Part 2
Yet another reminder that what is going on in Washington is not business as usual. The GOP, as the hand-puppet of the obscenely wealthy, is hellbent on destroying democracy and instituting autocracy and fascism. They are in bed with Mike Flynn and Putin and are using deluded Christian nationalists, and a partisan-captured Supreme Court to destroy our country and democracy. The election deniers/insurrectionists/fascists are now in control of the house of representatives. They aren't going to stop destroying our democracy until we stop them!!

"The point of everything Republicans do is to undermine democracy, with a huge helping of self-interest on top."

American Fascism, Billionaires, And You - by Sarah Jones https://politicususa.substack.com/p/american-fascism-billionaires-and

#GOPFacism
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#GOPLies
#IlliberalIsFascism

"Stanley also explained the role of undermining truth in fascism: “The heart of fascist politics is the destruction of truth. Fascist politics is based on a friend/enemy distinction where your enemy's not a legitimate opponent. Your enemy is hiding terrible crimes, and you can't treat them as any kind of normal opponent. And this is the purpose of conspiracy theories like QAnon.”

All of this works in concert with the Republican efforts to undermine the working classes first with Trump’s tax cuts that largely were meant to benefit the wealthy and corporations, and now that Republicans lead the House, they want to use the debt ceiling to steal Social Security from working people and they’re also floating a 30% sales tax on people.

As I discussed yesterday in our podcast about the inspiring strikes in France and Britain, working people (which is all of us who are not the 1%) need to be united in order to fight encroaching fascism, and unions are one good antidote to oligarchical fascism, which is behind the propaganda funding for a lot of the global right-wing push for fascism.

“The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump,” Jason Stanley wrote in The Guardian in December of 2021, noting how the United States’ racism makes it fertile ground for fascists.

The conservative and racist Breitbart empire is funded by billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer and Daily Wire, for example, received several million dollars in funding from the billionaire fracking and petroleum interests. The Daily Wire is now a $100 million dollar a year enterprise, according to them.

All of this division, the anti-vax lies, the election lies — it’s all being funded by billionaires.

This is what The People are up against, all around the globe. Here in the United States, no one is funding media for The People. The only people doing it are people who have put the interests of their country and her citizens above their own self-interests because it does not pay, and actually, under Trump, it started to cost money due to a variety of forces, and many outlets went under.

The already embattled and barely made-it Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy also has a horrific track record on democracy:

Signed Texas amicus brief

Objected to certification of electoral college votes in one or more states

Made false and/or irresponsible public statements against democratic system

Voted against impeachment or conviction of Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection

Voted against creating an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack

Voted against holding Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress

The power grab is the point. All of the chaos we are witnessing, including Kevin McCarthy’s willing embrace of Representative George Santos, a man with many names and aliases and stories and cons, it all tells the same story.

If we look at the pieces, it is infuriating and frustrating. But if we look at the whole, it becomes the clearest call to unite with other democracy-minded people in order to battle fascism."

Yet another reminder that what is going on in Washington is not business as usual. The GOP, as the hand-puppet of the obscenely wealthy, is hellbent on destroying democracy and instituting autocracy and fascism. They are in bed with Mike Flynn and Putin and are using deluded Christian nationalists, and a partisan-captured Supreme Court to destroy our country and democracy. The election deniers/insurrectionists/fascists are now in control of the house of representatives. They aren't going to stop destroying our democracy until we stop them!!

"The point of everything Republicans do is to undermine democracy, with a huge helping of self-interest on top."

American Fascism, Billionaires, And You - by Sarah Jones https://politicususa.substack.com/p/american-fascism-billionaires-and

#GOPFacism
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#TheRichHateDemocracy
#GOPLies
#IlliberalIsFascism

"America is already in the legal phase of pre-fascism. This is not meant to be alarmist, but rather to clarify that there is actually a point to what Republicans are doing.

If people are waiting for the arrival of Russian-style fascism here in the United States, they are not looking for the right symptoms and signs. It’s Hungary style “soft-fascism” that we must be looking for. And that involves using the legal system to seize power from opponents.

Sure, Republicans are using some of Putin’s tricks, like using Christianity and “traditional morals,” as a cultural weapon, but so does Hungary.

What does legal fascism look like? One big sign is what we tepidly call “election denialism,” also known as eroding trust in small d democracy. It’s not just Trump who does this, and while the 2022 midterms offered a beating to Republicans’ slate of election deniers, some of whom proudly announced their plan to steal the next election for their side, the Republican-led House of Representatives is teeming with election deniers.

It is even led by an election denier. “President Trump won this election. Everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet, do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes, we need to unite together,” Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News when it was clear Trump was losing on November 5th, 2020.

It’s worth noting that the lower third on Fox News’ screen is also wrong, because of course it wasn’t an election failure for Democrats and Democrats did not “revolt” against Pelosi. This, too, is an effort to weaken democracy.

Democracy is not possible without shared facts. Fox News and other well-funded Republican and conservative media outlets (how can the Daily Wire afford to offer a conservative commenter $50 million when the entire digital publishing world is on its knees?) work daily to separate their listeners from facts, to repeat conspiracies and outright lies, to make basic things like getting vaccinated into a culture war.

In an interview in 2020 with NPR, Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, explained fascism in a way that sounds exactly like Trump Republicanism: “So, fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by minorities, liberals and immigrants. He represents the cities as corrupt, filled with foreigners and disease, and the heartland as the true nation that he represents. And then he takes over a political party, transforms them into a cult of the leader and says only he can deal with the problem.”

“So we're - we've seen his election campaign focus on Black Lives Matter, on a minority social justice movement. We've seen him promise patriotic education in a second term - all sorts of tactics that we ideologically associate with far-right ultranationalism, i.e., fascism.”

We are already there in terms of the Trump cult. We kicked them out of the White House, but now they now lead the U.S. House of Representatives."