Tag: Fascism

Inverted Fascism–WTF?

For years now we have been having a conversation….well most sane people have been…..is a Donny a fascist or not?

His actions to me say he is…..and the actions of his sycophants say they are as well…..the tech bros are for sure…..but with all that what is this thing called ‘Trumpism”?

I argued that Trump is a fascist, but more specifically, borrowing from the language of Sheldon Wolin, he is an “inverted fascist.” Inverted fascism, like the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, is animated by a totalitarian drive, but puts corporate interests above those of the nation state. The Trump administration’s war on Iran is the most extreme manifestation of inverted fascism that we have seen yet.

Inverted fascism is more than simply a collection of policies that are repressive and in the interest of billionaires. It could be understood as a condition in which popular input, at every level, has been usurped by corporate power. This condition is marked by media concentration in the hands of a tiny group of conglomerates facilitated by FCC-authorized mergers; social media owned by right-wing billionaires; lobbyists, campaign donors, and corporate-backed think tanks determining policy; and underfunded schools, mass deportations, and militarized police.

But inverted fascism is also a global condition. In their report on 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term, Oxfam found that billionaire wealth around the world grew by more than 16%, reaching a record $18.3 trillion. This while right-wing governments around the world have taken up different versions of inverted fascism. Benjamin Netanyahu engages in brazen genocide in Gaza and land grabs in the West Bank and Lebanon while hollowing out Israel’s own social services. Narendra Modi oversees unprecedented inequality while forwarding his own Hindu nationalism.

This order, however, is fundamentally unstable as made evident by the inability of the Trump administration to pry open the Strait of Hormuz, the reverberating economic consequences of the war, Iran’s remarkable success in its assault on US and Israeli targets in the region, and the reluctance of US allies toward participating. This war marks a major step in the decline of US hegemony. As that decline unfolds, the brazenness of the violence of capitalism becomes increasingly evident. The assault began with the bombing of a girls’ school that killed over 150, the vast majority of whom were between the ages of eight and twelve.

Decline has been a reality for US global hegemony since it reached its peak following WWII. In 1949, the Chinese Revolution succeeded despite billions in US aid to the Kuomintang nationalists and tens of thousands of marines working alongside Japanese imperialists endeavoring to defeat the Red Army. One letter from US ambassador to China, John Leighton Stuart, to the secretary of state relayed, “Killing, assaulting of peaceful Chinese civilians and raping of Chinese women and robbing of Chinese shops by American forces in China. One United States Marine in Tientsin had thrown 9 year old Chinese girl into river [sic].”

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/its-going-to-get-a-lot-worse/

Donny’s actions and policies smell suspiciously like fascism…..this point has been debated for years now….the Donny loyalist do not see it….those effected by these policies see it so very clearly….

I know this is all debatable….but I would love to hear you thoughts….good or bad….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Dark Days Of Yesteryear Returns

Lots has been said and/or written about what is going on in the US these days…..some see it as an improvement but most see it for what it is….a return of the fascism of the past.

Donny has set himself up as the supreme leader with is underlings cleaning up his messes…..all this smacks of the aesthetics of yesteryear….

What is most revealing about the MAGA aesthetic is its studied ugliness. On one side stands the grotesque excess of beauty-pageant femininity, plastic smiles, puffy lips, lacquered beach-wave hair, sharpened jawlines, and a hyper-sexualized nostalgia masquerading as “traditional values.” US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem exemplifies this aesthetic as a badge of cruelty. Carefully styling herself in a Barbie-doll register of hyper-femininity, she delivers media performances staged in front of prisons and other sites associated with the punishment and terrorization of immigrants. The effect is chilling: a glossy, pornographic aesthetic fused with images of confinement, state violence, and racialized cruelty. Beauty here does not soften power; it aestheticizes domination and makes authoritarian violence appear natural, even glamorous. This aesthetic of cruelty is not confined to clothing (heavy on tweeds), posture, or setting. It increasingly takes hold at the level of the face itself, where artificiality is no longer concealed but aggressively displayed.

Fascist Aesthetics Has Come Back with MAGA Politics

There is more if interested….

