IMO, Project 2025 is NOT conservative in any way. It is radical. I'm glad we have the opportunity to vote, and I have done so. I have no clue how to deal with reality if trump wins this election. I hope to God he does not.
Just as the GOP is no longer a conservative party. In my writing I have come across many examples of this.
For example, calling for mass deportation now would destroy our economy. Trump is making hate become more powerful than the economy. That's scary. I hope tomorrow will mark a new era.
Indeed they’re not. They are the party of theocracy, fascism and plutocracy. Musk claims his solutions would cause “temporary hardship.” No, it’s intended to be permanent. How stupid does Musk think we are?
Really good point about mass deportation. I figured that one out some time ago. But the idea of hate being more powerful than the economy is truly scary. I'm with you on hoping that we will start new era.
I do not think anyone knows how to deal with it if Trump wins, except perhaps autocratic governments that Trump prefers over our traditional democratic allies. The EU is waiting but the majority of the people in Germany do not want Trump. Something like 11% support a Trump government here according to a poll I read yesterday, and I will bet that they are also aligned with the German fascist party AfD.
KSC I am not clear on what you are saying. If the far right Swedish Democrats disfavor Trump by a small majority, which groups favor Trump? I would have expected it to be the far right.
Yah, Linda, that is what I am remarking on. Mind you, this is a poll of the public supporters not the leadership….who rub elbows with Bannon and his ilk and are all in MAGA/MSGA. But for the people…most rural..who have supported the SD here Trump is a bridge too far.
Germans have learned from their own history, and I appreciate their support for those of us who want to remain a democracy and have the rule of law, rather than dictatorship.
You hit on an excellent point here. They think they’re “conservative,” as if it’s a virtue, but they are more fascist in their desire to regiment people’s lives. For example, John Boehner, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are conservatives. MTG, Boebert, Gaetz and their ilk are fascists and worship Trump.
Thank you, Kathy. I've long been unhappy hearing trump or any of the other fascists called "conservative". Real conservatives like the three you mentioned want to preserve our democracy, and I applaud them for that even though I mostly disagree with them on policy.
Darn straight! This pro-democracy movement is inspiring. PS I still check in to see if evangelicals have finally come to their senses. No, they're participating in the Great American Prayer tonight to pray for their fuhrer.
Indeed. I’m a Catholic Christian and find nothing to support in Christian Nationalism. The CNs have created a God and Jesus in their own image and use religion as anecdotes excuse to stomp all over everyone else.
Penetrating, as usual. But I am still convinced that Trump - like Putin, like Orban - doesn’t really care about politics, or has any theories but wants only power, money and that stay-out-of-jail card. All those immigrants (but people of color only), is sheer racism, not philosophy. And from a man with soft hands, soft belly. Project 2025, Agenda 47—just candy for the Republicans in office. This is a man with no vision for any future.
I'm currently reading accounts by holocaust survivors and the contrast with current politics and rhetoric is surreal, it's almost like a time warp. like Ruth says, we are not there yet, we have the ground work laid to maintain and strengthen our democratic society and confidence in our fellow citizens to see the choice clearly and to choose wisely.
I am being hopeful for the election that democracy will prevail. I’m not blind to the challenges, and no doubt the election will take days before there’s a clear winner. Many of my friends here in Germany are questioning the voting requirements in different states, inexplicable to them.
It makes me happy that I voted blue the weekend before last. Vance is a misogynistic embarrassment to our state. Peter Thiel bought him for the state, and I’d like the money back.
RGB’s present newsletter is full of fine insights about how tyranny works, as is exemplified by Trump. But the Republicans have not become a fascist party by themselves. They have had the help of the Democratic Party at every step of the way in preparing Americans for autocracy. Consider the parallels between how RBG describes the Republican 2024 campaign as a “rehearsal for autocracy” in 2024, and the behavior of the 2024 Democratic Party.
“a preparation of Americans for the kind of corrupt and violent acts and callous states of mind that have supported autocracies abroad”:
Under both Democrats and Republicans the US and its citizens have long supported and continue to support autocracies abroad. The Democratic Biden-Harris administration has supplied Israel with $25 billion in military equipment, supplies, and regional military support, as well as political, propaganda, and diplomatic cover, for the purpose of enabling Israel to perpetrate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as flagrant, gross violations of international law, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. Israel is using this aid to commit provocations designed to set off a regional war and to draw the US into a war with Iran.
“corrupt acts”
This military campaign that the Democratic Biden-Harris administration is enabling is being conducted autocratically under the rule of an Israeli PM who retains his office and forms his policies only with the support the most odious, extreme right-wing elements of Israeli society, which his cabinet is dominated by—that is, the settlers, who are characterized by a US civil-rights organization as “worse than the Ku Klux Klan.” This same PM, immediately before October 7, 2023, was attempting to legally remake the Israeli Supreme Court into the creature of his personal rule. And like Trump he is exploiting his political power in order to avoid being imprisoned for his gross, longstanding corruption.
“autocracies abroad”:
The US is enabling the genocide and other crimes at the sole discretion of the Biden-Harris administration, which has the authority to stop the military and other support, at any time, but instead enables Israel to commit these crimes. Israel would be unable to conduct these military actions without US supplies. Furthermore, by supplying these weapons, the Biden-Harris administration is actively and flagrantly violating the US Arms Export Control Act and Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibit the delivery of US weapons to countries committing gross human rights violations. In addition, the US Constitution’s War Powers Clause explicitly gives the power to declare war to Congress. But Congress has never declared war since WWII, despite the fact that the US has been engaged in hostile “military operations” in foreign countries, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, in three-quarters of the years since 1945. With regard to foreign affairs and war, the US president is not the president of a democratic nation, he is an autocrat, and the US has long been an autocracy. In addition, Harris was never democratically elected as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. She was quickly appointed behind closed doors by the plutocracy and oligarchy (the donors and party leaders). Biden did not voluntarily withdraw, as the official fairy tale has it, he was forced out through a behind-the-scenes party coup ruthlessly spearheaded by Nancy Pelosi. Trump, in contrast, was actually democratically elected to be the Republican nominee in the Republican primaries. And the dictator of Russia, Putin, also in contrast to Harris, was elected president of the Russian Federation in a phony election that at least pretended to be democratic. Now we are supposedly trying to save democracy in America by voting for the autocratically anointed Harris.
