOAT BY BANKS?

aha ish // disaster cap'l, never waste a crisis to dustoff wishlist

Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/will-an-oil-tycoon-who-donated-500000-to-support-trumps-re-election-get-bailed-out-by-his-administration

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Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon March 12, 2020

With oil prices plunging during the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration is weighing a federal bailout for oil and natural gas companies, according to a new report.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted a fracking boom under his administration, but oil and gas companies have seen profits drop amid an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia.

“Alarmed” by the prospect that some of these companies, many of which are already in debt, [see desmog]could go out of business, White House officials have pushed for a federal bailout in the form of low-interest government loans, The Washington Post reported.

Among those pushing for the bailout is Harold Hamm, a billionaire Trump adviser who owns Continental Resources, an energy companywhich lost half of its market value Monday.

Hamm told The Post that although he had not made “direct” contact with the president, he advised the administration to consider “any action that the administration might take to protect and preserve American interests at this time from being unfairly disadvantaged.”

Hamm has given more than $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election effort since 2017, the government watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington noted.

Some Trump advisers told The Post that the administration was eyeing “targeted assistance” for the companies. Though under consideration, another official warned that “political blowback over the idea may eventually lead campaign advisers and others in [the] administration to talk Trump out of it.”

Chris Rupkey, the chief economist at MUFG Union Bank, told the outlet that he expects significant political backlash.

“It’s difficult when governments selectively target individual industries,” he said. “And there’s going to be pushback on it, because it’s political and may be tied to the administration’s contacts and the people it knows.”

Cornell University professor Robert Hockett, who has advised Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on economic policy, added that it was ridiculous to look out for big fracking companies while millions need relief.

“We are in the midst of a crisis where people are literally having to skip work and may miss paychecks or face medical debt,” he said. “The idea you would look to help out shale companies now is like something out of a satire or a bad movie. It’s absurd.”

Trump also said that he was looking at bailing out airlines, cruise lines and the hospitality industryTuesday, as they reel from the impact of COVID-19, the disease spread by the novel coronavirus. But the bailout proposals have received public pushback from Republicans.

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aha: authoritarian deadly in pandemic; aha 2 tryant violate privacy and human/civil rights, so get our info but gives out only propaganda

experts accuse CDC of withholding ‘crucial’ information about the coronavirus from doctors

Igor Derysh / Salon

Absolutely outrageous’: White House bars press from filming or recording coronavirus briefing

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

"We need transparency. Instead we are getting this."

aha djt carrot and stick: tweet to get judges to back down, pork for mod gops eg collins, pardons for crimes (from chief law official no less!)

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-real-global-threat-to-21st-century-freedom-is-authoritarian-capitalism-not-democratic-socialism/

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The real global threat to 21st century freedom is authoritarian capitalism — not democratic socialism

Written by Peter Bloom / Common Dreams March 1, 2020

Only days after firmly establishing himself as the clear Democratic nominee frontrunner with a decisive victory in the Nevada caucus last week, Bernie Sanders found himself mired in a fresh controversy. In a widely watched and shared primetime interview he appeared to partially support recently deceased former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, condemning his authoritarianism while praising his mass literacy campaign and health program. Whatever the historical veracity of these arguments, it raised fears again of Sanders supposed “communist” sympathies as a self-described “democratic socialist.”

The onslaught by Republicans and establishment Democrats was as swift as it was predictable. Florida Democrats were particularly strong in their criticisms. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powel (D-Fla.) tweeted “as the first South American immigrant member of Congress who proudly represents thousands of Cuban Americans, I find Senator Bernie Sanders’ comments on Castro’s Cuba absolutely unacceptable.”

The larger worry is that this will be a preview of the general election if Sanders is the nominee. According to conventional thinking, the chance to stop Trump will be halted in its tracks by a Republican-led “red scare.” However, it also offers Sanders an opportunity to fundamentally change the debate to show that the biggest threat to freedom is capitalist oligarchy and militarism not progressives or socialism.