The United States is not merely awash in brutalizing and murderous acts of state-sanctioned violence. It is being restructured by them. The killings of Rachel Good and Alex Pretti are not aberrations or tragic mistakes; they belong to a longer and darker history that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People once named with chilling precision. In earlier periods of American turmoil, such killings were called lynchings, acts “carried out by lawless mobs, although police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.” Today, this violence extends well beyond the bullet and the baton. It takes form in the expansion of prison camps, what Thom Hartmann rightly calls concentration camps, the war on immigrants, and the routine assault on Black and brown lives made disposable through policy, indifference, and neglect. At the same time, the country is saturated with a culture steeped in fascist spectacle and authoritarian display. Under the Trump administration, aesthetics itself becomes a battleground, a weaponized field where power works on desire, memory, bodies, and pleasure to consolidate domination.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/13/maga-aesthetics-and-fascist-power-spectacles-of-white-supremacy/

All this is pointing to a problem that we have faced before but not with such approval as today….the GOP today seems to be embracing the policies and actions that this country fought against less than a hundred years ago…..

No less an authority on right-wing extremism than Laura Loomer, Donald Trump’s wacko loyalty policeman, said it: Republicans have a Nazi problem, warning that there are those “trying to redefine” the party “so it can become modern-day Hitler Youth.”

When a Loomer admits it, you know this is a real problem, not just a liberal fabrication.

The Republicans’ entanglement with Nazism — especially after a recent kerfuffle involving conservative hero Tucker Carlson, Nazi apologist Nick Fuentes, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts (more on that to come) — has been much written about, as GOP stalwarts argue over whether they should denounce Nazi sympathizers or make common cause with them. This is a debate that really shouldn’t be a debate at all, and certainly not one that requires another disquisition on the Republicans’ moral bankruptcy.

But I am delivering one nonetheless, because — no matter how much space this courtship has been given, no matter how many pundits decry the celebration of Nazis and the canonization of Adolf Hitler by large segments of the conservative movement, no matter how often conservatives trot out antisemitic tropes, and no matter how often conservative leaders declare that this would be a much better country if it were a dictatorship — the fact that one of our two major parties actively, publicly, enthusiastically embraces Nazism should be a scandal, a horror, and a disgrace. Not something to be promptly forgotten, as it has been, but something that should be a front-page story every single day.

Lest we forget — and Republicans seem to have forgotten — the Nazis were the bad guys, the very personification of evil, the force that hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat, and the gleeful, bloodthirsty murderers of millions. They needed to be destroyed, forever castigated as the very worst of humanity, not emulated. Yet emulated they are.

So, yes, Ms. Loomer: The Republicans do, indeed, have a Nazi problem, and that means America has one too.

America’s Nazi Problem

What amazes me is that many average Americans see no problem with the direction the government is taking….I have people I know that see no problem with the direction that I do not understand for they see and hear the same information I do yet they are content with the erosion of our rights as Americans.

How can this be?

We live in a ‘Dual State”…..

Life under authoritarianism is actually, for the most part, weirdly normal. It’s often even, well, boring. The average person can go about their day as usual. You take your kids to school, you head to the office, and yes, you even host dinner parties. You live in the realm that Fraenkel referred to as “the normative state,” and from within that realm, it’s easy to think that if you just keep your head down and avoid making waves, you’ll be perfectly fine, thank you very much.

Fraenkel’s book is called The Dual State for a reason. This first state, the business-as-usual one, actually exists to lull you into a sense of complacency such that you don’t realize that another state is also operating in parallel with it. That second state, which Fraenkel calls “the prerogative state,” only becomes visible to you when you do something that the powers that be don’t like. Then suddenly you’re in a realm where the rule of law does not exist, where citizens can be killed with impunity, where you — even you, who thought you were invulnerable — can become a target.

The dark genius of this setup is that most people don’t realize that the prerogative state is active until it’s too late. They only wake up when the knock comes on their very own door — or when the door is forcefully broken down.

“The Dual State lives by veiling its true nature,” Fraenkel wrote.

That’s why it’s not surprising to me that your friends have been politically inactive. If they think of themselves as “not the target” — if they’re citizens, if they’re white, if they don’t speak with the “wrong” accent or express the “wrong” political views in public — it’s extremely easy for them to think everything is mostly normal, because the whole political apparatus is designed to make them think exactly that.

(yahoo.com)

Cut it any way you like but the ugliness of the Goon Platoon and Donny’s sycophants is getting out of hand.

We are entering into a world that was crushed before and it will again….but only if the American people have the courage to step up.

Do we?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

So It Begins!