“callous states of mind”:
The Democratic script, repeated from Biden and Harris on down, is, “too many Palestinians have been killed.” If this weasely statement has any meaning, it is that there is some correct number for how many Palestinian civilians should have been killed, though that number is never specified. Note the use of the passive voice (“have been killed”) that makes this an impersonal construction, making it sound as if Palestinians have been killed by persons unknown; this use of the impersonal construction for killing Palestinians is the norm in US discourse. Contrast this with the fact that in US discourse Israelis are always killed, in the active voice, by Hamas or other Palestinians or Arabs. Why? Because Israelis are worthy victims, but Palestinians and other Arabs are unworthy victims. And Israelis are peace-loving American allies, while Palestinians and Arabs are sinister killers.
“callous states of mind”:
Harris would not even allow a friendly Palestinian speaker two minutes at the podium of the Democratic National Convention, while she featured several Republican speakers at the convention. In Harris’s America, we are all equal, except that those of us who are not Palestinian are more equal than Palestinians. Former president Bill Clinton recently explained to Arab-Americans that it is necessary to kill Palestinian civilians, on the basis of the evidence-free claim that Hamas uses them as “human shields.” Clinton’s assertion (which he had the nerve and stupidity to deliver to an audience of Arabs, as if Arabs are too stupid and ignorant to understand that he was peddling vicious propaganda) is a repetition of the Israel propaganda device of re-labelling Palestinian non-civilian combatants as “human shields.” While the IDF constantly uses this claim as its justification for the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians, it never supplies evidence to support its claim, and it is never asked to do so by the US propaganda machine, which simply reports the Israeli claim as being factual because they said so. This claim, as is usual with autocratic governments, is a projection of the autocrats’ own practice; Israel follows a well-documented practice of doing things like forcing Palestinians to put on IDF uniforms and walk as human shields in front of IDF soldiers. Furthermore, Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, including carpet-bombing of refugee camps and apartment complexes, and its deliberate, continuing slaughter of journalists and UN and other aid workers, can hardly be defended by claiming the victims were “human shields.”
Every day for a year, everyone in the world has been seeing pictures and reading accounts of an encyclopedic range of monstrous suffering sadistically inflicted on Palestinians by the Israelis under Netanyahu’s leadership. These pictures and accounts include those of children injured by Israeli carpet-bombing using US bombs, who have their limbs amputated without anesthesia, under the light of a cell phone, with dish towels used for bandages. Netanyahu, an active genocidal war criminal, addressed the US Congress in July, 2024, and received an 8-minute standing ovation on arrival. His speech was dedicated to extolling the genocide and other crimes he was committing, which the US was enabling, and which was authorized by his audience of congresspersons. During his speech he received about 40 ovations, more than half of them standing, lasting more than a quarter of the length of the speech. He then received the ultimate reward expressing US approval of the rulers of its client states, a personal meeting with Biden and with Harris. In Israel, the deaths and suffering of Palestinians are almost entirely absent from public discourse, unless they are a subject for celebration; an Israeli cabinet minister said, “I’m proud of the rubble in Gaza.” Israelis, particularly Arabs Israelis, are being interrogated and imprisoned for the mere act of verbally expressing concern for the suffering of Palestinian children. For, as an Israeli cabinet minister said, the Palestinians are not human beings, they are merely “human animals.” Israelis have long referred to the IDF’s periodic forays into Palestine to slaughter Palestinians with the ghastly phrase,, “mowing the grass.”
“callous states of mind”:
An increasing majority of Americans have wanted an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza since 2023. A majority of Americans consider Israel’s actions to be genocide, including a vast majority of Democrats and over 40% of Republicans. Yet Americans are helpless to stop one of the worst and most flagrant crimes against humanity since WWII. We can’t even protest against it; the military-corporate state has succeeded in developing and perfecting mechanisms of suppressing protests, particularly on university campuses, more quickly and perfectly than any other autocratic government I can think of. Before October 7, 2023, one would have thought that the ability to refrain from committing genocide was a baseline dividing a civilized nation from a barbarous one. Under the leadership of the Democratic Party under the Biden-Harris administration, that is no longer the case. Americans are now accustomed to living in a nation that normalizes genocide and other crimes, in the present case by redefining them as “self-defense” and as the loyal support of a close ally. And Americans are now compelled to vote for one of the perpetrators of genocide to be our next leader, in order to prevent someone even worse from becoming president. A truly ingenious turn of the screw in the infection of the Americans with the “callous” mentality of citizens helpless to resist a mass-murdering state.
“Trumped-up grounds for this emergency”:
Israel has been conducting all the myriad crimes against the Palestinians that settler-colonialists always commit against the “native” population, including genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land-theft. It exploited October 7, an attempt at resistance by the prisoners of the concentration camp that Israel had made of the territory of Gaza that it has illegally occupied since 1967, as a pretext for accelerating the settler-colonial process. Israel’s ultimate justification for its crimes against the Palestinians is always the Holocaust. It is delusional to think Jews are under threat of another Holocaust, and it is a sick paranoid fantasy to think that the historical persecution of Jews justifies their own persecution of Palestinians. Palestinians often ask why they are being punished for the crimes of the Germans.
“the destruction of liberal democratic models and institutions of governance . . . the creation of some form of autocracy”:
Our rulers were already drunk on their success in establishing the “full-spectrum dominance” of their neoliberal imperium. Their current suppression of effective protest against one of the greatest crimes of the modern world has now taught them that the US population is so alienated from its own humanity that it can be made to celebrate voting for a genocidal leader. Our rulers used 9-11 to greatly expand the repressive powers of the federal government, particularly regarding surveillance and monitoring, the suppression of journalism, creating new repressive organs of state, and vastly increasing their budgets. The ruling class is already exploiting the genocide in Gaza for similar ends.
“the suppression of reproductive rights”:
It was puzzling that Israel seemed to be especially targeting Palestinian children, until one realized that an essential part of the settler-colonial project is eliminating future generations of the “natives.”
“the suppression of . . . voting rights”:
Israel has always refused to allow the Palestinians real self-governance in any form, by imposing puppet regimes on the Palestinians and playing Palestinians factions off against one another. According to the Israel-American playbook, Palestinians must always be prohibited from selecting their own leaders.
“the weakening of the population through the twin plagues of disease and political violence”:
In addition to the military violence Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians, it has succeeded, by cutting off all the basic physical necessities of human existence from Gaza, in bringing polio back to Gaza. Soon, as almost always happens in war, more Gazans will die of disease and malnutrition and outright starvation than from US-Israeli bombs, missiles, artillery shells, drones, and bullets. But even that isn’t enough for the Israeli government. The notorious Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich has suggested that it is “just and moral” to commit the war crime of starving two million Palestinians by depriving them of food and water—as Israel is now doing in any case.
