Stasis: Surviving the Pork Reich With A Cassandra Complex

NinaIllingworth August 30, 2020April 5, 2021 2016 US Presidential Election, Amerikan Musik, antifa, antifascism, astroturfing, ballot challenges, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boogaloo movement, Brooks Brothers Riot, brownshirts, But He's Not Hitler, Cassandra complex, Cassandra Fairbanks, Charlottesville, concentration camps, coronavirus, Deep Dives, DoJ, Downmarket Mussolini, Encampments, Essays, far right terrorism, fascism, fascist militias, fascist Republicans, George Floyd Protests, Gestapo, GOP, hellworld, Hillary Clinton, Homeland Security, I Told You So, ICE, J20 protests, Jack Posobiec, Jeff Sessions, Joe Biden will lose, Journals, judicial coup, Julian Assange, Mike Cernovich, Muslim ban, Nate Bronze, Nixon, Open Letter to ESPN, personal, Pizzagate, police state, Police State of Denial, Politics, Portland, Post Office, Proud Boys, Punching Left And Empowering Fascism, QAnon, Red Map, rigged election, Russiagate was bogus, Second Civil War, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Summer Camp, Tea Party, the 2016 Dem nomination was rigged, Three Percenter Movement, Trump, Trump fascist coup, Trump will do a fascist coup in America, Weimar Dems, William Barr, worst case scenario

Author’s note: this is going to be a weird sort of article because for once I’m going to talk a little bit about my (less than pleasant) feelings like a normal person would in their journal. As I’ve told you before, I’m pretty garbage at self-promotion but I am very good at fulminating with rage because people didn’t listen to me when it would have been much easier to stop fascism. So I’m going to b*tch a little bit but I’ll make it worth your while by offering an important prediction at the end – and please, understand that by prediction I do mean studied opinion; I’m neither a prophet nor a charlatan but I can forgive you for wondering because we are surrounded by so many disingenuous mutants on social media. Let me tell you why I just spent three months staring at the news in a half catatonic state and why I came to hate knowing how this story ends:

Stasis

If I’m being completely honest with myself, I have to admit that even at the exact time more and more people around me are waking up to the realization that Trump is definitely a fascist, he has definitely molded the American state in his fascist image and said state was definitely already fascist enough to allow him to easily take the next step towards a “populist” dictatorship with rigged elections, I’m still not handling the role of mythology’s Cassandra particularly well. I certainly didn’t ask to be in this position and my aborted life as an academic hasn’t really prepared me well for this task. In a scholastic setting, you don’t argue endlessly with ignorant people and the mendacious; you write the essay, you source the arguments with reliable supporting evidence and then you tell folks “f*ck ya if you didn’t read the footnotes.” Obviously this is not so in the online pseudo-salon that has become public discussion; a tightly controlled discourse that travels entirely along digital social networks that algorithmicly reward those with the most wealthy patrons, the largest preexisting platforms or, increasingly more rarely – the culture war analyst who repeats himself most often and most loudly. What’s that? You’ve been living under a rock in the Hamptons and you still aren’t quite convinced Trump is a fascist? Here’s fifty-two reasons why you’re wrong and a library’s worth of links to articles explaining the folly of your complacency in great detail; I am nothing if not thorough.

In light of all this, I find myself feeling a bit like the dog that finally caught the nazi clown-car in a world where people refuse to accept nazi clowns are real. As my academic-style writing as an analyst has proven ineffective and I have no talent for the role of carnival barker, I’m suddenly in need of either a therapist or a new hat to wear for a moment, and I guess the hat I’ve chosen this time is that of the storyteller. Naturally there is a story I’ve already told numerous times in my writing; it’s a true story about how a bunch of fascist tech billionaires recruited and then helped rig an election for, a reality TV-show racist in order to transition America from a faux liberal democracy into a fascist quasi-dictatorship of elites, and just in time to prevent the end of capitalism but not the end of the world as we know it. There is however another story that I haven’t told, that only creeps out in the bitter quiet of late night social media when what I know and can’t quite figure out how to say is driving me to despair in a very real sense. That is of course the story of how I came to realize that Donald Trump was a fascist and the efforts I undertook to explain to anyone who would read my work, almost precisely how we would arrive at this the overt fascist moment eventually. I’m going to tell that story today for my own satisfaction and if folks find reading it useful in some small way, then they’re more than welcome to enjoy it – but sometimes, a woman must stake out a claim for herself and today that claim is the contents of my public journal.

I don’t really know at which precise moment it was that I became certain that Donald Trump was a fascist. I know that it predictably started out as more of a suspicion that Trump was a fascist, perhaps sometime in the early part of January of 2016. Although that might place me among the very first observers on the internet who flipped the trick, the truth is that in retrospect I should have known Downmarket Mussolini was serious about his violent, reactionary rhetoric the moment he gave that announcement speech demonizing Mexican migrants as rapists, drug dealers and as inferior societal “scum.” Indeed, Herr Donald’s fascist nature was in some strange ways more apparent at the very beginning of his campaign than it would be at any time before he became President. Not only was his rhetoric a clear escalation of the already vibrant reactionary tendency in post-Tea Party GOP politics, but even Trump’s coded dog-whistles were more explicitly fascist at their root than virtually anything a national Republican campaign had unleashed before. When Trump said, “they’re not sending their best” he was beating the battle-tested drum of the white nationalist inherently violent superiority complex right underneath my nose, and I, already a self-taught scholar of fascism, barely even noticed it.

