Authoritarianism / Fascism

There can be no doubt that while Biden rhetorically discussed a more humane approach to the border, his actual tenure has been devastating for migrants. Biden deported 271,484 people in 2024 alone — the highest number of any year since 2014. He maintained Trump-era border restrictions, such as the misuse of the Title 42 public health statute to deny migrants access to the U.S. and violate due process of asylum seekers. In its opening days, the Biden administration detained 14,000 Haitian migrants seeking asylum, and summarily deported them en masse. The devastating episode involved U.S. border agents on horseback whipping Haitians, producing photos reminiscent of slavery.

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Will Trump be worse than Biden? This has been a complicated question to answer for many on the left in light of Biden’s unwavering participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For sections of the population, there will be a dramatic, catastrophic change from Biden to Trump. The new attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ folks and women, immigrants and Muslims should not be underestimated. We should also prepare for a new round of attacks on organizing, beginning with especially vulnerable activists, such as international students, Muslim and immigrant organizers. But such attacks are already happening under Biden, who has presided over mass arrests of student protesters and the criminalization of organizing for Palestine.

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This continuity between Biden and Trump — and convergence between the Democratic Party and MAGA — complicates an assessment of Trump and made it difficult for many progressives to support Kamala Harris’s campaign.

The massive programme of cuts and deregulation that Musk and Ramaswamy seek extends the sadomasochistic politics now ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic. Demagogues have found that it doesn’t matter how much their followers suffer, as long as their designated enemies are suffering more. If you can keep ramping up the pain for scapegoats (primarily immigrants), voters will thank you for it, regardless of their own pain. This is the great discovery of the conflict entrepreneurs, led by Musk himself: what counts in politics is not how well people are doing, but how well they are doing in relation to designated out-groups.

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Why has the class war been unleashed now, not just in the US, but in much of the rest of the world? Because the democratising, distributive effects of two world wars have worn off. We fondly imagine that the semi-democratic era (exemplified in rich nations by the years 1945–1975) is the normal state of politics. But it was highly atypical, and made possible only by the wars’ erosion of the power of the ruling classes. The default state of centralised societies, to which nations are now reverting, is oligarchy.

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In nations that have not yet fully succumbed to oligarchy we need to recognise, and recognise fast, that democratic politics do not emerge spontaneously. Our systems achieve a quasi-democratic character only with an active citizenry, whose engagement is largely defined by protest, and an independent media. But, at the direct behest of capital, governments are criminalising peaceful protest, while many independent media, such as the BBC, shut out dissenting voices.

Bannon said after Zuckerberg’s visit, “the floodgates opened up and they were all there trying to be supplicants. I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them and they surrendered.” Bannon added, with a laugh: “They came and said: ‘Oh, we’ll take off any constraints, no more checkings, everything.’”

“I view this as September of 1945, the Missouri, and you have the [Japanese] imperial high command, and he’s like Douglas MacArthur. That is an official surrender, OK, and I think it’s powerful”, Bannon added.

The comments come as Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy” and of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people”.

But according to the White House archives, Biden had not uttered the word “oligarchy” in the context of American politics until last week. Progressive Democrats called out Biden for being an imperfect messenger having courted and relied on big-ticket donors during his 50-year career.

“It’s cowardly that after representing the oligarchs for 50 years in office, he calls out this threat to our nation with just days left in his presidency,” said Nina Turner, a national co-chair for the senator Bernie Sanders’ last presidential campaign.

The NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to “align lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050”. […]  At its height, the coalition boasted 40% of global banking assets. And at the time of its launch, its co-founder, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, described the NZBA as the “breakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needs”.

So far a breakthrough remains at large. In evaluating the NZBA, the benchmark that ultimately matters is that of curbing global emissions and fossil fuel expansion. On both of these points, it’s not clear that the alliance has had any effect. Banks’ targets have been met with widespread criticism concerning lack of transparency and inconsistent or questionable methodologies, and recent research shows little to no difference between the financing and engagement impact of NZBA members and non-members. A separate study found banks that self-present as eco-conscious lend more to polluting industries than those that don’t. Impressively, there has been an overall uptick in fossil fuel financing since 2021 – after the group was formed.

But this raises a critical question: if these alliances were voluntary, non-binding, and seem to have done close to nothing to hinder banks financing fossil fuel expansion, why are banks bothering to quit?