“the oligarchic plunder of the environment”:
The basic purpose of a settler-colonial project is to steal the land of the “natives.” In the West Bank, the land on which the illegal settlers live is well-supplied with water and other necessities, while the diminishing land on which Palestinians are permitted to live is deliberately reduced to state of privation. Turning Gaza into a pile of rubble that it will take decades to clear is a deliberate and malicious act of ecocide.
“the reversal of economic prosperity”:
For more than two decades, Israel has carefully calibrated the amount of food and other supplies allowed into Gaza in order to keep the Gazans in a state of hunger and destitution.
“the targeting of critics for prison and perhaps execution by firing squad”:
As is well-documented, Israel has long used indefinite detention, in conditions ranging from squalor to torture, imposed both arbitrarily and as retaliation against Arab critics, to suppress and terrorize the Palestinians.
“the possible use of the military against protestors and for mass deportations”:
One example of this among many is the Israeli response to the Palestinians’ Great March of Return in 2018-2019. Palestinians protested near the Gaza-Israeli border to demand the right-of-return for Palestinian refugees and the Israel blockade of Gaza (which was similar to but less extreme than the current blockade). In response to these demonstrations by unarmed demonstrators, the IDF killed more than two hundred Palestinians and injured more than 35,000, including nearly 10,000 children. Israeli snipers deliberately aimed at the extremities of thousands of protestors, thereby inflicting injuries that required the amputation of the limbs of more than one hundred protestors. A signal to any Palestinian who thought of protesting. These protests obviously posed no military threat to Israel. Israelis were not defending themselves but their settler-colonial project. The Israeli response to the protests was condemned internationally, of course to no effect. Israel has made no secret of its wish to send all those Palestinians it cannot exterminate into exile in Arab countries or out into the ocean.
“aggressors . . . advertise their plans . . . often . . . as . . . intimidation and conditioning. Treating extreme ideas and acts as normal . . . by calling for the repression of targeted groups [which] makes the exceptional and unthinkable into the expected and familiar, helping those cruelties and repressions to be accepted in the future”:
Netanyahu and Israeli cabinet ministers have a history of echoing, in regard to Palestinians, the views and intentions that Nazis held with regard to the Jews. Except that the Nazis had the decency to mostly express their worst views and intentions in private, and did not proudly advertise and flaunt them to the whole world, as the Israelis are now doing. No one bothers to pretend that the Israelis are now merely “joking.” There is a catalog of such statements by Israeli officials, which are of course rarely if ever reported in the US mainstream media. One Israeli, when asked about the consequences Israel would eventually suffer because of the crimes it is now committing, replied that it will never suffer any consequences, because in the future the rest of the world will be routinely committing far worse crimes, and then Israel’s crimes will seem like nothing. Considering the fact that the US autocracy has succeeded in effectively eliminating protest against these crimes, one must wonder whether he is right, and this is the insane future we are being groomed to live in.
“‘a kind of . . . program for sociopaths’ . . . the mass conditioning to cruelty [including the use of] campaign rituals. . . . undercutting their own power as Trump competitors. . . . a campaign that has trotted out powerful Republican elites to lie for and about Trump on command, rehearsing the kinds of party-leader dynamics that mark autocracies around the world. . . . TINA (There Is No Alternative). . . . Elections, of course, are all about giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders.”:
The entire Democratic 2024 campaign is a ritual that has conditioned the US population to the cruel barbarity of genocide by forcing us to celebrate and try to elect the genocidal Democratic nominee in order to defeat the fascist Republican nominee. This undercuts, or rather destroys, our own power as voters in a democracy in 2024. It is not possible that there are not multitudes of Democratic Party politicians who are fully aware that Israel is committing monstrous crimes. Yet they all must “lie for and about” the Biden-Harris administration’s participation in and support of these crimes, as is characteristic of “autocracies around the world.” This is the Democratic Party’s form of TINA: There Is No Alternative to our genocidal candidate, because The Only Alternative Is Even Worse. We are solemnly and grimly lectured, like children, that we must never, ever even think of voting for a third-party candidate who is not practicing genocide and actually opposes it, because that would be to vote for Trump. So much for “giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders” in democratic America.
Americans are well-indoctrinated in the fantasy that America is altruistically dedicated to democracy, human rights, and the peace and prosperity of the world. If we are forced to think about it for a moment, we do consider it regrettable that since WWII this project has resulted in the slaughter of millions of people around the world, the immiseration of dozens of nations, and the subjection of many nations to US-sponsored tyrannies. (Thus Palestine.) But these evils are the result of the hard reality that there so many evil people in the world who prevent America from leading the world to democracy, peace, and prosperity. (People like the Palestinians.) Because of these evil people, America must, as Harris declared, have the most “lethal” military in the world. (“Lethal” is the adjectival form of the Latin word for “death.” This perfectly expresses the American establishment’s subjection and dedication to the death instinct.) Because of these evil people, America has no choice except to spend half its federal government’s discretionary budget on its national-security military-industrial complex while children go hungry. We have no choice, according to the Biden-Harris administration, except to spend $1.7 trillion in the coming decades to “modernize” our nuclear weapons, because it is not enough that anyone who happens to be sitting in the Oval Office now has the capacity to extinguish all life on the planet in the next twenty minutes. America has no choice except to continue to wage endless, unsuccessful, and pointless wars whose purpose cannot even be defined, and which result in the death and immiseration of millions of people under tyrannical regimes. But whatever the outcome, America’s intentions are always noble. We follow Kantian, not consequentialist, morality.
Early in his first administration, Ronald Reagan asked his CIA director, William J. Casey, what the most important thing he had learned in government was. Casey replied it was that the federal government’s psyops (“psychological operations,” meaning propaganda—domestic in this case) would only be successful “when everything the American people believe is false.” Our government has been extremely successful in this project. Despite the fact that enough news does come through that Americans are quite aware of the massive and monstrous evils the American Empire continually commits, they psychically split the reality of the American Empire’s evil actions from their fantasy of the nobility of American democracy. Despite the fact that American foreign policy is made and conducted in secret by people Americans have never heard of—despite the fact that Americans have absolutely no control over foreign policy, war, or the budget or practices of the national security state or military-industrial complex—and despite the fact that Americans rightly do not trust their politicians when it comes to policies that affect Americans themselves—Americans nevertheless accept our exceedingly malign and stupid military and foreign policies, which continually destroy the lives of millions of foreigners, as being developed and implemented by intelligent people for noble purposes.
