I'm posting this infographic as an excuse to (briefly) talk to people who, despite all the evidence, are having a hard time believing that a bunch of rich politicians and billionaire donors really are just hateful fascists willing to spend infinite monies on policing, persecuting, and even eliminating people they don't like for wholly arbitrary (white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ animus, ableism, misogyny, etc), irrational, or conspiratorial reasons.

First of all, let me assure you that they really are just a bunch of fundamentalists, hatemongers, and fascists. This isn't some sort of secret, the larger establishment right in America and the fascist Trump political machine have been caught saying the quiet parts out loud repeatedly when they think nobody is listening or has the courage to hold them to account; this is documented heavily in even mainstream media sources and then instantly memory-holed by the Very Serious PeopleTM in American public discourse. If you're struggling to comprehend how hate could be such a powerful motivating factor even for a class of people with enough "fuck you" money to last for generations, it's probably because you're not a hateful little nazi, and that's objectively a good thing.

Setting that aside however, I need you to understand that operating a militarized fascist police state is a highly-lucrative endeavor - for *some* people. Naturally, I don't mean its profitable for you, or the larger society you live in; in fact you'll effectively be billed for all this fascist repression in the form of taxes. But someone gets paid to install and operate the mass surveillance panopticon. Someone gets paid to violently disrupt legally-protected protests. Someone gets paid to arm and train the murderpigs. Someone gets paid to build the prisons and guard the incarcerated. Hell a bunch of besuited minions even get paid to catalogue all of this and write glowing reports about what an effective expenditure it is. There's so much money flowing through the U.S. carceral state that the larger industry that exists to serve it is a whole plank in the modern capitalist economy. Furthermore, the people getting rich off a fascist police state have more than enough money and power to bribe politicians to expand that fascist police state; which is why doing so has largely been a bipartisan position in American politics for decades and decades now. Even though he's using it in horrifying ways, it's important to remember that Trump did not build the already massive fascist police state he inherited when he became president; it was built by generations of American politicians before him, both Republican and Democrat; many of whom were trying to secure donor money, or make a quick buck regardless of who that ultimately harmed.

All of which brings us to Trump and the rapid expansion of the carceral complex necessary to enact his fascist agenda. When Downmarket Mussolini moves to conduct the mass deportation of millions of people, that creates an *enormous* pot of money that can be looted by his rich donors in various ways. Are these folks motivated by white supremacy? Yes, definitely, but even if they weren't we're talking about billions, if not trillions of dollars worth of government contracts at stake here - a whole lot of people are going to get very rich off Trump's ethno-nationalist policies, regardless of what they believe in their hearts. To varying degrees, the same holds true of surveilling, suppressing, and hunting down anti-genocide protestors, conducting a pogrom against trans people as part of a made up "war on gender ideology," spying on every woman in America to make sure she's not trying to get an abortion, and so forth. Maybe I won't ever be able to convince you that the establishment fascists, doing fascism, have hate in their hearts, but surely you're already familiar with some of the awful, inhumane, and tyrannical shit rich people and the politicians they own are already willing to do for fuckpiles of money in our society, right? As far as the donors behind Trump are concerned, a rapid expansion in the number of state "enemies" and targets for repression, along with the corresponding expansion of the apparatus necessary to conduct that repression, is potentially one of the most profitable business opportunities in American history.

Quite frankly, we *could* take this discussion a lot further; for example, I could point out that capitalism itself is dependent on the marginalization, otherization, and dehumanization of minority or out groups in our society to create whole classes of people it's legally acceptable to ruthlessly exploit. For now however, just keep in mind that there's potentially trillions of dollars available for folks who want to help transform Trump's fascist vision for America into reality, and for that reason (among many others), it doesn't actually matter what's in their hearts.