Donald the Orange has been flexing his muscle to the tune of lies and misinformation…..while the people of this country suffer with slashes to their health care and rising food costs as well as rent going out of sight….the idiot in the room has decided  to takeover the nation’s capital on a LIE.

President Trump is deploying the National Guard onto the streets of Washington, DC, and placing the district’s Metropolitan Police Department under temporary federal control, reports the Washington Post, which describes the moves as an “extraordinary flex of federal power.”

  • “I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse,” Trump said in a Monday morning news conference.
  • One big part of the initiative is clearing out DC’s homeless population, and the White House already had mobilized FBI agents to aid local law enforcement. Now it plans to activate about 800 members of the Guard as well, reports Politico.
  • Before his announcement, Trump declared that DC “will be liberated today!” in a Truth Social post. “I will make our capital great again!” he added, in all caps. “The days of ruthlessly killing, or hurting, innocent people, are OVER!”
  • Earlier this year, the US Attorney’s Office in DC trumpeted a stat that seems to contradict Trump’s narrative of crime run amok, notes the New York Times: Violent crime is at a 30-year low in the district.
  • Last week, a high-profile member of the Department of Government Efficiency was car-jacked in DC, and Trump called attention to the attack on Monday. He was “savagely beaten by a band of roving thugs,” said Trump. “Can’t believe that he’s still alive.”

Liberated from what?  Crime has been down for 3 years running….what is this asshole’s desire here?

But the best stuff coming from motor mouth himself is about the homeless….

President Trump has ordered homeless people to move out of Washington, DC, “immediately.” “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” he wrote Sunday morning on Truth Social, not long after arriving at his Virginia golf club from the White House, the Guardian reports. Trump shared photos that appeared to be taken from his motorcade, showing a handful of tents near a highway on-ramp about a mile from the White House and one person sleeping on the steps of the American Institute of Pharmacy Building.

Trump then teased Monday’s press conference, where he vowed to address crime and the “beautification” of the capital. “The Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive,” he wrote. “Before the tents, squalor, filth, and Crime, it was the most beautiful Capital in the World. It will soon be that again.” Data released in January shows violent crime in DC was actually down 35% in 2024 for its lowest level in 30 years, per the Guardian. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Sunday that violent crime has declined another 26% so far this year, and that overall crime is down 7%, per MSNBC.

Homelessness, though a visible problem, is not an epidemic. About 800 unsheltered people sleep outside in the city of 700,000, according to the Community Partnership. Another 3,275 use emergency shelters and 1,065 are in transitional housing. As president, Trump controls only federal land and buildings in DC. It’s unclear what legal authority he plans to use to evict homeless people. “The Criminals, you don’t have to move out. We’re going to put you in jail where you belong,” he wrote as he reportedly prepares to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington, per Reuters.

He also said he would find them a home far from DC….that translates into another gulag deep in the disease infested Everglades….

Nothing about any of this should sit well on the stomachs of Americans….if it does then you are NOT an American you are a Nazi looking for blood from those you hate.

Was that plain enough for you MAGA d/bags?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Is Trump A Fascist?

I am sorry but I have had lots on my mind today so I have not written anything but this article should do to stir up some reactions.

I know, I know…..this is one subject that has been batted around for years but the question is still unanswered….definitively.

Supporters say no….that it is only sour grapes that has people saying such stuff…..opponents point to words and speeches and actions as proof that he is leaning far Right….which is accurate?

This is a well written article from the Guardian and I give it here to see if people will actually pay attention or stick to their shallow thinking.

****Please read the article and comment on the validity of the work not some half baked belief that is rambling around in that mind of yours.****

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/21/is-donald-trump-a-fascist

The piece is well worth the read whether you agree or not.

And now if you have any thing to add….

I Read, I Write, You know

“lego ergo scribo”

“…If I Quacks Like A Duck….”

This is just another re-post from one of my many blogs…..this time it is the Daily Agitator…..

There are so many labels thrown around today that it gets mind numbing…..socialist is a popular one to use in describing Dems…..but it is made by people that have no idea what a socialist is about….there is NOTHING socialist about Dems….if you doubt me then look up socialism do yourself a favor it will prevent you from looking stupid.

Now the popular word to describe the hard Right is fascist….but is that fair?

This post explains why I use the term….it is up to you to make your own mind up.

Is It American Fascism?

There is a crossroad approaching and now is the time to dig in and learn what you can about the candidates stop listening to the noise….make up your mind.