The answer is always, in finance, a calculus of risk. At the time of NZBA’s founding, banks faced considerable reputational risk for being seen as climate laggards. The wind was in the sails of governments and institutions touting climate action, and banks acted accordingly. Today, on the back of record fossil fuel profitability, a protracted backlash against “woke capital” and the second coming of Trump, the calculus has changed.

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In a statement published on 31 December, GFANZ announced it would drop its requirements for members to publish firm targets, allowing “any financial institution working to mobilise capital and lower the barriers to financing energy transition to participate” and earlier this month announced it would no longer work as an umbrella organisation, but a stand-alone body working to “mobilise” climate finance. For a project that still retains many prominent European banks within its ranks, the crumbling to pressure and change of direction was remarkably swift. More cynically, it might be read as an admission that all these “targets” and “disclosures” never meant much at all.

One idea that Tennessee has floated — that sex-based laws related to biological sex difference are shielded from scrutiny — is particularly pernicious. As I have shown in research, this has never been the court’s approach. And for good reason. Throughout the history of sex discrimination, hiding bias behind biology has been a common tactic. Many sex-based lines that have been challenged in the court — from a male-only university admissions policy to rules distinguishing mothers and fathers when it comes to the citizenship of their children — have been couched in terms of physical sex differences. Upon examination, the court has acknowledged that sex stereotypes and not biological differences drive these laws. Without requiring that courts take a close look at all sex-based laws, we make it far too easy to legislate on sexual prejudice.

Just as important as addressing women’s subordination, equal protection has been a key tool in striking down laws that confine not just women, but men, to traditional roles and expectations. Equal protection has been used to invalidate laws that exclude men from caregiving or that require anyone to conform their behavior or appearance to sex-based conventions. In doing so, the doctrine helps to free all of us from limiting sex stereotypes.

Seen this way, it is not hard to appreciate that the law at issue here strikes at the heart of sex equality. The Tennessee law — and trans discrimination more generally — is not only about discrimination against trans people, but about ensuring that we all keep in our gender lanes. As Prelogar explained, the law here is “one that prohibits inconsistency with sex,” requiring that children born as boys and girls “look and live like boys and girls.” Tennessee’s argument would call into question the longstanding freedom we all enjoy to live our lives as we wish, regardless of sex.

Even as many East Coast Straussians such as The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol have become vocal Never Trumpers, West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timelessly pure essence it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism—ideologies that seek to remake humankind and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. That is what Vought invokes here: When “the left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order, they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America—they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

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The American right today has become dominated by forces and factions that are convinced that the answer is that our moment requires not restraint and preservation but radicalism and counter-revolutionary force. As the major institutions of American life are supposedly in the grip of anti-American, leftist, “globalist,” “woke” forces that desire to tear the moral fabric of the nation apart, as the “natural order” is supposedly under siege, those who used to call themselves “conservatives” need to do whatever is necessary to defend a particular kind of “freedom”: the freedom to live in accordance with the “natural order,” which necessitates imposing it on the whole country.

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Many people get caught up in Trump’s nomination of clowns and buffoons to key positions. That’s invariably bad. But something even scarier awaits us: Trump also empowers competent radicals like Vought who pursue goals like “rehabilitating Christian nationalism” and “pursuing the largest deportation in history,” as an undercover video caught him saying. And unlike in the first go-round, there won’t be the moderating presence of “adults in the room” in Trump’s second term. That’s the whole point of Project 2025, of the Center for Renewing America, of handing Vought the policy keys from the beginning. Vought’s “radical constitutionalism” is about to be elevated to a position of immense influence and power, unbothered and undisturbed by inconvenient guardrails like moral and legal accountability, for the next four years. Somehow, he’s convinced himself that this is just what the Founders would have wanted.

This quote is just so telling:

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

It's pure nihilism. Nobody expects anything good. They just want to see people they don't identify with hurt more.

“Under His wings,” one lobbyist wrote in an email. “The Devil never sleeps,” another person sent in an email chain about the distinction between gender and sex. “I pray for the 2nd coming more and more.”

These missives are part of a trove of leaked emails between South Dakota GOP Rep. Fred Deutsch, anti-trans lobbyists, and other state lawmakers about anti-trans policies that are filled with language so deeply religious that, at times, the communications read like scripts from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the language, one expert told VICE News, of Christian nationalists who believe they’re engaging in a holy war.