Some might consider the present comment to be an inappropriate intrusion into a discussion of the election in which domestic freedoms are at stake. Such a judgment would be an example of the success of the imperial national-security-military-industrial-complex in creating the mentality that keeps Americans subject to their tyranny. RGB writes little about American foreign or military policy, but I have the impression that she believes it is possible for a country to be both a democracy and an empire. Therefore when we talk about American democracy we should talk about American democracy, and when we talk about the American Empire we should talk about the American Empire. Somehow if we vote the right way the US government will never inflict on Americans the repressive policies it inflicts on foreigners. Somehow the monstrous evils we are inflicting on Palestinians will never affect us. How can that be? The people who through imperial rule inflict monstrous evils on others, like the Palestinians, are the same people who govern Americans. (We acquired an acute awareness of how “corrupt” and “callous” our rulers are after 2008, when Bush and Obama rewarded the financial criminals who almost destroyed the world economy with freedom from prosecution, from effective regulation, and with billions of dollars and increased control of the economy and every aspect of our lives, while Obama abandoned the millions of Americans whose lives those criminals had destroyed. The essential accomplishment of the Obama administrations was saving the neoliberalism that has done so much harm to the entire world and has lost all legitimacy. And like every president after Carter, Obama has personally monetized his presidency with spectacular success. If Harris is elected, it is certain that she too will become extremely wealthy in the coming years.) Why should the ruling class hesitate to treat Americans as it treats other peoples like the Palestinians, if it finds it expedient and profitable? Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been bringing creeping fascism to America for decades, and the crisis of the last eight years is the result of “the boomerang effect”--the ruling class now rules America on the model of its rule over other nations in its empire. The way the American people allow their nation to treat other people is the way Americans are now being treated. That is why so many Americans have turned to Trump in desperation. In a real sense, if Trump is elected, it will be because we deserve him. “In the long run, people get the government they deserve.” Karma.
Finally, it is essential to state explicitly that to criticize Israel (and Zionism) is not antisemitic. To the contrary, one must weep for Jewish Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, as for the Palestinians and other Arabs. You cannot harm or destroy someone else without harming or destroying yourself, because we are all one. Israel is destroying itself as well as the Palestinians. The Israeli government has no geopolitical strategy. The only thing Netanyahu and his Israeli accomplices know how to do is to kill, and to escalate and expand the killing, because, except for a tiny minority, Israel is incapable of imaginatively conceiving living in peace and amity with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors.
Alexander, you have some great details here, but let me help you with the root of all this - American Business using the government power to "protect" American "interests" - theirs. It seems that the property rights of the Constitution is also at the root cause.
US imperialist action has long been a problem that has been swept under the rug for decades. Our CIA actions in Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Panama, Indonesia, El Salvador, The Congo, etc have reflected the wishes of our Power Elite. They do not answer to the electorate. They exist at a level above our politicians, so both major parties are subservient to them. If we look at the type of governments our Elites have installed via the CIA, we see that nearly all are quasi-fascist. This is a reflection of who our Power Elites are. They prefer fascism abroad and at home. Prescott Bush tried to install it here, circa 1933 but that failed. I believe that our Power Elites favor tRump because he promotes what they like; fascism.
We can use the ballot box to stop tRump but we can't use it to stop our Power Elites' agenda.
Today I feel like Francis Scott Key, standing helplessly on the deck of HMS Tennant, peering into the smoke and gloom and wondering if that flag is going to be there in the morning.
Thank you. This is a clear message today. I just had a thought about these cult loving pro-birthers: our son came into this world through the miracle of IVF AND c-section. I could not help but think that c-sections would also go the way of the past. I know this sounds extreme, but just think of what these people have said about birth control and IVF. They are really extreme enough to say something like this: if the baby cannot come into the world through natural birth, then it is God's will that the mother and child be called "home". Yes, people, they are that extreme.
A depraved, demented sociopath who threatens courageous adversaries like Liz Cheney with firing squad vs Harris Walz... VoteBlue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB23KtHIPOI
HCR 11/2/24: "On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names"...defending democracy while Vance wants to "take out" VP Harris ‘“trash” & Trump fantasizes about Mike Tyson punching Kamala! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f2KOrmCsV0
Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I still shake my head in wonder that fascism in America can garner more than 5% of the vote.
"George Conway’s remark on X that we might think of the Trump campaign as “a kind of DEI program for sociopaths” refers to this mass conditioning to cruelty, but the Trump-Vance campaign has rehearsed autocratic mentalities and power arrangements in myriad ways."
And also, you show how Trump/Vance/Fascism practices "ritual humiliation."
How on earth does this fascism obtain more than 5% of the vote? Who on earth wants martial law, degradation of major parts of our population, round-tables of the Cabinet on TV giving North-Korean type tributes to "Their Beloved Leader" (in this case, Trump).
tRumps tactics seem to be very much like the "law of the jungle", where animal world dominance and submission is venerated. In his sociopathic mind, he probably views himself as the all powerful lion, where all others must show submission to him. Fascism has many animal world traits, with social Darwinism being another of these. Its extreme social hierarchy is straight out of the animal world. It is dominance and submission at the societal level. Fascism seems to reject all of the advances made in modern societal structure and abandon egalitarianism. My guess as to why this characterizes fascism, has to do with fascist leadership being sociopathic (antisocial personality disorder). Sociopaths live entirely outside of our social contract and try to re-make it in their own image. We shouldn't let them.
Oh Ben-Ghiat; I believe we will pass this test: Harris?Walz will win. Will they win a working majority in the House? Yes! In the Senate? Not so sure. I am glad to write my thoughts before any results are in--to see if my beliefs held.
IMO, Project 2025 is NOT conservative in any way. It is radical. I'm glad we have the opportunity to vote, and I have done so. I have no clue how to deal with reality if trump wins this election. I hope to God he does not.
Just as the GOP is no longer a conservative party. In my writing I have come across many examples of this.
For example, calling for mass deportation now would destroy our economy. Trump is making hate become more powerful than the economy. That's scary. I hope tomorrow will mark a new era.
Indeed they’re not. They are the party of theocracy, fascism and plutocracy. Musk claims his solutions would cause “temporary hardship.” No, it’s intended to be permanent. How stupid does Musk think we are?
Really good point about mass deportation. I figured that one out some time ago. But the idea of hate being more powerful than the economy is truly scary. I'm with you on hoping that we will start new era.