Still I cannot say it took me a particularly long time afterwards to realize that the future Klepto Kaiser was not just a run-of-the-mill white supremacist running on the GOP ticket; it really wasn’t Trump’s racism that tipped one off since that has long since become a standard feature, it was ultimately the candidate’s gleeful willingness to embrace the idea of using state power to punish the undesirables just for existing in a way no Republican since Nixon, even one who intended to run a police state like America, would ever say out loud. Awkwardly enough it was this very same escalation that caused me to predict Trump would in fact win the GOP nomination before the first Republican primary, but I still hadn’t quite figured out the obvious implications of that realization. By the end of January 2016 however I was loudly declaring on Twitter that I thought Trump himself was explicitly a fascist and I would prove it to you gentle reader, but unfortunately they keep banning my Twitter account for talking back to rich folks who mean my people harm – there are however witnesses among my followers and regular readers who have confirmed that they remember the tweets, even if they didn’t consider them particularly important at the time.

Unfortunately there is quite a significant difference between saying you sincerely believe something in the dead of night on Twitter and putting that same idea down in a written article with your name at the bottom. For several months even as I became increasingly more adamant on Twitter not only that Trump was a fascist but also that it was not even remotely impossible for him to win the presidency, I resisted the urge to write an article about why I was certain Trump was an actual fascist. I did of course mention my belief in passing in a number of articles about other tangentially related subjects but even when I finally did explicitly argue that Herr Donald was a fascist as a central supporting statement in a June 2016 article, it was to lecture liberals for turning on Latino activists who were physically fighting nazis at Trump rallies simply because many of them were Sanders supporters and didn’t like Hillary Clinton very much.

So if I thought there was a reasonable, perhaps even better than even chance Trump could win the presidency *and* I was pretty certain he was a fascist, why the lack of urgency?

Well for starters, nearly every single person I tried to warn that Trump was indeed a fascist either assumed I was being hyperbolic or flat out called me crazy even though many in the mainstream media and political life were already hinting at similar conclusions. I definitely lost friends, followers and readers for just for mentioning it; and it certainly didn’t help that a great number of people who were reading my content online were already outraged at being openly cheated out of a fair primary, by a Democratic Party busy elevating that same fascist because Clinton thought he’d be easy to beat in the general election. Nobody particularly wanted to hear Trump was a fascist in the Spring of 2016 because that sounded an awful lot like an argument for Clinton’s utterly doomed 2016 campaign and quite frankly, folks being ground up to paste by rich liberals who treat them like dogshit online weren’t too receptive to anything that even sniffed of a pro-Hillary argument.

When you also factor in that “Very Serious People TM” were already pretty sure I was nuts for saying Clinton did in fact break laws she should have been indicted for in the so-called email server scandal, the Democratic Party nomination contest was rigged against Sanders, and there was a vast coordinated plot between corporate “liberal” media and Dem Party affiliated online influencers to smear both Sanders and his supporters… well you can be pretty sure a lot of people just rolled their eyes and thought “the crazy lady is screaming again, how quaint.” Of course all of those things I was yelling about did in fact turn out to be true, they were eventually even reported on in mainstream media, although today the liberal establishment would very much prefer that you threw all knowledge of those scandals down the memory hole forever. In the moment however the simple truth is that I was telling people Trump was a fascist and they just didn’t hear it because they either couldn’t believe it, or didn’t want to believe it and weren’t going to accept it coming from someone they’d already decided was crazy.

Compounding this problem was the fact that the 2016 presidential election was likely the first contest that saw near-ubiquitous astroturfed political disinformation campaigns conducted online, and no, I don’t mean by “zee Russians.” Naturally some of these people were simply grifters selling the most interesting and outrageous possible conspiracy stories to an audience that was sick of being lied to by the news and would now prefer to choose its own adventure; a fact that I learned quickly when a number of them began lifting my content and twisting it towards their own purpose – indeed, one of them ended up being more successful with stolen and corrupted versions of my analysis than I ever was by quite a good distance.

It has however long since come to light that both the Clinton campaign, and groups loyal to the Trump campaign were also spending millions and millions of dollars to astroturf troll campaigns online, thereby poisoning or at least distorting the discourse for their own political advantage in the upcoming election. The Clinton trolls were discovered early on in the election cycle because David Brock inexplicably bragged about how much money the campaign was spending on generating online flak with a program called “Correct the Record,” which turned out to be just one more own goal in a self-destructing campaign consisting almost entirely of own goals. The Trump online astroturfed campaigns however were far more secretive, sinister and effective; so much so that they not only helped Trump get elected, but many of them remained quite undiscovered until well after the Klepto-Kaiser took office. To this day it seems that very few people understand that Pizzagate, an online conspiracy about elite Democrat pedophilia spread primarily by a number of reactionary online influencers with some ties to the Trump administration (Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Cassandra Fairbanks, among others), was a Trump campaign disinformation operation. Fewer still comprehend that someone extremely close to Trump is still running the QAnon fascist conspiracy cult as we speak and has millions of people pledging to die for Trump or at least fight a second civil war for him if he doesn’t win the 2020 election.