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“Know that many have prayed and are praying for you this day. Do not back down, nor should you be afraid. Know that the Lord is with you. The children of South Dakota belong to him. He is jealous over them. Let his jealousies be spoken forth in the House of Representatives of South Dakota today so that his children would be made safe. Know you are HIS representative today. Do not be afraid. Stand firm in what is right,” wrote Vernadette Broyles, a lawyer and president of the Georgia-based Children and Parental Rights Campaign, which mobilizes against “gender ideology,” in 2020.

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“It is the language of Christian nationalism,” Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University focusing on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “It is the language of people who very much believe they are doing God’s will, and it is the language of people who very much believe that they are engaged in a holy war.”

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“Stopping the existence of transgender people and the acceptance of trans people in the public sphere is to them some sort of religious imperative,” Lecaque told VICE News.“It’s particularly fascinating that this group that has all this money, control in state legislatures, control of the house, they had a presidency, is acting like somehow they are David in the struggle.”

None of this is particularly surprising, and none of it is new. Today’s Christian nationalists believe that America is an inherently holy, Christian land, and that it’s their duty to restore God’s kingdom in order for Jesus to return. Part of this means that they think the country’s laws, policies and cultural institutions should reflect evangelical Christian values, VICE News previously reported. As a result, contentious cultural and political issues, like drag queen story hours and “critical race theory” are perceived as Satanic. Indeed, the Devil came up in the leaked emails.

See also.

“For a medieval historian, they’re really obvious red flags,” she says, and all the experts interviewed expressed similar unease and anxiety. “If you told me that it was some random proud boy, I wouldn’t be surprised for a second. But given his position it is pretty shocking,” Elley says. Lodder echoes this exact feeling: “It’s both absurd and terrifying; terrifying that … someone with such prominent and worrying tattoos on their body is getting a Cabinet position in the U.S., but also absurd, because it’s all very cosplay.” 

When it comes down to it, there are some undeniable features of Hegseth’s collection of tattoos. “It’s all very specifically violent,” summarizes Jannega. “There is no way of reading this that isn’t about violence, when you have guns and swords all over you. He’s telling you this. He cannot play the misunderstood Christian — he’s violent.” What a medievalist finds particularly troubling in the real history of the Crusades is what happened before Crusaders got to the Holy Land. “One thing that happened was horrific violence here in Europe,” Janega continues. “There were so many knights so keyed up — why would they bother waiting for the Holy Land when there were non-Christians in their backyard?” Lecaque, too, is anticipating increasing oppression at home — already seen in Hegseth’s book “American Crusade,” which, in its own words, “lays out the strategy we must employ in order to defeat America’s internal enemies,” as well as more violence abroad, especially in the Middle East. 

While the editor of this hallowed section and I do not always agree, he has conceded that it’s almost Christmas – which is all the excuse I need for a quiz. So let’s play What Did Nigel Say? Read these broadsides from Westminster’s biggest names, and guess: which are from Nigel Farage?

1) Rishi Sunak was “the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration”.

2) Mass immigration “happened by design, not accident”.

3) British government is “broken”.

4) The UK is a “one-nation experiment in open borders”.

5) The British state is wallowing in “the tepid bath of managed decline”.

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Through his speeches, how he frames debates, and most of all in his shrugging acceptance of how limited and slow his political powers are, time and again the Labour leader makes Farage’s case for him.

Want an example? Go back to the five phrases at the top. A collection of nasties, I’m sure you agree. How many came from Nigel Farage?

None. Nor are they the work of Kemi Badenoch, Liz Truss or any other horror you care to think of. Each was said by Keir Starmer, most within the past few days. Britain’s progressive-in-chief claims that politicians and civil servants have deliberately allowed immigration to run rampant, and that the country has “open borders” to the rest of the world. He did this in a speech at the end of last month, which made not one positive reference to immigrants or migration. During the election campaign, he accused Britain’s first Asian prime minister of being “the most liberal” on immigration, sounding a dog whistle that could be heard by any follower of Farage. As far as I can see, hardly any commentator has picked him up for using such rhetoric – but to talk about migrants as only a burden to this country, here on a scam, is the kind of language that people like me are used to catching after last orders on streets that suddenly don’t feel so safe. To hear them from our prime minister should shame him and his party.