I do not think anyone knows how to deal with it if Trump wins, except perhaps autocratic governments that Trump prefers over our traditional democratic allies. The EU is waiting but the majority of the people in Germany do not want Trump. Something like 11% support a Trump government here according to a poll I read yesterday, and I will bet that they are also aligned with the German fascist party AfD.
Linda, Here in Sweden, if the supporters of the far right Swedish'Demomcrats' disfavor Trump by a small majority,
KSC I am not clear on what you are saying. If the far right Swedish Democrats disfavor Trump by a small majority, which groups favor Trump? I would have expected it to be the far right.
Yah, Linda, that is what I am remarking on. Mind you, this is a poll of the public supporters not the leadership….who rub elbows with Bannon and his ilk and are all in MAGA/MSGA. But for the people…most rural..who have supported the SD here Trump is a bridge too far.
This adds perspective on Europe Linda and all: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/50844-who-do-europeans-want-to-win-the-2024-us-presidential-election. It shows the Swedish results for the different alliance partners.
Germans have learned from their own history, and I appreciate their support for those of us who want to remain a democracy and have the rule of law, rather than dictatorship.
I think it's good that you are in Germany, if trump were to win. I'm long past ready to be rid of him.
You hit on an excellent point here. They think they’re “conservative,” as if it’s a virtue, but they are more fascist in their desire to regiment people’s lives. For example, John Boehner, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are conservatives. MTG, Boebert, Gaetz and their ilk are fascists and worship Trump.
Thank you, Kathy. I've long been unhappy hearing trump or any of the other fascists called "conservative". Real conservatives like the three you mentioned want to preserve our democracy, and I applaud them for that even though I mostly disagree with them on policy.
Darn straight! This pro-democracy movement is inspiring. PS I still check in to see if evangelicals have finally come to their senses. No, they're participating in the Great American Prayer tonight to pray for their fuhrer.
Their rapist fuhrer.....
The extreme Christians are doing everything opposite of their Jesus. Apparently they never asked themselves, WWJD
Indeed. I’m a Catholic Christian and find nothing to support in Christian Nationalism. The CNs have created a God and Jesus in their own image and use religion as anecdotes excuse to stomp all over everyone else.
Kathy ….as clergy I can say you are spot on with your analysis of CN’s…..but remember they are aligned with the Roman Catholics
( especially Opus Dei) and many of the Protestant mainline churches feel this is truly an unholy alliance.
Kathy….yes and that’s exactly what idolatry is all about. Or if you’re of a religious persuasion the first four of the Ten Commandments liz
Fascism is on the ballot, with much support, and it's the job of patriots to overwhelmingly repudiate it.
Penetrating, as usual. But I am still convinced that Trump - like Putin, like Orban - doesn’t really care about politics, or has any theories but wants only power, money and that stay-out-of-jail card. All those immigrants (but people of color only), is sheer racism, not philosophy. And from a man with soft hands, soft belly. Project 2025, Agenda 47—just candy for the Republicans in office. This is a man with no vision for any future.
I'm currently reading accounts by holocaust survivors and the contrast with current politics and rhetoric is surreal, it's almost like a time warp. like Ruth says, we are not there yet, we have the ground work laid to maintain and strengthen our democratic society and confidence in our fellow citizens to see the choice clearly and to choose wisely.
Ummmm..... a trial run for autocracy. Wow. Never thought of that, but it absolutely makes total sense, yes.
The Republican cabal will have lots to learn (and retool) after they do the autopsy from the losing Trump campaign.
The late breaking of the race in the other direction gives me some hope in my fellow humans 🙏 🙂
I am being hopeful for the election that democracy will prevail. I’m not blind to the challenges, and no doubt the election will take days before there’s a clear winner. Many of my friends here in Germany are questioning the voting requirements in different states, inexplicable to them.
It makes me happy that I voted blue the weekend before last. Vance is a misogynistic embarrassment to our state. Peter Thiel bought him for the state, and I’d like the money back.
PART ONE
RGB’s present newsletter is full of fine insights about how tyranny works, as is exemplified by Trump. But the Republicans have not become a fascist party by themselves. They have had the help of the Democratic Party at every step of the way in preparing Americans for autocracy. Consider the parallels between how RBG describes the Republican 2024 campaign as a “rehearsal for autocracy” in 2024, and the behavior of the 2024 Democratic Party.
“a preparation of Americans for the kind of corrupt and violent acts and callous states of mind that have supported autocracies abroad”:
Under both Democrats and Republicans the US and its citizens have long supported and continue to support autocracies abroad. The Democratic Biden-Harris administration has supplied Israel with $25 billion in military equipment, supplies, and regional military support, as well as political, propaganda, and diplomatic cover, for the purpose of enabling Israel to perpetrate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as flagrant, gross violations of international law, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. Israel is using this aid to commit provocations designed to set off a regional war and to draw the US into a war with Iran.
“corrupt acts”
This military campaign that the Democratic Biden-Harris administration is enabling is being conducted autocratically under the rule of an Israeli PM who retains his office and forms his policies only with the support the most odious, extreme right-wing elements of Israeli society, which his cabinet is dominated by—that is, the settlers, who are characterized by a US civil-rights organization as “worse than the Ku Klux Klan.” This same PM, immediately before October 7, 2023, was attempting to legally remake the Israeli Supreme Court into the creature of his personal rule. And like Trump he is exploiting his political power in order to avoid being imprisoned for his gross, longstanding corruption.
“autocracies abroad”:
The US is enabling the genocide and other crimes at the sole discretion of the Biden-Harris administration, which has the authority to stop the military and other support, at any time, but instead enables Israel to commit these crimes. Israel would be unable to conduct these military actions without US supplies. Furthermore, by supplying these weapons, the Biden-Harris administration is actively and flagrantly violating the US Arms Export Control Act and Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibit the delivery of US weapons to countries committing gross human rights violations. In addition, the US Constitution’s War Powers Clause explicitly gives the power to declare war to Congress. But Congress has never declared war since WWII, despite the fact that the US has been engaged in hostile “military operations” in foreign countries, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, in three-quarters of the years since 1945. With regard to foreign affairs and war, the US president is not the president of a democratic nation, he is an autocrat, and the US has long been an autocracy. In addition, Harris was never democratically elected as the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. She was quickly appointed behind closed doors by the plutocracy and oligarchy (the donors and party leaders). Biden did not voluntarily withdraw, as the official fairy tale has it, he was forced out through a behind-the-scenes party coup ruthlessly spearheaded by Nancy Pelosi. Trump, in contrast, was actually democratically elected to be the Republican nominee in the Republican primaries. And the dictator of Russia, Putin, also in contrast to Harris, was elected president of the Russian Federation in a phony election that at least pretended to be democratic. Now we are supposedly trying to save democracy in America by voting for the autocratically anointed Harris.