Unfortunately in the reactionary soup ultimately created by all of these forces working quite dishonestly online, my work (which was at once both extremely critical of rich liberals gas-lighting the labor class to subvert democracy through the Clinton campaign, and was repeatedly reminding people that Trump himself was also a billionaire aristocrat f*cking over poor people as well as a literal fascist to boot) struggled to find a home audience that wasn’t angry at me for something or other I’d already written. This meant that not only was I not being boosted very often by either of the coordinated propaganda networks working the electorate on social media, but folks that were reading my work tended to discard important observations (like say, Trump is literally a fascist) as hyperbolic propaganda in an environment completely saturated with such.

Making matters worse, I was wasting a lot of time and energy chasing down the roots of these astroturf social media networks and it would indeed be a very long time before I realized that some of the people pretending to be fans in my mentions were actively trying to steer my writing towards pushing the same reactionary conspiracy theories the Trump networks were exploiting for political purposes online. For the most part, I was able to stay out of the crypto-fascist communities but I’d be lying if I told you that chasing down the cloak and dagger machinations of left-jacketed nazis in what the online right now calls “the Meme War” wasn’t demoralizing, distracting and actively successful in causing me to tone down some of my observations and suspicions so as to not rile up the black helicopter “leftists” in my mentions and comment sections. At various points in time I half wondered if I myself hadn’t gone crazy chasing shadows, but eventually more mainstream observers of reactionary right wing propaganda operations began to catch on and write about the connections between all of these people pretending to be grassroots “citizen journalists” and the Trump campaign itself, on sites like Right Wing Watch, Hate Watch, Media Matters and even in an ongoing column about the QAnon conspiracy on the Daily Beast. As an aside, I would like to encourage readers to please note the complete absence of Russian hackers or bots in this story; this entire phenomenon, which continues to some degree today both online and offline, was purely an American made crisis.

Finally I should confess that throughout most of the 2016 election, even I hadn’t quite figured out how dangerous Donald Trump would ultimately be. There’s a fairly huge difference between electing a moronic reality TV show fascist who can’t remember a sentence he just read off a teleprompter to run a liberal democracy, and living in a fascist country. I mean sure I knew Trump stood a much better chance of winning the election than the media was letting on, and it had dawned on me that it was probably a really bad idea to give a literal fascist the keys to the War on Terror police state Panopticon the Obama and Bush administrations had built, but there were still a great number of things I didn’t know yet that would probably would have driven me into a panic if I had understood them at the time.

For example, I didn’t know that Trump would easily be able to stack his administration, the civil service and the judiciary with unhinged fascists prepared to back whatever authoritarian plays a Republican president might make. I certainly didn’t realize the swine emperor could threaten to invoke the 1807 insurrection act to put the US military in the streets and teargas lawful protesters for a fascist photo op. Hell, like a lot of people I definitely bought into the idea that Steve Bannon, not Trump himself, was the architect of the fascist elements of Trump’s campaign – if you had brought up the name Stephen Miller to me back in 2016, I probably would have made a joke about midnight toking.

Furthermore, I didn’t know that the opposition party would steadfastly refuse to call Trump a fascist no matter how much fascist sh*t he tries to do and even if they knew he was a fascist before he was even elected, mostly as part of a quixotic and self-destructive campaign to keep an emerging and openly anti-fascist left wing inside the party’s base from gaining any traction in the arena of public opinion. I didn’t know that the liberal establishment would waste four years and counting pushing a thoroughly nuts Bircher spy novel conspiracy theory about Russian hackers and “pee tapes” instead of fighting Trump’s fascist agenda in any meaningful way. I did not (but perhaps should have) predict that even while calling the swine emperor an “existential threat” to the nation, Democrats would repeatedly collaborate with Trump to further his reactionary policies and programs, thereby undermining anyone trying to point out that Trump is in fact a fascist.

Additionally I didn’t know that the president was essentially above the law so long as his party held a majority in either the House, or the Senate. I didn’t know that Trump as president could fire and replace literally anyone tasked with stopping him from doing fascism. I didn’t realize that Trump, even if people knew he was a fascist, would still be legally entitled to use ICE as a private army to snatch protesters demonstrating against his administration off the street. I didn’t realize that nazis and fascists had so thoroughly infiltrated American law enforcement that Trump would be able to command them like an army to use against his opponents, even if the cops themselves ultimately worked for Democratic governments in urban areas. Speaking of armies in the street – it wasn’t until sometime in early 2020 that I realized Trump was recruiting his own fascist conspiracy cult and pushing them towards a possible armed conflict with anyone who might try to stop him from turning America into his private dictatorship.

