I have been writing for some time that fascist America is here now, not just something that is coming. Barton Gellman of The Atlantic writes an in-depth study of this - "Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun" - 12/6/2021. America needs to be very aware of what is happening here. To read it in full would be good. This is a longer than normal post, but I feel it is important to document what is happening to our democracy.
Some takeaways:
- "For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft"
- "Virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that Trump could compel the whole party’s genuflection to the Big Lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs. Today the few GOP dissenters are being cast out."
- "His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power."
- He did deep interviews with a man named Patterson - "Does Patterson know that January 6 was among the worst days for law-enforcement casualties since September 11, 2001? That at least 151 officers from the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department suffered injuries, including broken bones, concussions, chemical burns, and a Taser-induced heart attack? Patterson has not heard these things. Abruptly, he shifts gears. Maybe there was violence, but the patriots were not to blame."
- "His voice rose. “There ain’t no fucking way we are letting go of 3 November 2020,” he said. “That is not going to fucking happen. That’s not happening. This motherfucker was stolen. The world knows this bumbling, senile, career corrupt fuck squatting in our White House did not get 81 million votes.”
- ..."a theory called the “Great Replacement.” The term itself has its origins in Europe. But the theory is the latest incarnation of a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants, and the rise of nonwhite citizens, to take power from white Christian people of European stock. When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” (When I first saw this chant in Charlottesville I was baffled - there are only about 6 million Jews in America, how could they replace these white supremacists? Naive me.)
- "...Trump had skillfully deployed three classic themes of mobilization to violence, Pape wrote: “The survival of a way of life is at stake. The fate of the nation is being determined now. Only genuine brave patriots can save the country.”
- January 6, 2020 insurrection - "Yet these insurgents were not, by and large, affiliated with known extremist groups. Several dozen did have connections with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or the Three Percenters militia, but a larger number—six out of every seven who were charged with crimes—had no ties like that at all."
- “January 6 wasn’t designed as a mass-casualty attack, but rather as a recruitment action” aimed at mobilizing the general population,..."
- A statistical study to find out who the insurgents were showed a surprising result - Replacement Theory - "Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state." (Replacement Theory is another way of saying Racism) "Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them."
- "... just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists."
- "Constitutionally, all the power rests with the people. That’s you and
me, bro. And Mao is right that all the power emanates from the barrel of
a gun.” (Quote of a Trump Cultist)
- "In nearly every battle space of the war to control the count of the next election—statehouses, state election authorities, courthouses, Congress, and the Republican Party apparatus—Trump’s position has improved since a year ago."
- "The strategic objective of nearly every move by the Trump team after the networks called the election for Joe Biden on November 7 was to induce Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to seize control of the results and appoint Trump electors instead. ... Electors are the currency in a presidential contest and, under the Constitution, state legislators control the rules for choosing them. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.... in Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court affirmed that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” No court has ever said that a state could do that after its citizens have already voted, but that was the heart of Trump’s plan.”
- "...the Trump team achieved something crucial and enduring by convincing tens of millions of angry supporters, including a catastrophic 68 percent of all Republicans in a November PRRI poll, that the election had been stolen from Trump. Nothing close to this loss of faith in democracy has happened here before."
- And, of course, January 6 saw a violent effort to overturn the election. "For a few short weeks, Republicans recoiled at the insurrection and distanced themselves from Trump. That would not last."
- 'With Trump loyalists ascendant, no room is left for dissent in a party now fully devoted to twisting the electoral system for the former president. Anyone who thinks otherwise need only glance toward Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, so recently in the party’s power elite, has been toppled from her leadership post and expelled from the state Republican Party for lèse-majesté."
- "Most of all, there is the roaring tide of revanchist anger among Trump supporters, rising up against anyone who would thwart his will. Scarcely an elected Republican dares resist them, and many surf exultantly in their wake"
- "In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement."
- "The infinite scroll of right-wing social media is relentlessly bloody-minded. One commentator on Telegram posted on January 7 that “the congress is literally begging the people to hang them.” Another replied, “Anyone who certifies a fraudulent election has commited treason punishable by death.”
- "Republicans are promoting an “independent state legislature” doctrine, which holds that statehouses have “plenary,” or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead...Trump is not relying on the clown-car legal team that lost nearly every court case last time. The independent-state-legislature doctrine has a Federalist Society imprimatur and attorneys from top-tier firms like BakerHostetler."
- "There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without."
- And what has been Biden's response? "So: enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws,
vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans
stand athwart their own electoral schemes....Conspicuously missing from Biden’s speech was any mention even of
filibuster reform, without which voting-rights legislation is doomed.
Nor was there any mention of holding Trump and his minions accountable,
legally, for plotting a coup. Patterson, the retired firefighter, was
right to say that nobody has been charged with insurrection; the
question is, why not? The Justice Department and the FBI are chasing
down the foot soldiers of January 6, but there is no public sign that
they are building cases against the men and women who sent them. Absent
consequences, they will certainly try again. An unpunished plot is
practice for the next."
- "Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. " Biden needs to step up.
We need to remember one thing, the currency of fascism is violence and the threat of violence. Already, elected Republicans are voting against their own principles out of fear for the lives of themselves and their loved ones - real death threats. Does anyone think any of this will diminish in 2024? Trump, and the most violent Trump Cult, needs to be imprisoned by a Justice Department (which was created, by the way, in 1870 to fight the KKK - the same folks under many different names it needs to fight today)
One of my questions is what happens to this white supremacist authoritarian fascist movement if Trump goes away? Does it need this famous charismatic leader, or will a smarter but perhaps less charismatic person fill the void and the fascist movement continues forward? How much does the MAGA movement need the MAGA monster? Was Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Lenin etc needed for their authoritarian dictatorships? We cant know about Germany and Italy, but China and Russia went on to very long term despotic terror reigns. Tucker Carlson of Fox News seems to be setting himself up as the White Supremacist Glorious Leader. (Steve Bannon would like to be that but he is too old, fat, ugly, and creepy)
It can happen in America. It is happening in America.
But we are not helpless. We can shine a light, expose the stench, and win. But we have to pay attention. Things are very serious.