“callous states of mind”:
The Democratic script, repeated from Biden and Harris on down, is, “too many Palestinians have been killed.” If this weasely statement has any meaning, it is that there is some correct number for how many Palestinian civilians should have been killed, though that number is never specified. Note the use of the passive voice (“have been killed”) that makes this an impersonal construction, making it sound as if Palestinians have been killed by persons unknown; this use of the impersonal construction for killing Palestinians is the norm in US discourse. Contrast this with the fact that in US discourse Israelis are always killed, in the active voice, by Hamas or other Palestinians or Arabs. Why? Because Israelis are worthy victims, but Palestinians and other Arabs are unworthy victims. And Israelis are peace-loving American allies, while Palestinians and Arabs are sinister killers.
“callous states of mind”:
Harris would not even allow a friendly Palestinian speaker two minutes at the podium of the Democratic National Convention, while she featured several Republican speakers at the convention. In Harris’s America, we are all equal, except that those of us who are not Palestinian are more equal than Palestinians. Former president Bill Clinton recently explained to Arab-Americans that it is necessary to kill Palestinian civilians, on the basis of the evidence-free claim that Hamas uses them as “human shields.” Clinton’s assertion (which he had the nerve and stupidity to deliver to an audience of Arabs, as if Arabs are too stupid and ignorant to understand that he was peddling vicious propaganda) is a repetition of the Israel propaganda device of re-labelling Palestinian non-civilian combatants as “human shields.” While the IDF constantly uses this claim as its justification for the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians, it never supplies evidence to support its claim, and it is never asked to do so by the US propaganda machine, which simply reports the Israeli claim as being factual because they said so. This claim, as is usual with autocratic governments, is a projection of the autocrats’ own practice; Israel follows a well-documented practice of doing things like forcing Palestinians to put on IDF uniforms and walk as human shields in front of IDF soldiers. Furthermore, Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, including carpet-bombing of refugee camps and apartment complexes, and its deliberate, continuing slaughter of journalists and UN and other aid workers, can hardly be defended by claiming the victims were “human shields.”
PART TWO
“callous states of mind”:
Every day for a year, everyone in the world has been seeing pictures and reading accounts of an encyclopedic range of monstrous suffering sadistically inflicted on Palestinians by the Israelis under Netanyahu’s leadership. These pictures and accounts include those of children injured by Israeli carpet-bombing using US bombs, who have their limbs amputated without anesthesia, under the light of a cell phone, with dish towels used for bandages. Netanyahu, an active genocidal war criminal, addressed the US Congress in July, 2024, and received an 8-minute standing ovation on arrival. His speech was dedicated to extolling the genocide and other crimes he was committing, which the US was enabling, and which was authorized by his audience of congresspersons. During his speech he received about 40 ovations, more than half of them standing, lasting more than a quarter of the length of the speech. He then received the ultimate reward expressing US approval of the rulers of its client states, a personal meeting with Biden and with Harris. In Israel, the deaths and suffering of Palestinians are almost entirely absent from public discourse, unless they are a subject for celebration; an Israeli cabinet minister said, “I’m proud of the rubble in Gaza.” Israelis, particularly Arabs Israelis, are being interrogated and imprisoned for the mere act of verbally expressing concern for the suffering of Palestinian children. For, as an Israeli cabinet minister said, the Palestinians are not human beings, they are merely “human animals.” Israelis have long referred to the IDF’s periodic forays into Palestine to slaughter Palestinians with the ghastly phrase,, “mowing the grass.”
“callous states of mind”:
An increasing majority of Americans have wanted an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza since 2023. A majority of Americans consider Israel’s actions to be genocide, including a vast majority of Democrats and over 40% of Republicans. Yet Americans are helpless to stop one of the worst and most flagrant crimes against humanity since WWII. We can’t even protest against it; the military-corporate state has succeeded in developing and perfecting mechanisms of suppressing protests, particularly on university campuses, more quickly and perfectly than any other autocratic government I can think of. Before October 7, 2023, one would have thought that the ability to refrain from committing genocide was a baseline dividing a civilized nation from a barbarous one. Under the leadership of the Democratic Party under the Biden-Harris administration, that is no longer the case. Americans are now accustomed to living in a nation that normalizes genocide and other crimes, in the present case by redefining them as “self-defense” and as the loyal support of a close ally. And Americans are now compelled to vote for one of the perpetrators of genocide to be our next leader, in order to prevent someone even worse from becoming president. A truly ingenious turn of the screw in the infection of the Americans with the “callous” mentality of citizens helpless to resist a mass-murdering state.
“Trumped-up grounds for this emergency”:
Israel has been conducting all the myriad crimes against the Palestinians that settler-colonialists always commit against the “native” population, including genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land-theft. It exploited October 7, an attempt at resistance by the prisoners of the concentration camp that Israel had made of the territory of Gaza that it has illegally occupied since 1967, as a pretext for accelerating the settler-colonial process. Israel’s ultimate justification for its crimes against the Palestinians is always the Holocaust. It is delusional to think Jews are under threat of another Holocaust, and it is a sick paranoid fantasy to think that the historical persecution of Jews justifies their own persecution of Palestinians. Palestinians often ask why they are being punished for the crimes of the Germans.
“the destruction of liberal democratic models and institutions of governance . . . the creation of some form of autocracy”:
Our rulers were already drunk on their success in establishing the “full-spectrum dominance” of their neoliberal imperium. Their current suppression of effective protest against one of the greatest crimes of the modern world has now taught them that the US population is so alienated from its own humanity that it can be made to celebrate voting for a genocidal leader. Our rulers used 9-11 to greatly expand the repressive powers of the federal government, particularly regarding surveillance and monitoring, the suppression of journalism, creating new repressive organs of state, and vastly increasing their budgets. The ruling class is already exploiting the genocide in Gaza for similar ends.
“the suppression of reproductive rights”:
It was puzzling that Israel seemed to be especially targeting Palestinian children, until one realized that an essential part of the settler-colonial project is eliminating future generations of the “natives.”