In other words, despite my complete lack of faith in the state, I was still dumb enough to believe that our absurd system of “standards and norms” and the vaunted “checks and balances” built into the American system of government would somehow stop Trump’s fascism from being the deciding factor of his presidency, and for that miscalculation I can offer few excuses. I do however feel I can be excused for deciding it probably didn’t matter anyway after months and months of mainstream media gaslighting convinced me in the final stretch of the election that none of this mattered anyway because Hillary Clinton was going to win – Nate Bronze was never wrong, after all.

Then of course he won, or at least achieved what legally qualifies as a win in American elections clearly rigged for the Republican Party. By this time however, I was far more prepared to say what I already knew to be true out loud.

Starting in late 2016 I made sure that whenever I wrote about Trump at all, I directly mentioned that he was a fascist. As the president-elect was naming his initial cabinet, I published online meme cards and links to articles exposing the openly reactionary positions of his appointees. Not long after his ascension to the White House I was openly pointing out the fascist nature of the Trump-controlled Department of Justice’s war on antifascist protesters and sympathetic journalists after the J20 protests at his inauguration. In the opening weeks of Downmarket Mussolini’s reign I attacked Trump’s Muslim ban and mass ICE raids as explicitly fascist. By February of 2017 I was encouraging all reasonable people to criticize, shun and otherwise ostracize Trump supporters in daily life because they were openly supporting a fascist. I also pointed out that Trump’s quest to arrest Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was explicitly authoritarian, and a grave danger of becoming a real threat to Freedom of the Press in America. What I didn’t do is push an objectively made up conspiracy theory about Russia controlling the President of the United States that happened to include calling everyone who had a problem with Democratic Party policy (including environmental activists, Black Lives Matter protesters, Latino activists advocating on behalf of undocumented migrants and of course, other Democrats who had the nerve to support Bernie Sanders) a Russian asset, and that in turn kept my work out of the mainstream liberal and faux-left “indie” media circles online that might have been able to more effectively raise the alarm.

I could keep going and just list every article where I talked about Trump being a fascist, or recount the by now infinite number of Twitter threads where I’ve done the same, but I don’t think any of that would be particularly important to our story – if you’ve been clicking on the links in this journal already, I’m sure you get the point by now. I would however like to draw your attention to a few specific stories I’ve written in the roughly three and a half years since Trump has taken office because I feel that my analysis in these pieces offered a wealth of evidence that not only was Trump and his administration literally fascist, but indeed often predicted with eerie accuracy what the Klepto Kaiser would do next on the road to installing his fascist agenda and government:

Antifa, Arpaio and Donald Trump’s All-American Reichstag Fire – written in the chaotic aftermath of the objectively fascist and white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, this August 2017 essay was not the first time I’d written about Trump’s fascism and what his current (again, objectively fascist) actions could tell us about where America was heading, it was the first time that those actions and possibilities were the central focus of my investigation and subsequent writing. In this foundational work, I specifically examined the authoritarian reasons behind the reactionary right’s attempts to brand anti-fascist protest as terrorism, Trump’s ability and willingness to use existing War on Terror national security laws or perhaps even write new ones to violate the civil liberties of his political enemies and why the proliferation of fascist and white nationalist beliefs in American law enforcement had already allowed Trump to recruit them to his side in an explicit war against people exercising their first amendment rights. I also briefly touched on the growing relationships between the Trump administration, American law enforcement and the violent reactionary right brownshirt groups now largely supporting Trump in the open. Naturally of course, in one manner of speaking or another all of these predictions have largely come true already with the lone caveat that I believe Downmarket Mussolini is only now in the process of potentially executing the fascist coup I talked about back in 2017 – a prediction that seemed ridiculous to some at the time, but is probably looking a little more prescient now that Trump has turned Homeland Security into his private Gestapo, he’s openly trying to rig the 2020 election and he’s telling his reactionary cult-infested base that they shouldn’t interpret any result in which Trump losses as a coup by Soros-backed Satanist cannibal liberals using anarchist terrorists and Black Lives Matter as an army of extermination against the good white folks in the heartland. Full to the brim with supporting links to back up my now prescient arguments, this article has represented the foundation on which I’ve built all my further writing about the rise of a wholly Americanized fascism in the United States and increasingly abroad; if you were only going to read one of the articles I share here in this space today, this would clearly be the one.

Encampments – in this June 2019 article on my (free) Patreon blog I decided to combine everything I’d already written about the Klepto Kaiser and America’s descent into overt fascism to accomplish three primary goals: to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump and his administration are legitimately fascist, to address the concern in some portions of left wing discourse that because America has always been fascist Herr Donald himself did not represent any more of an existential danger to American life than any previous president, and to place an urgent call for anti-fascist resistance independent of a liberal or moderate conservative establishment that would clearly prefer a fascist dictatorship to sharing or placing some constraints on their ability to accumulate capital through exploitation. While this article doesn’t go into as explicit detail a the August 2017 Deep Dive above, it does have almost as many verification links and it represents a good summary of my work for those who want “proof of fascism” and simply don’t have the time to read another four thousand word piece of analysis.