Take some time and challenge your biases.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“cognito ergo me agitare”

Closing Thought–10Jan24

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!

I remember that intro from the news round-up on the original SNL (by far the best SNL)….

The reason I bring up Franco is because there are some on the Radical Right that are trying to resurrect this fascist dictator.

Is the fascism? Or is it the popped fur collar? The jaunty cape itself? The military fatigues? The teeny tiny mustache? Maybe it’s Maybelline. No, it’s probably the fascism.

Whatever it is, some on the Right are now pretty hot to trot for Generalissimo Francisco Franco — which I can honestly say is not a take I have heard outside of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the whole bit there was that she was actually quite daft and thought the fascists were just super into art and that being into fascism herself made her seem very chic and European. Though now that I’m reading up on it, it seems that William F. Buckley was also a fan.

This week, noted Pizzagate idiot Jack Posobiec embarked upon a quest to rehabilitate the image of Franco, a brutal, oppressive, authoritarian falangist/fascist dictator who killed hundreds of thousands of people. I’d love to be surprised by this, but it seems only natural after they all embraced Pinochet so eagerly.

“The communists were slaughtering everyone,” he cried. “Someone had to stop them. His name was Francisco Franco.”

I’m not going to get too into it, but this is a not a man who is very good at timelines. The Red Terror happened after the attempted 1936 military coup that lead to the Spanish Civil War and would eventually lead to Franco declaring himself dictator of Spain. Yes, communists in Spain at that time did kill people and they specifically targeted Nationalists, Royalists, Spanish nobility and members of the clergy. Estimates of this range from 38,000 to 110,905. I can “condemn” it now, just as it was condemned by many socialist and liberal Republican leaders during the Spanish Civil War, because I am not a psychopath.

The thing is, at the time the Red Terror was happening, the White Terror — committed by the Nationalists and Royalists — was also happening, was far worse and lasted far longer, with death tolls ranging from 160,000–200,000. Unlike the Red Terror, the White Terror was organized and calculated, as well as supported by the right-wing leaders at the time.

https://www.wonkette.com/p/guess-which-brutal-authoritarian

That is just what we need here….let democracy die so the rest of us can as well.

If you cannot see a problem then we are in serious trouble come November.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Faces Of Fascism

Fascism now there is a word that is getting a workout these days….almost as popular as ‘socialist’ was in the not so distant past.

But how many that use the term actually know anything about it?

Here’s a hint: Very Few!

Then here is a very simple definition to get us started….a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

But if that is too simplistic for you then maybe this will make more sense to you…..

When far-right personalities and movements started popping up during the last two decades, there was, in some quarters, strong hesitation to use the “f” word to describe them. Indeed, as late as less than three years ago, I had to defend the use of the word fascist in the Cambridge Union debate against academics who were squeamish about employing it to describe far-right movements in Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world. What Donald Trump and the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection have shown, however, is that the distinction between “far right” and “fascist” is academic. Or one can say that a “far-rightist” is a fascist who has not yet seized power, for it is only once they are in power that fascists fully reveal their political propensities.

Fascism 101 for Today’s Geopolitics

But like so many other political philosophies there are many aspects within the ‘movement’….

Primo Levi used to say that every era has its own fascism. What is the fascism of our time? I define fascism as the socio-political condition of capital concentration which, without democratic control, legitimizes total indifference to the humanity of others. Therefore, fascism is a phenomenon specific to capitalist societies. I’ve been making a distinction between societal fascism (when one social group holds the right of veto over the life of another group) and political fascism (a type of authoritarian regime). Today, I think we are moving towards fascist assemblages in which previously distinct components (cultural, economic, social and political) are combined. The fascism of our time has the following faces: social neo-Darwinism, political religion, the traditional far right, lawfare, acedia individualism. Any of them is compatible with democracy, as long as democracy is not much more than a game of appearances.

Social neo-Darwinism. Neoliberalism, as an economic policy, is a device for concentrating wealth through transfers from the poor and middle classes to the upper classes by reducing the freedoms proposed by liberalism to economic freedom. As a social policy, neoliberalism translates into neo-social Darwinism: sacralization of individual autonomy in parallel with the denial of the conditions for being effectively autonomous, which leads to defending the incapacity of the state to alleviate inequalities of opportunity; glorification of order, security and tranquillity guaranteed by police repression and the mass incarceration of discontents or nonconformists; conversion of wealth and economic power into privileged criteria of human dignity; cooperation and altruism are unnatural; the means are always more contingent and disposable than the ends; the production of death is collateral damage in the struggle for success or power.