Beyond Damage Control

The obvious and understandable first instinct of the Sanders campaign is to go into damage control mode. In a town hall following the interview, Sanders reiterated once again his rejection of authoritarianism of all types while still highlighting the benefits of mass literacy campaigns—proclaiming “truth is truth.” This commitment to freedom is backed up by his 100% legislative score from the ACLU and the fact that he is the only candidate to completely reject the Patriot Act.

Further, Sanders has sought to shift the discussion into a larger one about the dangers of right-wing authoritarianism, often backed by U.S. imperialism past and present. At the last debate before the South Caroline primary, he declared: “Occasionally it might be good idea to be honest about American foreign policy, and that includes the fact that America has overthrown governments all over the world in Chile and Guatemala in Iran.” While the effects of this tactic remains ambiguous, it represents a substantive and strategically important attempt to put into question the actual cause of authoritarianism both at home and abroad.

It is almost gospel in mainstream U.S. political discourse that socialism and Communism are the greatest threats to liberty. Yet the actual historical record suggests otherwise. While recognizing the death and misery caused by past totalitarian Communist regimes, too often ignored is the role of the free market for spreading oligarchy, dictatorship, and illiberalism across the world. If Sanders wants to win the nomination and generation election, he must go beyond damage control and show progressive values and his brand of democratic socialism is the best defense against such tyranny.

The Global Threat of Authoritarian Capitalism

A huge problem, in this respect, is the narrowness of traditional U.S. popular understandings of authoritarianism and fascism—and the distinctions between such terms as socialism, democratic socialism, and communism. Mounting fears of a Trump dictatorship, for instance, have brought renewed historical attention to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Tellingly, the emphasis has been on the increase in mass intolerance (especially anti-Semitism) and even the “authoritarian personality” both of which are thought to have resonances with the present day situation. While all these factors had a role to play, conveniently forgotten is how economic and social elites supported Nazism to protect their own wealth and status.

This holds strong lessons for our own times. The encroachment of fascism is being enabled through the funding and at times direct political support of the 1% defending their privileges by seemingly any means necessary. The are willing to do whatever they can to protect the upward redistribution of wealth to the rich following decades of neoliberalism. Indeed, we are now confronted with the troubling prospect of a U.S. election between two billionaires—one who has mused that it might be nice to be “President for Life” and another whose campaign merchandise trumpets the need to “bring in the boss.”

Fundamentally, it points to the wider danger corporations and the very wealthy pose to the very survival of democracy and civil liberties. Internally, they have eroded democratic institutions such as union based collective bargaining and idolised the top down dictator like leadership of the “CEO politician”. The scourge of private prisons, moreover, reveals the desire by these conglomerates to profit off the lessening of our freedom and human rights. Internationally, the U.S. continues to undermine democracies that do not serve its corporate interests ranging from Honduras to the Ukraine to Haiti.

This speaks to the broader rise of the 21st century authoritarian capitalism. It reveals the willingness and enhanced ability for governments and corporations to work together to defend the “free market” against social unrest and demands for greater equality and justice.

The Real Danger to Freedom

Again and again Sanders is being attacked as a socialist and by association a friend of totalitarianism. The question instead should be how corporate-funded Democrats and Republicans will be able to stave off the threat of “authoritarian capitalism” despite being primarily funded by the very autocrats who most benefit from and promote it. Indeed, how can they answer for their support for a market system that seems to incetivize and without serious socialist safeguards leads naturally too increased economic repression, political oppression, and military intervention?

To his credit, Sanders has in the past laid out his own foreign policy division that explicitly stresses the global danger of oligarchy to democracy. In a 2017 speech he proclaimed:

Inequality, corruption, oligarchy and authoritarianism are inseparable. They must be understood as part of the same system, and fought in the same way. Around the world we have witnessed the rise of demagogues who once in power use their positions to loot the state of its resources. These kleptocrats, like Putin in Russia, use divisiveness and abuse as a tool for enriching themselves and those loyal to them.