Tales from the American DMZ: Police State of Denial – written in December of 2017, this combination info-graphic and short essay was meant as a sort of companion piece to “Antifa, Arpaio and Donald Trump’s All-American Reichstag Fire” because it focuses intently on the now Trump-controlled DoJ and FBI’s willingness to adopt fascist logic in persecuting Trump’s enemies; in this case, teenage anarchist protesters who happened to standing near someone who broke a window during the J20 protests against Trump’s inauguration. This may seem an odd inclusion here in light of the fact that the US Department of Justice ultimately lost its fight against the J20 protesters, but it speaks to a clear reality that everyone around me seems almost incapable of understanding; namely that ideologically the Department of Justice, the FBI and other law enforcement figures agree more with Trump, than anti-fascists and anti-racists protesting against Trump, and will thus gladly serve his agenda when called upon. I mean here you have a bunch of career prosecutors, many of whom worked under the Obama administration gleefully trying to lock up protesters exercising their First Amendment rights for quite possibly the rest of their lives, based on a specious argument about group responsibility for property damage of all things? Does anyone sincerely think things have improved with Trump continuing to stack the courts with fascists and turning the DoJ over to fundie nutjob cover-up artist William Barr, who fairly recently visited the University of Notre Dame to tell Trump’s Catholic supporters that liberals were literally trying to exterminate them? I would gather from the hundreds of videos of heinous police violence committed against protesters during the Black Lives Matter rallies after the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as the every growing reams of specious charges against protesters the DoJ is now undertaking, the answer to the question is a resounding no.

Active Measures – at first glance this essay might seem out of place on this list, but I assure you that in light of recent developments in precisely how rigged the 2020 election is going to be, its relevance will quickly become apparent to anyone who reads it through to the end. After reading about direct evidence of the Republican Party’s attempts to actively rig the upcoming election cycle in a number of mainstream, but largely boutique news outlets and becoming frustrated at the lack of coverage this very real crisis was receiving compared to some stupid Russian memes on Facebook, I once again decided to try and raise the alarm about American fascism. So, roughly halfway through the month of June in 2019, I compiled this extremely granular and heavily sourced look at the GOP’s ongoing efforts to actively rig pretty much every election in the country for the next ten years, including the 2020 US Presidential election. While obviously to some degree my focus was the Hofeller leaks, ballot challenges and widespread voter suppression, I also devoted the entire back third of the piece to examining what a rigged election would mean for America under a fascist like Trump and issued an extremely earnest appeal for everyone reading my work to take up the fight against the fascists before it was too late. While I strongly urge interested observers to read the entire essay, I’d like to quote a small portion of it here with links (and incompatible site formating) intact to demonstrate a larger point I’m trying to get at with all of the articles in this section:

“Before we can plot a course to the future, it is important to be completely honest with ourselves about where we stand today across the Pig Empire. We are observing the terrifying global rise of an Americanized brand of modern fascism that has been facilitated by decades, if not centuries of reactionary ideas, policies and abuses promoted by elite capital, the mainstream media establishment and the Western ruling class.

In the United States, this movement has taken the form of an unholy alliance between reactionary billionaire families, Wall Street criminals, lobbyists, the fossil fuel industry, wealthy Christian fundamentalists, the Republican Party, right wing media, opportunistic political grifters, hatemongers and various nationalist street gang style organizations. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration are at once both a natural byproduct of this reactionary fascist movement and also a catalyst for a transformative shift from poorly concealed hyper-capitalist police states posing as liberal democracies, to overt fascist oligarchies here in the West.

Our society has largely stood by as our corrupt institutions, unenforceable political norms and compromised regulatory bodies have fallen to the reactionary right one by one, in country after country throughout the entire Pig Empire. Finally, even as you read this significant if not overwhelming portions of our ruling aristocracy, mainstream media and corporate class are happily punching left and silencing dissent while openly collaborating with and normalizing fascists for personal gain.

In other words, our time to react has grown short and the situation is alarmingly bleak.

When do we as a society say that this has gone on long enough? How far into delusion, depravity and death must we descend before it becomes reasonable to demand coordinated opposition from our leaders, elitist media intellectuals and those who claim to defend democracy?

What was it that finally made you decide that you could tolerate no more of this naked malice, greed and inhumanity? Was it the criminality, corruption and contempt for the law? Was it the bald-faced racism? Was it the creation of a white nationalist government, the swine emperor’s open embrace of violent reactionary thugs or the growing number of innocent people murdered by neo-nazis the Amerikkkan Injustice Department no longer bothers to monitor? Was it trading arms sales for support of a genocidal client-state dictatorship lead by a man who we know ordered the murder of a Washington Post journalist in cold blood? Was it the Republican Party’s war on women, the LGBT community and non-white minorities? Was it the Klepto Kaiser’s scorched earth assault on freedom of the press, the DoJ’s unlawful crackdown on political dissent or the Supreme Court’s blessing for authorities to harass activists and protesters? Was it when you realized the president is probably a rapist? Was it the way the system bent over backwards to protect billionaire pre-teen rapist Jeff Epstein? Was it when you noticed that these cracker reactionaries were trying to get a couple of Muslim freshmen Congresswomen murdered? Was it the habitual lying, the virulent Islamophobia or perhaps the open nepotism? Was it when the Trump administration decided to help Israel starve Palestinian refugees out of existence? Was it the concentration camps, the stolen brown babies and the growing number of imprisoned migrants our government has murdered? Was it the potential destruction of all life on this planet? Was it when Trump’s imperialist cronies started maneuvering America towards up to three wars all at once? Was it halfway through this article when you realized voting the fascists out might soon be impossible? Or was it some other monstrous atrocity the people around you have already forgotten as we all fall further under the yoke of reactionary tyranny?