“the suppression of . . . voting rights”:
Israel has always refused to allow the Palestinians real self-governance in any form, by imposing puppet regimes on the Palestinians and playing Palestinians factions off against one another. According to the Israel-American playbook, Palestinians must always be prohibited from selecting their own leaders.
PART THREE
“the weakening of the population through the twin plagues of disease and political violence”:
In addition to the military violence Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians, it has succeeded, by cutting off all the basic physical necessities of human existence from Gaza, in bringing polio back to Gaza. Soon, as almost always happens in war, more Gazans will die of disease and malnutrition and outright starvation than from US-Israeli bombs, missiles, artillery shells, drones, and bullets. But even that isn’t enough for the Israeli government. The notorious Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich has suggested that it is “just and moral” to commit the war crime of starving two million Palestinians by depriving them of food and water—as Israel is now doing in any case.
“the oligarchic plunder of the environment”:
The basic purpose of a settler-colonial project is to steal the land of the “natives.” In the West Bank, the land on which the illegal settlers live is well-supplied with water and other necessities, while the diminishing land on which Palestinians are permitted to live is deliberately reduced to state of privation. Turning Gaza into a pile of rubble that it will take decades to clear is a deliberate and malicious act of ecocide.
“the reversal of economic prosperity”:
For more than two decades, Israel has carefully calibrated the amount of food and other supplies allowed into Gaza in order to keep the Gazans in a state of hunger and destitution.
“the targeting of critics for prison and perhaps execution by firing squad”:
As is well-documented, Israel has long used indefinite detention, in conditions ranging from squalor to torture, imposed both arbitrarily and as retaliation against Arab critics, to suppress and terrorize the Palestinians.
“the possible use of the military against protestors and for mass deportations”:
One example of this among many is the Israeli response to the Palestinians’ Great March of Return in 2018-2019. Palestinians protested near the Gaza-Israeli border to demand the right-of-return for Palestinian refugees and the Israel blockade of Gaza (which was similar to but less extreme than the current blockade). In response to these demonstrations by unarmed demonstrators, the IDF killed more than two hundred Palestinians and injured more than 35,000, including nearly 10,000 children. Israeli snipers deliberately aimed at the extremities of thousands of protestors, thereby inflicting injuries that required the amputation of the limbs of more than one hundred protestors. A signal to any Palestinian who thought of protesting. These protests obviously posed no military threat to Israel. Israelis were not defending themselves but their settler-colonial project. The Israeli response to the protests was condemned internationally, of course to no effect. Israel has made no secret of its wish to send all those Palestinians it cannot exterminate into exile in Arab countries or out into the ocean.
“aggressors . . . advertise their plans . . . often . . . as . . . intimidation and conditioning. Treating extreme ideas and acts as normal . . . by calling for the repression of targeted groups [which] makes the exceptional and unthinkable into the expected and familiar, helping those cruelties and repressions to be accepted in the future”:
Netanyahu and Israeli cabinet ministers have a history of echoing, in regard to Palestinians, the views and intentions that Nazis held with regard to the Jews. Except that the Nazis had the decency to mostly express their worst views and intentions in private, and did not proudly advertise and flaunt them to the whole world, as the Israelis are now doing. No one bothers to pretend that the Israelis are now merely “joking.” There is a catalog of such statements by Israeli officials, which are of course rarely if ever reported in the US mainstream media. One Israeli, when asked about the consequences Israel would eventually suffer because of the crimes it is now committing, replied that it will never suffer any consequences, because in the future the rest of the world will be routinely committing far worse crimes, and then Israel’s crimes will seem like nothing. Considering the fact that the US autocracy has succeeded in effectively eliminating protest against these crimes, one must wonder whether he is right, and this is the insane future we are being groomed to live in.
“‘a kind of . . . program for sociopaths’ . . . the mass conditioning to cruelty [including the use of] campaign rituals. . . . undercutting their own power as Trump competitors. . . . a campaign that has trotted out powerful Republican elites to lie for and about Trump on command, rehearsing the kinds of party-leader dynamics that mark autocracies around the world. . . . TINA (There Is No Alternative). . . . Elections, of course, are all about giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders.”:
The entire Democratic 2024 campaign is a ritual that has conditioned the US population to the cruel barbarity of genocide by forcing us to celebrate and try to elect the genocidal Democratic nominee in order to defeat the fascist Republican nominee. This undercuts, or rather destroys, our own power as voters in a democracy in 2024. It is not possible that there are not multitudes of Democratic Party politicians who are fully aware that Israel is committing monstrous crimes. Yet they all must “lie for and about” the Biden-Harris administration’s participation in and support of these crimes, as is characteristic of “autocracies around the world.” This is the Democratic Party’s form of TINA: There Is No Alternative to our genocidal candidate, because The Only Alternative Is Even Worse. We are solemnly and grimly lectured, like children, that we must never, ever even think of voting for a third-party candidate who is not practicing genocide and actually opposes it, because that would be to vote for Trump. So much for “giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders” in democratic America.
PART FOUR
Americans are well-indoctrinated in the fantasy that America is altruistically dedicated to democracy, human rights, and the peace and prosperity of the world. If we are forced to think about it for a moment, we do consider it regrettable that since WWII this project has resulted in the slaughter of millions of people around the world, the immiseration of dozens of nations, and the subjection of many nations to US-sponsored tyrannies. (Thus Palestine.) But these evils are the result of the hard reality that there so many evil people in the world who prevent America from leading the world to democracy, peace, and prosperity. (People like the Palestinians.) Because of these evil people, America must, as Harris declared, have the most “lethal” military in the world. (“Lethal” is the adjectival form of the Latin word for “death.” This perfectly expresses the American establishment’s subjection and dedication to the death instinct.) Because of these evil people, America has no choice except to spend half its federal government’s discretionary budget on its national-security military-industrial complex while children go hungry. We have no choice, according to the Biden-Harris administration, except to spend $1.7 trillion in the coming decades to “modernize” our nuclear weapons, because it is not enough that anyone who happens to be sitting in the Oval Office now has the capacity to extinguish all life on the planet in the next twenty minutes. America has no choice except to continue to wage endless, unsuccessful, and pointless wars whose purpose cannot even be defined, and which result in the death and immiseration of millions of people under tyrannical regimes. But whatever the outcome, America’s intentions are always noble. We follow Kantian, not consequentialist, morality.
