Authoritarianism / Fascism

A commentator here drew my attention last night to a new policy paper from the Restore Britain group that has been launched by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who now sits as an independent MP for Great Yarmouth in the House of Commons, and who, this weekend, launched his own political party.

That party is called Restore Britain, and sits further to the right than any other likely to attract media attention in the UK at present.

Entitled Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, this paper claims that the UK could remove every undocumented migrant now living in the country within a few years through sweeping legal change, administrative expansion, and a deliberately hostile environment designed to force voluntary departures. 

[…]

In short, it would be one of the largest state economic programmes in modern British history, put together with the deliberate intention of pursuing hate whilst imposing threats, fear, intimidation, incarceration and violent relocation on many hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions of people.

The supposed numbers involved are staggering. The suggestion is that up to 2 million people might be forced from the UK within three years. About 75% half of those would supposedly leave voluntarily due to the hostile environment the policy would create. That environment would undoubtedly target all migrants, regardless of their legal status. It would be totally foolish to think otherwise. The remainder, the report suggests, would be forcibly removed. Official estimates do not suggest that anything like that number of people are illegally resident in the UK.

[…]

We are often told that the state is powerless. That includes the claim that it is powerless to house people, powerless to fund social security, and powerless to invest in care.

This paper implies something quite differently. The implication is that the state is immensely powerful. The suggestion is that it is capable of tracking, detaining, transporting, and expelling millions. The contradiction is obvious, but it exposes something deeper.

The choice revealed is whether the state wants to do things that are good, to which the answer from the current political establishment is that, apparently, and for reasons that are not clear, it does not, or something straightforwardly evil, which is what this paper proposes, of which it is apparently thought to be capable.

The question is not, then, about whether the state has power. The question is about how that power is used, and to what ends.

There's video of Roberts saying all this, if anybody needs an emetic:

"But where there continues to be disagreement is on what you do with adults. At Heritage, we believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody because of what you saw in Rhode Island yesterday," said Roberts, referencing a domestic violence shooting at a Rhode Island ice rink the day before. "There does seem to be a mounting body of evidence that suggests a correlation between that surgery at any age, mental health issues, and increasingly, although we're running the numbers on this at Heritage, acts of violence. We have to come to grips with that as a society, in a way that transcends left versus right, because this really is about the human condition." "How do you address this, though?" replied host Patrick Bet-David. "You outlaw it," Roberts responded.

Then, when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

[…]

One thing is clear: gender-affirming care bans have never been about science, despite attempts by far-right organizations to launder their lobbying efforts through pseudoscientific hate groups and overseas "reviews." Rather, it’s always been about hate. That much is made clear by the openly-stated agenda of a billionaire-funded political machine that has always been working towards one goal: the elimination of transgender people from public life. The only thing that has changed is that they are now saying it out loud.

Remember when Roberts voiced support for self-avowed Nazi Nick Fuentes and the respectable mainstream media cried with one voice "He's gone too far! This is the beginning of the end of the MAGA coalition!"?

Nope. They're only getting louder and more brazen.

As Oxfam said in a previous report, every billionaire is a policy failure.

Billionaire fortunes have grown at a rate three times faster than the average annual rate in the previous five years since the election of Donald Trump in November 2024.1 Whilst US billionaires have seen the sharpest growth in their fortunes, billionaires in the rest of the world have also seen double digit increases. Actions of the of the Trump presidency, including the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation, have benefited the richest around the world.

[…]

This phenomenon of the richest influencing and controlling politics is not new; it is familiar in countries in every part of the world. But events in the US in 2025 perhaps made this viscerally clear: in country after country, the super-rich have not only accumulated more wealth than could ever be spent, but have also used this wealth to secure the political power to shape the rules that define our economies and govern nations. At the same time, all over the world we are seeing an erosion and rolling back of the civil and political rights of the many; the suppression of protests; and the silencing of dissent. A century ago, the US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, ‘We must make our choice. Either we can have extreme wealth in the hands of the few, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both.’

This report is about that choice. How governments worldwide are making the wrong choice; choosing to defend wealth not freedom. Choosing the rule of the rich. Choosing to repress their people’s anger at how life is becoming unaffordable and unbearable, rather than redistributing wealth from the richest to the rest. It shows how the economically rich are becoming politically rich the world over, able to shape and influence politics, societies and economies. In sharp contrast, those economically with the least wealth are becoming politically poor, their voices silenced in the face of growing authoritarianism and the suppression of hard-won rights and freedoms.

In my defence, everybody needs a hobby.

On December 18th, during a Health and Human Services press conference that saw RFK Jr. announce new federal rules that, if implemented, will almost entirely ban gender-affirming care for minors nationwide, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill said the following:

“Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. [pauses for applause from other Trump officials] Children are innocent and they need our protection. [pauses for more applause] It takes organized efforts to deny these fundamental truths. Sadly, we’ve seen such efforts succeed from time to time.

The denial of fundamental truths can destroy nations from within. At the root of the evils we face, such as the blurring of the lines between sexes and radical social agendas, is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived. This ideology does not just deny biology; it declares war against it.”

[…]

And it wasn’t just O’Neill either. The next day, conservative political commentator Benny Johnson, in a speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, escalated even further while speaking about Charlie Kirk’s death:

“The person who pulled the trigger is part of the demonic transgender ideology that warps the minds of our young children, that poisons them, that is antithetical to creation itself. God called on us: I maketh you, man and woman. God doesn’t make mistakes. Transgenderism is a lie from the pit of hell and I’m sick of seeing transgender violence and murderers in my country!”