With injustice manufactured by a corrupt executive branch and sanctified by a partisan judiciary, what is clearly needed now is a broad-based protest movement to occupy the places of government, to take the battle to the court of public opinion, and if necessary the streets. Politicians, the judiciary and the pro-corporate American establishment must be pressured at all times to help fight the reactionary far-right takeover, and if they will not do so then they must be replaced with those who will. We must create a unity of action, not one of feckless civility and meek acquiescence to the rising tide of overt fascism. It is time to start forcing those who would collaborate with white supremacists, mass murderers and thieves to suffer material consequences for their monstrous betrayal of the public trust; for far too long, inaction from those who should be opposing Downmarket Mussolini and the Buckley Bunch with every fiber of their being, has served to provide legitimacy for this fundie fascist regime. It is time to name the revanchist, elitist beast that dwells inside the both the American “right” and significant portions of the elite “liberal” establishment; it is time to publicly disown, disempower and destroy those who would lay down with fascism for personal gain.”

There is of course more and indeed more source links that prove my arguments in this essay, but my purpose here is to simply point out that I do not understand how anyone reading those paragraphs and clicking on the links as they go, could possibly accuse me of failing to prove we are facing down the overt fascism moment in America, or failing to sound the alarm desperately enough to force people to hear it.

Summer Camp – in June of 2019 I wrote this heavily documented essay addressing the reality that ICE’s migrant detention facilities were objectively concentration camps and that concentration camps themselves were an internationally recognized portion of the historical process of genocide. Once again I split my analysis between recognizing America’s pre-Trump embrace of horrifying migrant concentration camps and explaining how the Downmarket Mussolini administration had actively enhanced and accelerated the historical tendency of these camps to facilitate fascist policy and eventual crimes against humanity or mass killings. While I don’t mean to sound like a broken drum, I struggle to understand how someone reading this article could fail to observe my specific accusations that Trump himself is fascist, his Stephen Miller-crafted immigration policy is fascist and we’re headed for something at least akin to mass killings and political murders if we don’t start taking action against the fascist creep that threatens to completely engulf our society.

But He’s Not Hitler and Homework Assignment #2 -in this very recent (informal) Facebook Journal I took a reasonably thorough look at why Americans struggle to recognize fascism in a hyper-capitalist corporation reorganized as a country that was built on genocide and slavery. Spoiler the answer is because America has spent pretty much its entire existence embracing fascist propaganda and ideology wearing a variety of names and disguises. From Jim Crow, to anti-communism and through to today’s neofeudalist variants like racialized mass incarceration for profit or the police state panopticon created by the post-911 National Security state, much of what is considered completely normal in American life is ideologically fascist, authoritarian and reactionary in nature. Includes a link to an extremely important 1995 New York Review of Books essay about recognizing modern (post-Word War II) fascism by Umberto Eco.

Everyone Is Wrong But Me Episode 5: Punching Left & Empowering Fascism – during this August, 2017 pseudo-anonymous video I spend roughly eleven minutes talking about the murderous nazi riot in Charlottesville, the inherently fascist nature of Trump, his administration and the authorities protecting violent neo-nazis from lawful protesters, as well as the extreme danger represented by a liberal media class eager to use the deadly riot to conflate left wing dissidents with fascist thugs even in the wake of nazi violence that ultimately killed a socialist protester. Again it’s hard to imagine that if someone watched this video they would not understand I was talking about my fear we were entering worst case scenario for fascism in America here while simultaneously pointing out how the elite centrist establishment and its allies in the mainstream corporate media were actively, albeit perhaps unknowingly, helping the fascists win.

An Open Letter to ESPN About President Trump and Jemele Hill – written in the style of an open letter, this article was composed in response to ESPN publicly admonishing presenter Jemel Hill for (accurately) stating that Donald Trump, by then well into his habit of signaling support for violent fascists, is a white supremacist. Some mendacious folks who have read this article have made a great deal out of the point that in light of the fact that Hill called Trump a white supremacist instead of a fascist, I committed to maintaining that language choice in my letter to ESPE – thus the article isn’t really about Trump’s “fascism” or so the theory goes. This however is a distinction without a difference and the minor quibbling points between violent racist reactionaries who call themselves slightly different names pretty much only matters to fascists and their ilk. The article itself makes no such distinction and actively highlights the ways in which Trump has supported violent neonazis and reactionary racists of all types; once again, virtually everything is properly sourced with links to primarily mainstream media outlets whose reporting demonstrates that Trump is indeed a fascist and a white supremacist.