This is the precise argument he must continue to make not just for his own political survival but democracy and freedom worldwide. The real danger to freedom in the 21st century is authoritarian capitalism not democratic socialism and this election is a choice once more for a new generation between “socialism and barbarianism.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trumps-secret-police-things-are-heading-in-that-direction/

no lnx

Trump’s secret police? Things are heading in that direction

[President Donald J. Trump speaks with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers coming in for their shift change, after President Trump attended a Roundtable on Immigration and Border Security Thursday, January 10, 2019, at the U.S. Border Patrol McAllen Station in McAllen, Texas. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)]

Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board February 18, 2020

I wrote this morning about the president’s new intimidation of sanctuary cities. He’s deploying 100 CBP agents, including BORTAC, which is a SWAT team for border security. The official goal is increasing deportations by 35 percent, but it’s pretty clear the aim is bullying local law enforcement into cooperating with federal authorities. I set the Times report in historical context, trying to explain, as I see it, how 9/11 sparked a chain reaction leading to what appears to be Donald Trump’s secret police force.

I end the piece by quoting Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent turned civil rights activist, who reported a conversation she had with a former CBP official. She wrote:

Border Patrol does not believe they are a civilian law enforcement agency. They believe they are kin to the Marine Corps. They do not believe they are accountable to Congress, which is why they have no issues lying to them even while under oath.

They believe they are only accountable to … presidents like Trump. Border Patrol believes it is not required to answer to local police, FBI, CIA or any other law enforcement agency. They claim to be the “premiere” law enforcement agency, superior to all others. They say they will become a “national police force” to be used by a president to enforce laws even among citizens. (Italics are mine.)

Check out the whole thing here.

And while you’re there, please support my work by becoming a member!

Thanks. —John Stoehr

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didn't they have like 2k signatures? mostly retired?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/federal-judges-postpone-emergency-meeting-on-barrs-political-interference-after-trump-tweets-at-them/

no lnx

Federal judges postpone emergency meeting on Barr’s political interference after Trump tweets at them

Written by David Edwards / Raw Story February 20, 2020

A group of judges have reportedly cancelled an emergency meeting on possible political corruption at the Justice Department after President Donald Trump tweeted about the event.

The Federal Judges Association was set to discuss political interference by Trump and Attorney General William Barr. According to CNN, a decision was made on Wednesday afternoon to postpone the meeting.

A spokesperson for the group did not offer an immediate explanation and did not say if a new meeting had been scheduled.

The cancellation came after the president addressed the meeting on Twitter.

I hope the Federal Judges Association will discuss the tremendous FISA Court abuse that has taken place with respect to the Mueller Investigation Scam, including the forging of documents and knowingly using the fake and totally discredited Dossier before the Court. Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 18, 2020

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yikes. went after amb marie A

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-to-name-bombastic-loyalist-a-top-intel-chief-despite-lack-of-qualifications-report/

no lnx

Trump to name bombastic loyalist as top intel chief despite lack of qualifications: report

Ambassador Richard Grenell with California Wine Representative

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 19, 2020

President Donald Trump is expected to install Richard Grenell, his current Ambassador to Germany, as his next Acting Director of National Intelligence, according to The New York Times. Grenell is known as a bombastic Trump loyalist who has not been well received in Berlin.

Some eyebrows are being raised, not due to Grenell’s harsh attitudes but his disturbing lack of qualifications for the job of Director of National Intelligence, also known as the DNI.

The DNI is a Cabinet-level official who sits at the very top of the entire Intelligence Community, serving as the head of the 17 federal agencies that comprise it. They also serve as the President’s chief advisor on national security, and produce the top-secret President’s Daily Brief (PDB).

Federal law states quite clearly, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Ambassador to Germany does not qualify. Grenell previously has served as the spokesperson for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He has run a public affairs consultancy, has been a Fox News contributor, and for a few days was presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s national security spokesperson, but was forced to step down after conservatives blasted the former governor over Grenell’s sexual orientation.

In November the german magazine Der Spiegel ran a damning profile of Grenell titled, “Trump’s Ambassador Finds Few Friends in Germany.” (Ironically, one of the reasons Trump gave for firing his venerated Ambassador to Ukraine was that she was not well-liked in the country, which was false.)