Early in his first administration, Ronald Reagan asked his CIA director, William J. Casey, what the most important thing he had learned in government was. Casey replied it was that the federal government’s psyops (“psychological operations,” meaning propaganda—domestic in this case) would only be successful “when everything the American people believe is false.” Our government has been extremely successful in this project. Despite the fact that enough news does come through that Americans are quite aware of the massive and monstrous evils the American Empire continually commits, they psychically split the reality of the American Empire’s evil actions from their fantasy of the nobility of American democracy. Despite the fact that American foreign policy is made and conducted in secret by people Americans have never heard of—despite the fact that Americans have absolutely no control over foreign policy, war, or the budget or practices of the national security state or military-industrial complex—and despite the fact that Americans rightly do not trust their politicians when it comes to policies that affect Americans themselves—Americans nevertheless accept our exceedingly malign and stupid military and foreign policies, which continually destroy the lives of millions of foreigners, as being developed and implemented by intelligent people for noble purposes.
Some might consider the present comment to be an inappropriate intrusion into a discussion of the election in which domestic freedoms are at stake. Such a judgment would be an example of the success of the imperial national-security-military-industrial-complex in creating the mentality that keeps Americans subject to their tyranny. RGB writes little about American foreign or military policy, but I have the impression that she believes it is possible for a country to be both a democracy and an empire. Therefore when we talk about American democracy we should talk about American democracy, and when we talk about the American Empire we should talk about the American Empire. Somehow if we vote the right way the US government will never inflict on Americans the repressive policies it inflicts on foreigners. Somehow the monstrous evils we are inflicting on Palestinians will never affect us. How can that be? The people who through imperial rule inflict monstrous evils on others, like the Palestinians, are the same people who govern Americans. (We acquired an acute awareness of how “corrupt” and “callous” our rulers are after 2008, when Bush and Obama rewarded the financial criminals who almost destroyed the world economy with freedom from prosecution, from effective regulation, and with billions of dollars and increased control of the economy and every aspect of our lives, while Obama abandoned the millions of Americans whose lives those criminals had destroyed. The essential accomplishment of the Obama administrations was saving the neoliberalism that has done so much harm to the entire world and has lost all legitimacy. And like every president after Carter, Obama has personally monetized his presidency with spectacular success. If Harris is elected, it is certain that she too will become extremely wealthy in the coming years.) Why should the ruling class hesitate to treat Americans as it treats other peoples like the Palestinians, if it finds it expedient and profitable? Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been bringing creeping fascism to America for decades, and the crisis of the last eight years is the result of “the boomerang effect”--the ruling class now rules America on the model of its rule over other nations in its empire. The way the American people allow their nation to treat other people is the way Americans are now being treated. That is why so many Americans have turned to Trump in desperation. In a real sense, if Trump is elected, it will be because we deserve him. “In the long run, people get the government they deserve.” Karma.
Finally, it is essential to state explicitly that to criticize Israel (and Zionism) is not antisemitic. To the contrary, one must weep for Jewish Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, as for the Palestinians and other Arabs. You cannot harm or destroy someone else without harming or destroying yourself, because we are all one. Israel is destroying itself as well as the Palestinians. The Israeli government has no geopolitical strategy. The only thing Netanyahu and his Israeli accomplices know how to do is to kill, and to escalate and expand the killing, because, except for a tiny minority, Israel is incapable of imaginatively conceiving living in peace and amity with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors.
Alexander, you have some great details here, but let me help you with the root of all this - American Business using the government power to "protect" American "interests" - theirs. It seems that the property rights of the Constitution is also at the root cause.
US imperialist action has long been a problem that has been swept under the rug for decades. Our CIA actions in Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Panama, Indonesia, El Salvador, The Congo, etc have reflected the wishes of our Power Elite. They do not answer to the electorate. They exist at a level above our politicians, so both major parties are subservient to them. If we look at the type of governments our Elites have installed via the CIA, we see that nearly all are quasi-fascist. This is a reflection of who our Power Elites are. They prefer fascism abroad and at home. Prescott Bush tried to install it here, circa 1933 but that failed. I believe that our Power Elites favor tRump because he promotes what they like; fascism.
We can use the ballot box to stop tRump but we can't use it to stop our Power Elites' agenda.
Today I feel like Francis Scott Key, standing helplessly on the deck of HMS Tennant, peering into the smoke and gloom and wondering if that flag is going to be there in the morning.
Perfectly said, Steve. Same here.
Thank you. This is a clear message today. I just had a thought about these cult loving pro-birthers: our son came into this world through the miracle of IVF AND c-section. I could not help but think that c-sections would also go the way of the past. I know this sounds extreme, but just think of what these people have said about birth control and IVF. They are really extreme enough to say something like this: if the baby cannot come into the world through natural birth, then it is God's will that the mother and child be called "home". Yes, people, they are that extreme.
A depraved, demented sociopath who threatens courageous adversaries like Liz Cheney with firing squad vs Harris Walz... VoteBlue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB23KtHIPOI
HCR 11/2/24: "On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names"...defending democracy while Vance wants to "take out" VP Harris ‘“trash” & Trump fantasizes about Mike Tyson punching Kamala! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f2KOrmCsV0
Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I still shake my head in wonder that fascism in America can garner more than 5% of the vote.
"George Conway’s remark on X that we might think of the Trump campaign as “a kind of DEI program for sociopaths” refers to this mass conditioning to cruelty, but the Trump-Vance campaign has rehearsed autocratic mentalities and power arrangements in myriad ways."
And also, you show how Trump/Vance/Fascism practices "ritual humiliation."
How on earth does this fascism obtain more than 5% of the vote? Who on earth wants martial law, degradation of major parts of our population, round-tables of the Cabinet on TV giving North-Korean type tributes to "Their Beloved Leader" (in this case, Trump).
Who in their right mind WANTS this?!
Many are not in their right mind.
tRumps tactics seem to be very much like the "law of the jungle", where animal world dominance and submission is venerated. In his sociopathic mind, he probably views himself as the all powerful lion, where all others must show submission to him. Fascism has many animal world traits, with social Darwinism being another of these. Its extreme social hierarchy is straight out of the animal world. It is dominance and submission at the societal level. Fascism seems to reject all of the advances made in modern societal structure and abandon egalitarianism. My guess as to why this characterizes fascism, has to do with fascist leadership being sociopathic (antisocial personality disorder). Sociopaths live entirely outside of our social contract and try to re-make it in their own image. We shouldn't let them.
Oh Ben-Ghiat; I believe we will pass this test: Harris?Walz will win. Will they win a working majority in the House? Yes! In the Senate? Not so sure. I am glad to write my thoughts before any results are in--to see if my beliefs held.