As I mentioned above, these articles by no means represent the sum total of my writing about Trump and the overt fascist moment in America, I talk about the rise of fascism as embodied by the Trump administration even when I’m not really writing about fascism in specific. Could I have written these same observations down more often? Yeah, absolutely but I already told you I suck at the “I told you so” post (which is why it took me so long to write this article) and please keep in mind that I had to waste a lot of time and energy debunking an insane Bircher conspiracy theory about Russia controlling everyone who doesn’t like the Democratic Party and trying to analyze what ultimately turned out to be a completely rigged 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest. One thing I can say is that looking at this body of work, it is impossible for me to understand how anyone, including my guilty conscience, can suggest I could possibly have raised the alarm about where we would find ourselves today, any louder.

How I Fell Down & What I Think Happens Next

I warned you things might get a little negative and emo in the introduction, didn’t I? I didn’t promise this ride wouldn’t go to dark places, and that’s true whether you’re talking about my emotional state over the past four months or the immediate future of America as a whole. I don’t want to get all “woe is me” here but since we’re already about six thousand words into a deep-dive style journal about my efforts to identify and warn people about the rise of overt fascism in America, let me just say that even my quixotic quest to get my friends, family and readers to see the fascism right in front of their faces has not come without significant, although not unbearable personal cost.

I have found attempting to speak about fascism in this political environment isolating and alienating. I’ve been attacked, smeared, plagiarized, infantalized and openly subjected to psychologically abusive gaslighting for expressing these opinions; sometimes by AstroTurf crypto-fascists, sometimes by rich liberals who don’t want to accept any responsibility for putting Trump in the position to realize his reactionary and authoritarian fantasies and sometimes by well-meaning black helicopter leftists who just don’t like when anything I say sounds like something they’ve ever heard on MSNBC. Frankly, speaking to that last group I can’t rightly blame them – when rich media liberals spend almost five years, across two rigged primaries, telling the country that you’re a woman-hating Russian asset who is just like a nazi because you want free public healthcare, you’re probably not going to be inclined to trust those same people later when they tell you Trump is a fascist; which is the situation we find ourselves in now.

Like virtually everyone on the left, I was demoralized and despondent when Bernie Sanders (a candidate I am confident would beat the GOP rig in the 2020 election) lost the Democratic Party nomination in a contest you will never convince me wasn’t rigged (mechanically, procedurally, and in the media) as long as I live on this earth. Furthermore because I’m not a psychic, I too was caught completely unawares by the coronavirus crisis and subsequent lockdown; in fact, it’s only just now that I’ve gotten around to considering how it might affect Downmarket Mussolini’s prospects in the upcoming election (spoiler, it probably doesn’t hurt his chances because his voters don’t believe the virus is real and won’t stay home.) I withdrew inward, I said things that hurt people I care about and I became more than a little depressed; when I was able to write about American fascism and offer warnings about what I saw coming next it was once again in the form of confusing, late-night Twitter threads riddled with typos – I was not in a very good place.

When the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and anarchist actions broke out in response to the police murder of George Floyd, I was briefly invigorated at the prospect of a widespread resistance movement against American fascism growing out of the moment. Once it became clear to me that the liberal establishment was going to replay the same hippy-punching script from Charlottesville, leaving the protesters to the tender mercies of Trump-loving fascist murderpigs, I became outraged. As the Klepto Kaiser sent in his private Homeland Security Gestapo in to kidnap protesters, I couldn’t help but think back to 2017 and 2018 when many of Trump’s very first actions in office caused plenty of respectable people to sound the alarm against fascism. I kept thinking about how in the first year of Trump’s corrupting reign, we were all swarming airports to stop fascist ICE pigs from detaining Muslims, we were fighting against neighborhood immigration raids by blocking the roads in front of ICE vehicles, thousands of people assembled to shut down fascist rallies (that were protected by fascist police, might I add) after the Charlottesville neonazi riot and murder; folks were even chasing fascists and neonazis in Trump’s government out of Mexican restaurants. We had these bastards on the run and it wasn’t a judicial crackdown that broke the anti-fascist momentum, it was elite liberals calling for civility and insisting we let the nazis have tacos in peace. I was hurt, I was enraged and watching the precise scenario I had always feared most unfold before me on television nearly broke my heart. Until very recently, I found myself struggling to simply relate to other people; formal writing and podcast recording would have been utterly out of the question. To put it simply, I was and perhaps still am resentful, exhausted and terrified that it is now too late to stop the horrible outcome I see occurring this fall and in response to the 2020 US presidential election.

It is however fair to say that if you’re still reading this article, you’ve more than fulfilled my request to let me talk a little bit about my experiences, my feelings and my work in a way I simply haven’t done before and for that I thank you. In return, I will now hold up my end of the bargain and explain in extremely broad strokes how I think this Fall’s US election is going to go down and why, in the most basic possible terms. While Trump himself is notably unstable, the simple truth is that his actions and the actions of the fascist movement/administration propping him up are almost never random or incidental. If you spend long enough staring into the eye of fascism in America, it becomes possible to glean a method to Trump’s supposed madness and I think if you’re read this article and clicked on any of the citation links you will agree that I have certainly spent quite a great deal of time staring into that eye. The key in my opinion is to take Trump both “literally” and “seriously” while hoping that someone along the line manages to talk him out of whatever fascist nonsense he’s (always) talking about in the open.