“Since arriving in Berlin as U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell has flouted diplomatic conventions and attempted to interfere in domestic politics. He has since become politically isolated in the German capital,” Der Spiegel reported.

In the extremely “unflattering” article, Grenell is compared to “a right-wing extremist colonial officer.”

“The powerful avoid him. Doors have been shut. Few politicians to the left of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AFD) and the populist-conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), want to be seen with him.”

It gets worse.

Der Spiegel writes they spoke with 30 sources before publishing their report.

“Almost all of these sources paint an unflattering portrait of the ambassador, one remarkably similar to Donald Trump, the man who sent him to Berlin. A majority of them describe Grenell as a vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism. His brash demeanor, some claim, hides a deep insecurity, and they say he thirsts for the approval of others.”

All that aside, again, Grenell is not qualified, neither by law nor by common sense.

Some experts agree:...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/documentarian-ken-burns-warned-trumps-rise-would-be-hitler-esque-heres-what-else-he-predicted

no lnx

Documentarian Ken Burns warned Trump’s rise would be ‘Hitler-esque.’ Here’s what else he predicted

Director and producer, Ken Burns visits the FDR Library, May 3, 2009 Image via Flickr.

Written by Leslie Salzillo / Daily Kos February 17, 2020

“…He (Trump) represents the greatest threat to American democracy since the Second World War. He is so fundamentally un-American…” — Ken Burns on Donald Trump, 2016 Variety Interview

The above quote is by award-winning filmmaker and documentarian Ken Burns. Millions have enjoyed his many acclaimed films on PBS. Some of those documentaries include The Civil War, The Central Park Five, The Roosevelts, The Vietnam War, College Behind Bars, Jazz, , Baseball, Country Music, Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony and Unforgivable Blackness. To date, Burns, 66, has made over 30 historical films/documentaries.

In a Variety interview in 2016, Ken Burns discussed a work-in-progress called, “Defying the Nazis.” During the discussion, Burns was asked by Variety writer Brett Lang why he had become so outspoken about Donald Trump, who had not yet been elected president. Here are some excerpts from that interview with foreboding accuracy by Burns as to what would happen if Trump took office.

Why have you been so publicly opposed to Donald Trump?

I have never in my professional life ever spoken out in this way. I certainly have my own opinions and have a yard sign at elections and make sure I vote. But I spoke out because he represents the greatest threat to American democracy since the Second World War. He is so fundamentally un-American, and not only because he is unqualified, but because he is mentally unsuited. He represents a kind of strong man, narcissistic thing that represents the potential death of the Republic. All of my films are about the United States and all of them are about trying to understand how it works and how it doesn’t work, and I just felt compelled to speak out.

While tracing the Vietnam War, Burns said he has heard many tawdry discussions on tape by Johnson and Nixon, forgetting they were being recorded. But Burns says those tapes were nothing compared to the extreme vulgarity of Donald Trump.

What’s so dangerous about his appeal?

He has tapped a dark unconscious, in which it is easier to vilify the other than to see what you share in common. It’s easier to be afraid than to welcome change. It’s always been there. We had a civil war, you know. We killed 750,000 of ourselves over this issue. He’s appealing to that in the most venal and vulgar ways.

I could have answered your question in a much simpler way by just saying he’s too vulgar for me. There’s no one who has occupied the presidency of the United States like that. This is coming from a person who has just finished a ten-part series on the Vietnam War, so I have been listening for years to Johnson and Nixon on tapes that they forgot were being recorded, and the vulgarity there is pretty extreme, but nothing compares to the vulgarity of this man.

In the Variety interview, Burns refers the time when Trump took out a full-page ad asking for the death penalty to be given to five innocent children, the “Central Park Five,” who were accused of a heinous crime, from which they were later fully exonerated.

Are you referring to the “Access Hollywood” tape?

