MARCH TO FASCISM

 

Friday, March 5, 2021

INSURRECTION

Friends, some thoughts regarding insurrection,

Some correspondents have expressed skepticism or disagreement regarding use of “insurrection” to describe what happened at the 6 January joint congressional assembly convened to accept the Electoral College ballots. I also note some news reports use words such as angry mob, rioters or other such descriptors to avoid using insurrection or attempted insurrection.

I must point out that it is difficult to remedy a problem if you fail to identify the problem in the first place.

I argue we are in the late stages of an insurrection begun decades ago with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (“government is the problem” “There is no society only individuals”) and the adoption of neoliberal ideology and cruel capitalism which continue to dominate our society today. Successive Republican administrations have pressed for reduction of regulations governing public safety and environmental pollution. These changes often effected by hobbling the government agencies responsible for the oversight.

Part and parcel of the plan is destruction of labor unions, in part, because such collective action violates Ms. Thatcher’s dictum. Those individuals (read workers) who toil as Uber drivers, food delivery drones, various gig workers and nomadic camper-living Amazon temporary workers, are examples of the atomized work force with no claim to community. The atomized have no weight, no power and likely feel no commitment or loyalty to community or nation. That is the desired effect described by some observers as alienation.

Five years ago two knowledgeable Eastern European historians warned us of the authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump. They didn’t use the insurrection label (or the fascism label at the time) but the warning they offered included the clear, if only implied, description of a possible take over of the government by that authoritarian.

January 2017 we got Donald Trump as President and he immediately began to install his loyalists and donors in positions of leadership in various government agencies, agencies which are our government, agencies which we expect to work for us, agencies we need for our security, health protection and education. The obvious example is Postmaster General DeJoy who crippled the Post Office to slow the mail of absentee ballots. Some observers describe America as having fallen to third world status for some parameters (poverty, life expectancy). This destruction of government services should be understood as an assault and a continuation of the ongoing insurrection.

We watched Trump spit out his vile hate and bigotry for four years. The message was embraced by those citizens who were susceptible for whatever reason. His big lie propaganda and demonization of others, particularly Democrats, instructed his followers who their enemies were and continued right through to the January 6 assault on Congress.

Consider what might have happened if the hate motivated mob had been able to take control of the building and seize political leaders that day. What might have developed if VP Pence had done what Trump wanted, that is to reject the electoral ballots from several states sufficient to deny any candidate to necessary 270 votes. The plan was to then shift the selection of President to the House of Representatives and if several of the progressive house members were detained and unable to vote, the House would then vote to declare Trump President.

It failed for several reasons. Trump apparently assumed he had greater support of police and military. He was counting on Pence to do his bidding. His “army,” probably a small percentage of the people who actually entered the building, were prepared to take custody of some legislators (zip ties in hand) but were stymied by the legislators having been secured elsewhere. And, maybe Trump thought some of the Republican legislators would help neutralize Democrats however, they didn’t have the opportunity and might have been too cowardly to do so anyway.

In closing I must remind everyone the history of Europe in the last century. Adolf Hitler was such a threat in the first years of the 1930s and was actually jailed for a time. He came back big time in 1933 being named Germany’s Chancellor in and then Führer in 1934. The Reichstag was neutered at that time and Hitler was then allowed to function as a dictator. The lesson for us here is that the threat of insurrection remains. Trump is not going away and so we must consider the Insurrection as ongoing.

Consider the recent efforts by Republican controlled states to restrict voting opportunities. Over 250 such laws have been introduced in 43 states in recent weeks. Laws aimed at reducing the availability polling places,restricting early voting and requiring citizen identification documents. Such laws should be considered continued acts of insurrection in so far as these actions are intended to control election outcomes.

I will leave it the reader to identify America’s enemies in this whole terrible process. I have my opinions, implied in the above analysis, but prefer to invite others to offer their observations.

Dr. Bandy X Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and editor of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" has written a second book Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, a psychological assessment of the president against the backdrop of his supporters and the country as a whole.

“I ...emphasize in Profile of a Nation that we should consider the president, his followers and the nation as an ecology, not in isolation. Hence, what he does after this presidency depends a great deal on us. This is the reason I frantically wrote the book over the summer: we require active intervention to stop him from achieving any number of destructive outcomes for the nation,” Read the whole report here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/

Perhaps Dr. Lee’s analysis will help us understand how to defend our country from the fascist insurrection.

Wayne

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Trump’s Turn From Immigration to the Enemy Within

Trump’s shift from demonizing immigrants to targeting leftists is straight out of the fascist playbook.