Naturally there is a very obvious reason why the Kelpto Kaiser is destroying the United States Postal Service right before an election that will likely be decided by mail in ballots due to the coronavirus, but as far as I can tell that’s really only the top layer of this filthy fascist onion. There is also a reason Trump is working to de-legitimize mail in voting in general and an election he hasn’t even lost yet. There is a reason someone in the Trump administration is working to popularize a reactionary fascist cult that is totally loyal to Trump and believes his political enemies are baby murdering satanist pedophiles who must be stopped from seizing control of Trump’s America at all costs. There’s a reason the Trump administration has worked to build ties with violent murderpigs, the immigration gestapo and far right militia or paramilitary brownshirt groups. There’s a reason right wing intellectuals, evangelical leaders and even members of the Trump administration keep painting this upcoming election in terms of a struggle for survival, or even a second Civil War. Finally, there is of course a horrifying reason that Trump keeps telling all of these people “you know what to do” at his whackjob fascist political rallies. I don’t have a crystal ball, but taking Trump both literally and seriously this is what I think he means to do:

Donald Trump and the Republican Party at large are going to, or perhaps more accurately have already effectively rigged the election. That’s why Trump is trying to intimidate (primarily) Democrat minority voters before a single ballot is even cast, that’s why sixteen million and seven hundred thousand voters (mostly Democrats) are in the process of being purged from the voting rolls, and that’s why Trump is crippling the Post Office ahead of the what might be the first election dependent on mail in ballots.

If even despite sitting on the scale like a fat elephant, Trump is unable to win the election outright, the administration and the Republican Party will spring into action to challenge and disqualify enough ballots (which will be entirely folks who’ve voted Democrat this time) to give Trump the win. This historically unprecedented number of challenges will likely be supported by astroturfed pressure groups much the same as the Bush-era “Brooks Brothers Riot” although you can bet they’ll be better armed and more explicitly reactionary. Finally, the Party will rely on a judiciary hand-picked by Herr Donald and the Federalist Society to apply the very barest veneer of legality to Trump’s win; in other words, it’ll be a judicial coup just like George W. Bush’s first “win” back in 2000.

If Trump ultimately cannot “win” the election by some combination of voter suppression and judicial coup, he will simply refuse to leave the office and call for a fascist uprising that will be explicitly framed as a counter-coup against the rightful “winner” and President, Donald Trump. Although it is ultimately impossible for me to predict the actions of perhaps millions of people in response to events that haven’t happened yet, I believe the principle groups involved would theoretically be Department of Homeland Security and especially ICE personnel, sympathetic local governments in areas dominated by right wing politics, sympathetic members of the far right Constitutional Sheriff’s movement, American law enforcement acting in open rebellion against regional governments if necessary, paramilitaries and right wing militias such as the Three Percenter movement, brownshirt groups like the Proud Boys, longstanding white supremacist, white nationalist and neo-confederate groups, vast reactionary portions of the American “conspiracy community” such as the regular audience cultivated by folks like Alex Jones, locally formed far-right posses such as those organized to stop the fake “busloads of antifa soldiers coming to your town” propaganda panic, some portion of the pro-Second Civil War US “Boogaloo” movement, perhaps even folks who envision themselves as being part of a biker gang, and of course the President’s astroturfed reactionary cult, Q-Anon. Ultimately, I believe the only logical purpose for assembling the coalition of violent, unhinged reactionaries and autocratic murderpig tyrants Downmaket Mussolini and his administration have actively cultivated is to at least threaten to commit violent repression against your political opponents and I believe that if this were any country other than America that fact would be self-apparent to most observers, but we’re still very much living in a “can’t happen here” understanding of American history and politics.

So, what happens next? The simple truth is that I don’t rightly know, but I am beginning to fear that the worst case, Weimar Germany-type scenario is officially on us like a fat kid on a french fry. As I write this to you, the American right is lauding a seventeen year old fascist militia goon for murdering protesters, the Democratic Party is busy attacking its own base on behalf of property owners and the US military is openly stating that it has no intention of enforcing an election result for Joe Biden, even if he wins the presidency. Oh, and the President of the United States is publicly signaling to his followers that the protests are literally a coup to topple their president; things are indeed looking a little bleak. There is of course always a chance that Trump tries to start the fascist coup and there aren’t enough motivated right wing nutjobs in the country willing to back his play, but that possibility is seeming less and less likely by the day. Furthermore, it might not even matter how big the army Trump can ultimately put in the street is if Biden doesn’t actually win the election, and at this rate – I really don’t think he’s going to.

The future of our society and indeed, perhaps the world as we understand it is now hovering on a knife’s edge and frankly, I have nothing left to say except “I told you so and I don’t understand why you folks didn’t listen, or believe me until it was pretty much too late to do anything about it.” At this point, after just over four years of being completely correct about everything Downmarket Mussolini represents and what he means to do, I find myself praying that this time, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I’m going to be wrong.

The only problem is that even when I pray, I’m still not really sure anyone is listening.