The most recent one does it in spades, but it’s more than that. My daughter and my son-in-law and I made a film about the Central Park Five. He took out full page ads asking for the death penalty to be brought back and applied to five innocent children and on Friday he doubled down on that. It’s only the sex tape that’s kept that relatively quiet, but I was very impressed by Sen. McCain who finally disavowed Trump and not only mentioned the completely off-the-rails sex tape, but also the Central Park Five as one of the reasons. He had the trifecta last Friday because he also said while being endorsed by border control folks that the Obama administration under the direction of Hillary Clinton was letting in immigrants so they could vote against him. This is the greatest country on earth, and one of the many reasons is because we have a smooth transition of power. He’s set himself up to continue to roil that dark unconscious that he has tapped into for his base. The fact that he could say the things he said about women, and that his adoring masses are not even flinching at that, is Hitler-esque. I refer you to Michiko Kakutani’s review of the Hitler biography two weeks ago in the Times, in which she didn’t mention the contemporary situation, she just put the bullet points of Hitler’s rise and every single one of them was exactly what Trump has done.

In his last comment about Trump, Burns was asked if he thought Trump was a fascist.

Do you think he’s a fascist?

:{:{}:

Absolutely. When you talk about having extra-judicial, threatening rivals with jail. You can call it fascistic or you can call it dictatorial. You can call it monomaniacal or imperial. Whatever you want to say, this is not the way that our country works.

:{:{}:

Ken Burns is a historian who foresaw the dangerous, insidious and historic rise of Donald Trump. Today, millions look forward to the historic fall of this odious out-of-control, wannabe king.

To learn more about Ken Burns and his documentaries, you can visit KenBurns.com.

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no lnx

https://onezero.medium.com/the-age-of-climate-authoritarianism-is-upon-us-ef7e88689430

OneZero

The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us

As climate change worsens, the world’s most powerful states will become even more dominant through a concentration of political power, military force, and energy resources

Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright

Jan 27 ·

An excerpt from Climate Leviathan by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainright.

A rapid — and massive — change in the geographies of energy production and consumption is currently underway. In a bid for energy security and new streams of profits, some of the world’s largest consumers of energy are turning to “friendlier,” and, ideally, domestic suppliers. Big Oil’s gaze has turned north (to the Arctic), deeper (offshore), and dirtier (tar sands). While the Middle East still holds most of the world’s oil reserves, it accounts for only about a third of current global oil production.

Meanwhile, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has generated a massive push into “unconventional” hydrocarbon resources.Despite persistent talk of peak oil, the world is awash in fossil fuels. For the major energy corporations, demand is a bigger problem than supply.

These centripetal forces are reconfiguring the world’s political geography, spurring at least two profoundly significant developments. First, the “winners” of this geopolitical game, already the world’s most powerful states, are likely to become even more dominant through a concentration of political-economic power, military force, and energy resources. The United States and China have developed two of the largest fracking industries, and both have potentially enormous reserves of shale gas. Second, this shift signals the end of any hope for meaningful carbon mitigation. Fracking and related extractive processes are much more carbon-intensive than drilling Saudi oil, and the explosion in unconventional hydrocarbons guarantees increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Further still, the geographic and political-economic distribution of these resources deepens the global division of wealth and power, exacerbating geopolitical inequalities and further destabilizing what little ground international negotiations have cleared for cooperation on climate-related concerns.

The International Energy Agency does not say mitigation — in other words, drawing down carbon pollution to slow the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere and thus slow the rate of climate change — is no longer possible. And, to be sure, some sectors, firms, and localities have reduced emissions. “Green energy” has expanded in many places — there are new solar panels in China and Europe, more dams on tropical rivers, and so on. Global demand for electricity has soared, and shows little sign of slowing. As of yet there is no green energy boom. But carbon emissions continue to accelerate. The International Energy Agency explains:

“Despite the growth of non-fossil energy (such as nuclear, hydropower and other renewable sources… the share of fossil fuels within the world energy supply is relatively unchanged over the past four decades. In 2014, fossil sources accounted for 82% of the global [energy supply].”