The Different Faces of Fascism

There are many faces to fascism and I feel we have not seen the end of any of them.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Vermin And Blood

Since the next general election is less than a year away now is a good time to start paying attention to the candidates and their messages.

Some may think that I and others spend too much time on the possibility of a Trump victory in November….but people need to know what they will get with their precious vote.

Donald the Orange seems to be channeling his inner Adolph….I wrote about his Veterans Day speech which was a re-word of a Hitler speech…..but in case you were too damn business to read it…..

Trump’s Veterans Day Speech

For Christ sake READ IT!

But wait there is more…..

In that speech he term ‘vermin’ was thrown about….

The word “vermin” – in German “das Ungeziefer” – was frequently used by Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and other Nazis to refer to Jews, Roma, queers, communists, socialists, and others considered undesirable. They picked up the term from, among others, the late 19th C. Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, and the German/Hungarian physician Max Nordau who used it to describe the scourge of delinquency and the supposed degeneracy of contemporary literature and art. From them, and from the writings of Frederick Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, the Nazis developed the idea that Jews, socialists and other proscribed persons were parasites, vampires, and vermin. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “[The Jew] remains the eternal parasite, a sponger who, like a terrible bacillus, spreads out more and more as soon as a favorable medium invites him to do so.”

When questioned about the Nazi resonance of “vermin”, Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung both denied it and doubled down: “[T]hose who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Realizing that the phrase “entire existence will be crushed” sounded Nazi, Cheung amended his statement. He was only referencing his opponents’ “sad, miserable existence” he said, not their “entire existence.”

Vermin

But wait there is even more….

“Blood traitor” or “blood poisoning”….I have heard these terms used many times here in the South meaning inter-racial marriages and fornication…..and guess who jumped on this fascist bandwagon?

Former President Donald Trump said immigrants coming to the U.S. are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a remark on Saturday that quickly drew a rebuke from his chief Democratic rival as President Joe Biden’s campaign likened the words to those of Adolf Hitler.

“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in New Hampshire. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

Trump then repeated the use of “poisoning” in a post on his social media website Truth Social, saying overnight in an all-caps post, that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”

The term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” in which he criticized immigration and the mixing of races. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote.

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-says-immigrants-poisoning-blood-181843345.html

Terms staright out of a fascist playbook.

Anyone using the terms ‘vermin’ or ‘blood poisoning’ is a fascist….they pretend top be something else but their words give them a way.

Please learn everything you can about any candidate before you give them your vote.

Do not sleep through this portion of the campaigns for while you snooze our country is bleeding and to the point that death could be certain.

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Jack Boots And Brown Shirts

There seems to be a consensus in some circles that Donald the Orange will win the 2024 election. There are many things that that vision conjures up…..authoritarianism, fascism, rule by a steel hand, loss of rights and so on and on…..but the one thing that disturbs me the most is his rhetoric about using the military within out own borders.

I wrote about the possibility after I heard him speak….in case no one was paying attention I give you my thoughts then….

Will ‘Jack Boots’ Come Home To Roost?

How could he get this across where American people would go along?

I read what one person thought of a way he could possibility use the military….

When my colleague Tom Nichols, who taught at the Naval War College for 25 years, warns people that Donald Trump might be a threat to democracy, they often ask him to prove it. Yes, Trump has said dictator-like things, but if he won a second term, aren’t there barriers in place to prevent him from acting on his rhetoric? Would he really be able to persuade senior command in the military to use force against American citizens? Would he be able to get past the Geneva Conventions? Wouldn’t Congress or the courts intervene to stop him from acting on his worst impulses?

Nichols has never served in the military, but he knows its rules and its culture well. And he has watched over the years as some of his students became more openly partisan. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Nichols explains how a reelected President Trump could bend the military to his will and how political schisms in the military could happen. He emphasizes how close Trump came to achieving some of his goals in his last term, how ill prepared we are as a democracy that assumes a “minimum level of decency in the people who are elected to public office.” And he breaks down his personal nightmare scenario.

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2023/12/how-trump-could-manipulate-military/676341/

The podcast is fascinating…..

If you want to be afraid of another Trump presidency then look no further for a reason NOT to vote for this megalomaniac….

How can anyone with half a brain want this person anywhere near the levers of power?

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”