Ryan Devereaux October 3 2020, 6:00 a.m.

 "...the Trump administration has increasingly and prominently centered purported threats posed by leftists, anarchists, and anti-fascists in its bid to hold onto power. This widening of the threat aperture is straight out of the authoritarian playbook, said Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.”

 https://theintercept.com/2020/10/03/trump-immigration-antifa-fascism/

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13 August 2019

President Trump is preparing to sign an executive order creating an Internet speech police with sweeping powers to censor the Internet.

A draft copy of the executive order was leaked to the media, giving us a chance to alert the public and generate the grassroots backlash needed to kill Trump’s “Internet speech police” executive order.¹

The leaked executive order would put the FCC and the FTC in charge of deciding what political speech is—and isn’t—permissible on the Internet.

The order comes in response to a myth pushed by far-right activists that Internet platforms like Facebook and Google are biased against conservatives.² 

But instead of protecting free speech, Trump’s executive order would put political appointees in charge of deciding what speech is allowed and what speech isn’t. 

[1] White House drafting executive order to tackle Silicon Valley’s alleged anti-conservative bias: Politico
[2] The myth of social media anti-conservative bias refuses to die: Columbia Journalism Review

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Friday, March 15, 2019

IMPEACHMENT

15 March 2019

In an interview with Breitbart, Donald Trump had a not-at-all-subtle message for his opponents. “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump,” he claimed. “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.” Breitbart  Note: this venue is a mainline injection point for the Trump army. (emphasis mine)

Explicit threats of authoritarian violence from the orange ogre. We should take him at his word because we know some elements of his assumed army  of "tough people" are capable of acting on such suggestions.

Considering the vile pronouncements which spew from this nut job's pie hole, it is obvious Trump is a threat to the safety of peoples all over the world. The New Zealand Islamaphobic shooter was likely inspired by our hate champion.

With regard to police supporting Trump, all you have to do is look at the video of Suffolk County police officers, including ranking officers, clapping, smiling and smirking as stage backdrop for Trump's theater event in Brentwod NY in 2017.  youtube Do not watch this on a full stomach. Disclosure: I am an alumni of the aforementioned institution and can no longer be proud of that association.

It is long past time for an impeachment investigation to have begun. Palosi is just wrong about "He's just not worth it." We are in a constitutional crisis and congress is thus required to act!

Mr. Delgado, get on board with impeachment now!

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But Then It Was Too Late

“They Thought They Were Free” by Milton Mayer, 1954,

Interviews of German citizens to discover their engagement with Nazism

From Chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late”, an excerpt:

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen the gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

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

...

“Those,” I said, “are the words of my friend the baker. “One had no time to think. There was so much going on.” Your friend the baker was right,” said my colleague. “The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your “little men,” your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about-we were decent people-and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by machinations of the ‘national enemies’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it-please try to believe me-unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

How tall is our corn?    Wayne

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How the Administration Is Manufacturing a New Border Crisis

Ryan Devereaux | The Intercept October 29 2018

  Note: this story is primarily about ICE releasing large numbers of immigrants to civil service organizations probably for the purpose of inflaming the right-wing base leading up to the midterms. This is dangerous in that it puts some of those innocent folks at risk given the anti-immigrant sentiment the administration has engendered. But there is a larger issue I will explain below. 

Devereaux wrote:
  

  “...Trump ... urgently informing his base that the real “national emergency” facing the United States was external, and the result of brown-skinned migrants.

It’s political theater, but it’s had real-world consequences. ... the accused shooter in the Pittsburgh synagogue attack, included the Trumpian conspiracy theory among the deeply anti-Semitic complaints he posted on a right-wing social media site.

  Trump ... called up military assets to respond to the caravan. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, “Operation Faithful Patriot” will include the deployment of 5,000 troops to the border. As the paper noted, “the additional troops would mean that the number of U.S. forces deployed at the border would be greater than those currently in Syria and Iraq, and roughly half of those deployed in Afghanistan.”

   Sure this is political theater, but it is also very likely a premeditated fascist-authoritarian power grab; create a crisis, exaggerate the threat, declare yourself the nation’s guardian, then mobilize the military within our own borders. What happens next might require additional “angry mobs” or subversive agitators.

   We are being set up for the military to serve as a domestic “peace-keeping” presence. I suspect the Republicans are anticipating rebellious civil disobedience if/when Democratic candidates fall victim to voter dis-enfranchisement, voter intimidation, and election fraud. This could get ugly very fast.

Wayne