So, without radical change, the world’s atmospheric concentration of CO2 will not fall below 400 parts per million until after the Anthropocene. The possibility of rapid, global carbon mitigation as a climate change abatement strategy has therefore quite likely passed. The world’s elites, at least, appear to have abandoned it — if they ever took it seriously.

In 2010, the writer Mike Davis imagined a “not improbable scenario” in which mitigation “would be tacitly abandoned… in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth’s first-class passengers.”

His prediction may prove prescient.

“The goal would be the creation of green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet,” he wrote. “Of course, there would still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But worldwide adaptation to climate change, which presupposes trillions of dollars of investment in the urban and rural infrastructures of poor and medium-income countries, as well as the assisted migration of tens of millions of people from Africa and Asia, would necessarily command a revolution of almost mythic magnitude in the redistribution of income and power.”

What does the plausibility of such a terrible future scenario mean for politics today? The momentous socio-ecological transformations to which Davis refers — and against which a global climate justice movement might enact what he calls a “revolution of almost mythic magnitude” — is best grasped as a dangerous, conjunctural moment of transition in the planet’s natural history. In the midst of these changes the urgent questions concern not merely a transformation in politics, but a total transformation of the political.

We posit that two conditions will fundamentally shape the coming political-economic order. The first is whether the prevailing economic formation will remain capitalist or not: Will capitalism continue to shape social life in most places? The second condition is whether a coherent planetary sovereign will emerge — a body through which authoritarian rule-making may be carried out — and whether sovereignty will be reconstituted for the purposes of planetary management.

What we call “Climate Leviathan” exists to the extent that some sovereign — a body evolving out of the UN’s climate frameworks, perhaps — exists who can invoke the exception, declare an emergency, and decide who may emit carbon and who cannot. This sovereign must be planetary in a dual sense: capable of acting both at the planetary scale (since climate change is understood as a massive collective action problem) and in the name of planetary management for the sake of life on Earth. A task of biblical proportions, amounting to an impossible global accounting of everything, like determining “a weight for the wind and apportion[ing] the waters by measure,” to quote the book of Job.

Climate Leviathan is defined by this dream of a planetary sovereign. It’s a regulatory authority armed with democratic legitimacy, binding technical authority on scientific issues, and a panopticonlike capacity to monitor the vital granular elements of our emerging world: fresh water, carbon emissions, climate refugees, and so on.

Though they failed to reduce global carbon emissions, the annual meetings of the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) to advance the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) represent the first institutional manifestation of this dream of planetary regulation — a process that the dominant nation-states will consolidate as climate-induced disruptions of accumulation and political stability become more urgent.

And the 2015 Paris Agreement clarifies the present conditions of any possible global agreement. To begin, capitalism is treated not as a question, but as the solution to climate change. Indeed, filtered through the COP lens, climate change appears to capital as an opportunity: trade in emissions permits (“cap-and-trade”), “green” business, nuclear power, corporate leadership, carbon capture and storage, green finance, and ultimately, geoengineering: these are Leviathan’s lifeblood. Why call this “Leviathan”? Climate Leviathan is a direct descendant from Hobbes’ original: when it comes to climate, Leviathan will decide, and, in fact, is constituted precisely in the act of decision.

It expresses a desire for, and the recognition of, the necessity of a planetary sovereign to seize command, declare an emergency, and bring order to the Earth — all in the name of saving life. If “the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government,” then the consolidation of Climate Leviathan represents the rescaling of the “normal technique[s]” to encompass planetary security, or the making-secure of planetary life.

With this achievement, the state of nature and the nature of the state would form a self-authorizing union.

To date, what political scientists call “the interstate system’”— the networks and institutions through which capitalist nation-states negotiate agreements — has clearly failed to rapidly reduce carbon emissions. Yet the demands for action on climate change continues to grow This contradiction — rending deep fissures in the UNFCCC process — may lead, as with other “public good” collective action problems, to the construction of a nominally “global” frame that is in fact a political and geographical extension of the rule of the extant hegemonic bloc: the capitalist global North (working with its allies and, sometimes, China). But this is by no means certain. Any realizable planetary Climate Leviathan must be constructed with the approval of a range of actors formerly excluded from global governance — China and India most notably, but the list could go on.