An interesting take, although I don't think it's quite right. I think opportunistic plunder motivates Trump, his TV personality flunkies, and his tech oligarch courtiers. They somehow scraped together enough capital to mount a hostile takeover of the US, and are now asset-stripping with a view to cashing out before it all crashes. But I don't think they believe themselves to be unfairly privileged. They sincerely believe in their own self-worth, and that they are getting only what they are due.

The rest of the MAGA coalition have other Utopias, but they are united in a shared pseudoscientific eugenicist/social Darwinist world view, and a rough consensus on who constitutes the common enemy and the immediate steps that must be taken to defeat them. However, I don't think MAGA is just a clumsy proto-fascism. The Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, Miller/Bannon driving force is very clear the mission of (as they see it) restoring the world to the timeless and eternal natural order of things.

From the bizarre cacophony of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, Opus Dei fetishists and Q-Anon hangers-on that compose MAGA red hats writ large, there emerges one unifying notion in Trump’s actions. I do not believe the power and money behind Trump’s 2nd ascendancy cares for any of these ideologies the left frets about. Nor do they want to rule through a fascistic party structure—it would be too much work. The real goal is to return to an era in the United States where property and capital were despotic kings back in the 1890s.

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The powers behind Trump’s second term worship at the altar of patriarchy, property rights, and perpetual wage-slavery. They want to remove anything promoting otherwise. Now, some may still call this fascism—the state is using its power to shape society to serve privilege instead of popular mandate. But I am beginning to believe there is no long-term goal to Trumpism except to steal as much as possible, restore Jim Crow and other oppressive controls, then tear government apart bureaucratically and legally so thoroughly that it will take a generation to recover.

Too often, mainstream journalists treated Project 2025 as a claim to be adjudicated rather than a document to be analyzed. They asked whether it was “Trump’s plan” instead of examining how likely its proposals were to be implemented by a Trump administration staffed with its authors.

CNN published a “fact check” pushing back on claims from Harris’ campaign, stating in September 2024 that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative,” even while acknowledging Trump’s extensive ties to it. USA Today went further, rating a statement that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan” as “false” on the grounds that the project belonged to the Heritage Foundation, not Trump. After Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 during their only debate, the newspaper published yet another piece insisting, “That’s still not right.” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler emphasized in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document,” as if the absence of a campaign logo somehow negated the document’s authorship, intent or utility. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Norah O’Donnell cut Harris off during an interview to remind viewers that Trump had “disavowed Project 2025.”

Now, over a year later, the administration’s systematic assault on the press reads like a direct transcription of Project 2025’s media section.

A new Justice Department memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi instructs the FBI to create a “cash reward system” to incentivize providing information against domestic terrorists. However, it also makes it clear that the targets of such domestic terrorist investigations will be “Antifa-aligned extremists,” including those promoting “radical gender ideology.”

“The FBI shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations,” the memo reads. The memo, dated December 5, was leaked.

Bondi’s memo cites multiple laws that might be used to target domestic terrorism, but also lays out a clear vision for the priorities of the FBI in targeting suspected terrorists. Primary examples given are not the mass shootings and white supremacist actions that have plagued the nation; rather, the document names the “doxing of law enforcement” or the “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement.”

While it raises the specter of extreme viewpoints, they are not the ones that previous studies have linked most domestic terrorism to. Bondi’s memo suggests that the perpetrators are “certain Antifa-aligned extremists” and that their “animating principle is adherence to the types of extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.”

This:

Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised. In some cases, Trump’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism.

The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.

The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.

Federal immigration officers have started using Renee Good’s death to threaten more U.S. citizens.

A video posted to Reddit showed a screaming ICE agent repeatedly threatening to kill a man who was sitting in his car, asking how he didn’t “learn from what just happened.”

In the two-minute clip, a masked agent wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves hat approached the vehicle already furious, while the driver rolled down his window. “Stop fucking following us, you are impeding operations, this is the United States federal government,” the officer shouted.

“I live over here, I got to get to my house,” the driver replied calmly.

“This is your warning, alright? Go home to your kids, go home to your kids. This is your last warning. I won’t arrest you,” the officer threatened, before stomping away. 

[…]

“You’re not gonna like the outcome of this, sir. I guarantee you that,” the first officer said, circling back. “I guarantee you’re not gonna like the outcome. Go home to your children. It’s Sunday. It is Sunday. You did not learn from what just happened?”

“Learn what?” the driver asked, but the officer did not elaborate, and the group of federal agents appeared to leave without arresting anyone.

It seems clear, however, that the agent was referring to Renee Good, the U.S. citizen who was shot multiple times by an ICE agent last week after federal officers surrounded her vehicle.

 

Well said, this fellow:

Supporters of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and elements of the media have steadfastly defended the indefensible – the atrocities against Palestinians – and this campaign has deliberately created a serious confusion in our national discussion about what antisemitism is.

Antisemitism is not criticism of Israel or Zionism, nor is it a timeless or mystical hatred. It is not something caused by migration. It’s a political and historical form of racism that takes different shapes in different contexts. Right now, it is real, escalating and sometimes lethal – but it is being tackled in exactly the wrong way.

We have heard calls not only to investigate how a massacre occurred, but to place universities, protest movements, migrants, cultural institutions and human rights bodies under suspicion. As though they are responsible for bloodshed.
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I want antisemitism confronted. I want it named and addressed with urgency. But I do not want it treated as a political tool, a justification for silencing dissent or expanding state power in ways that will ultimately harm us all.