Authoritarianism / Fascism

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.

[…]

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.

A transaction is a two-way process, an exchange where a party agrees to do a thing in return for another party agreeing to do a thing.

To use old-style language, a transaction is a bargain, an exchange of promises.

And for the business people concerned in a commercial transaction, that contract has sanctity. So if a party does not comply or even breaches the contract there are remedies which are intended to place the injured party in the position they would have been had the agreement been properly performed. Often these are “money” remedies, but sometimes they can be injunctions or other court orders.

The court will enforce what the parties had agreed, for the agreement is the thing.

But for Trump, the agreement is not the thing.

An agreement is there to be opportunistically repudiated, and not to be performed.

An agreement offers an opportunity to gain leverage, for a new negotiation. for a new exertion of power.

On Thursday evening, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that the FBI is developing tools to identify transgender suspects and classify them as “nihilistic violent extremists.” Within hours, the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation—the same outfit driving Project 2025’s blueprint now being implemented inside the federal government—released a four-page memo urging the bureau to go even further. Its proposal: formally designate all transgender activism as “Trans Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” a new category of domestic terror threat. It’s important to note that the Heritage Foundation is not itself the federal government, and to our knowledge, its proposals are not yet in place. But the group’s influence is vast, especially in the wake of a Trump administration openly committed to implementing Project 2025. That makes its latest push far more than just a think-tank memo—it’s a roadmap for policy. Here’s what you need to know about the proposal.

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We’ve seen this playbook before. The U.S. government has a long record of turning surveillance tools against civil rights movements. COINTELPRO, the infamous FBI program from 1956 to 1971, targeted Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and countless others in an effort to disrupt the civil rights movement. The same tactics were deployed against Vietnam War protestors and the gay rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s. After 9/11, Muslim communities bore the brunt of an expanded national security state, subjected to dragnet monitoring and infiltration. Now, under this proposal, those same techniques could be repurposed against transgender rights leaders and organizations—casting constitutionally protected advocacy as extremism to be neutralized.

Um… You've heard of the Nazis, haven't you?

During the final day of the hearing on Tuesday, the court heard from a member of the public who observed the rally on December 3, 2023.

Mark Doery was a witness presented by the defence.

"It just looked like a bunch of boys in a group, going for a walk," Mr Doery told the court.

"Nothing stood out as offensive to me, but that's just me."

[…]

"The prosecution has not proved the behaviour of the accused was offensive," Mr Sewell said.

Ultimately, Magistrate Mike Wardell agreed and said he had not been convinced of Victoria Police's case that Mr Sewell's behaviour during the rally was "deeply or seriously insulting".

"Behaviour deemed unacceptably offensive by some, may not trouble others at all," Magistrate Wardell said.

"The test … is whether the impugned behaviour is so deeply and seriously insulting … as to warrant the interference in the criminal law.

"Society is evolving in attitudes all the time … Fringe groups are arising all the time."

Most people detained by ICE are being housed in sprawling complexes in rural areas, where the land is cheap and the protests are few. Akiv Dawson, a criminologist at Georgia Southern University, has been conducting research at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, which can hold up to 2,000 people at a time. She said that since Trump took office, courtrooms have been packed with immigrants whose experiences would, according to polling, trouble the average American—people who have lived in the U.S. for decades, have American-born children, and have never been convicted of a serious crime. She told me about a lawful permanent resident of 50 years whose child is a U.S. citizen and whose deceased wife was as well. The man explained in court that ICE agents had mistaken him for someone else when they arrested him. But he admitted in court to having a single criminal conviction—simple marijuana possession from 30 years ago—so the judge decided to let the deportation case against him proceed. The man told the judge that his belongings would soon be thrown into the street if he wasn’t released; he needed to go back to work and pay rent. “He began to panic,” Dawson told me. “He said, ‘My people don’t even know that I’m here. They came and took me from my bed.’” Dawson said the man asked the judge why this was happening after he had spent so many decades in the United States. She replied, “Sir, this is happening across the country.”

Dawson also told me about a young mother from Ecuador who had followed the legal process for requesting asylum and pleaded to be released on bail so that she could be reunited with her 2-year-old son, whom she had left with a neighbor. “She begged,” Dawson said, and recalled the woman saying, “Please, give me an opportunity so that I can do the process the right way.” The woman said she wouldn’t be able to continue with her asylum case if she was going to have to do it from inside a detention center. “I have a child. I can’t be here too long without him,” she said. With that, the judge said the woman had waived her right to relief, and continued processing her for removal from the country.

“Are you going to deport me with my son?” the woman asked. “I don’t have anyone to keep him here.”

“You would need to talk to your deportation officer,” the judge replied, according to Dawson. “I’m only handling your case.”