Leviathan could take one of two broad forms. On one hand, a variety of authoritarian territorial sovereignty could emerge in nations or regions where political-economic conditions prove amenable to transcending capital. On the other hand, we could see Leviathan emerge as the means by which to perpetuate the rule of northern liberal, democratic capitalist states.

We think the most likely scenario is that, through the coming decades, the waning, U.S.-led, liberal capitalist bloc will collaborate with China to create a planetary regime that, in light of political and ecological crisis, will brook no opposition in defense of a human future for which it volunteers itself as the first and last line of defense.

The pattern of mobilization will likely be familiar, in which the United Nations or other international fora serve as a means of legitimizing aggressive means of surveillance and discipline. This could make the construction of Climate Leviathan a key means by which to salvage U.S. hegemony — a prospect that only increases the likelihood of its consolidation.

Climate Leviathan will be the fundamental regulatory ideal motivatingelites in the near future. Still, it is neither inevitable nor invincible; it is strong and coherent but not uncontested. It is threatened from within by the usual burdens of any state-capitalist project divided by multiple accumulation strategies, and it is almost impossible to imagine that it will actually reverse climate change.

Excerpt from Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, published January 7, 2020, by Verso Books.

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Authoritarian3 Bak

More than crazy bluster

Violence as noble and intoxicating

Social disruption and destruction

Targeting the Left

Related

Federal Agents at Protests Renew Calls to Dismantle Homeland Security

Stand Back and Stand By

Related

Proud Boys Rally Fizzled but Portland’s Cops Went on the Attack

Unanswered questions about Pegasus in India

BJP surveillance measures

A global trend

only winner of last night's 'debate' was dictatorship and oligarchy

trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

The precipice is here’: Conservative explains why Trump’s love for dictators is only getting worse

Trump’s Claim He’ll Send Sheriffs to Polling Places is Revealing in a Lot of Unintended Ways

A powerful tool

Religious imagery

Trump as savior

The battle over free speech online is a volcano that’s ready to blow

Ex-intelligence officials warn we are dangerously close to a complete unraveling of democracy Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Mon

From President to Dictator

Admitted His Crimes

Justice Department Turmoil

On Putin’s Payroll

More Kremlin Connections

Economic Collapse and Riots

‘Country Goes to Total Hell’

Trump Places Trust in Putin

Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

experts accuse CDC of withholding ‘crucial’ information about the coronavirus from doctors

Absolutely outrageous’: White House bars press from filming or recording coronavirus briefing

Authoritarian3 Bak

More than crazy bluster

Violence as noble and intoxicating

Social disruption and destruction

Targeting the Left

Related

Federal Agents at Protests Renew Calls to Dismantle Homeland Security

Stand Back and Stand By

Related

Proud Boys Rally Fizzled but Portland’s Cops Went on the Attack

Unanswered questions about Pegasus in India

BJP surveillance measures

A global trend

only winner of last night's 'debate' was dictatorship and oligarchy

trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

The precipice is here’: Conservative explains why Trump’s love for dictators is only getting worse

Trump’s Claim He’ll Send Sheriffs to Polling Places is Revealing in a Lot of Unintended Ways

A powerful tool

Religious imagery

Trump as savior

The battle over free speech online is a volcano that’s ready to blow

Ex-intelligence officials warn we are dangerously close to a complete unraveling of democracyNancy LeTourneau / Washington Mon

From President to Dictator

Admitted His Crimes

Justice Department Turmoil

On Putin’s Payroll

More Kremlin Connections

Economic Collapse and Riots

‘Country Goes to Total Hell’

Trump Places Trust in Putin

Will an oil tycoon who donated $500,000 to support Trump’s re-election get bailed out by his administration?

experts accuse CDC of withholding ‘crucial’ information about the coronavirus from doctors

Absolutely outrageous’: White House bars press from filming or recording coronavirus briefing

Ex-intelligence officials warn we are dangerously close to a complete unraveling of democracy Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Mon