Look, it's not lost on me that a lot of people don't want to hear what I'm saying in this infographic. Some of you will read the words "liberal establishment" and think I mean you, instead of the politicians you vote for, the for-profit media that (selectively) informs your opinions, and the rich people who own both of those groups. Some of you won't be ready to hear it because you're still operating under polite fictions that conceal what America really is, who it really works for, and how that work is actually accomplished. Finally, even some of you who acknowledge what I'm telling you, will insist that now is not the time for this discussion, and our entire focus must be on stopping Trump and the fascist America First movement so things can "go back to normal."

Frankly, I'm not really sure I can help the first two groups I mentioned at all, or at least in the short term. You folks clearly need to get yourselves a library card and start reading, with a particular focus on American history, class hierarchies in our society, and how capitalism actually functions. It's probably going to shock the shit out of you to learn that we are not a society of equals under the law and America doesn't really work the way your middle school civics class told you it did; I do not envy you the mental vertigo that's gonna cause, but I will say that it's better to understand how the world you live in actually works and how power is exercised, even if it's horrifying, than to keep pretending things are drastically better and more egalitarian than they actually are. Free market fundamentalism is not a humane ideology, capitalist extraction is facilitated by the threat and application of violence, and a "democracy" where rich people own everything, control our politicians, and dictate the laws we live under while existing far above them, is not actually "democratic" at all. Those are just the facts, and when you get done yelling at me because you don't want to believe that, I'll still be here waiting for you with open arms and a burning desire to make the better world you thought we lived in, a reality.

For those of you in the "now is not the time" camp however, I'd just like to ask you a simple question. Given that folks just like you and I have been having this same discussion since the Nixon administration, and "let's go back to normal" has won out every time in the larger public consciousness, how would you say that strategy is working out for us so far? As Americans, we went back to normal after Nixon, and ended up with Reagan, before we went back to normal and got the Bush-Cheney administration for our troubles, which in turn lead to another period of "going back to normal" before that normal handed a turnkey dictatorship to Trump, twice. All the while, the extraction never stopped, the imperialism never stopped, the police state only grew larger, corporate power and wealth inequality vastly increased, organized labor was decimated, our civil rights were eroded, and oligarchic power crept in to seize control of nearly every aspect of our lives anyone could possibly turn a profit from. You can't even really argue that going back to a liberal capitalist "normal" improved social equality, made our society more democratic, or halted the rise of fascism because we just watched a bunch of billionaires capitalize on the racist, patriarchal, and fundamentalist attitudes of seventy-five or so million of the worst people in America to install a bloviating reality TV show nazi as the de facto King of America. Are you seriously gonna tell me that a liberal capitalist "normal" that has resulted in the planet being on fire while billions of lives hang in the balance, politically empowered fascists seizing control of "democracies" all across the Pig Empire, and some k-head 4chan nazi controlling the political discourse of like half the planet, is working out for labor class people?

Whether you like it or not, the bipartisan fascist police state that protects oligarchs and projects corporate power, is the same fascist police state Trump is using to protect and install a fascist political order. The same racism, marginalization, and callous indifference to human life required to make capitalist extraction possible, is fueling popular support behind the rise of de facto fascist dictatorships in the Pig Empire. The same national security state created to fight an endless "war on terror" is now being used to hunt down and silence opposition to Trump's fascist agenda. The chickens have come home to roost, and an unholy union of capitalism, imperialism, and hierarchal class warfare that is all completely "normal" in our society, has given birth to the very same fascist monster that threatens to destroy everything labor class people care about today. Every time we listen to people who still want "a little" fascism and "go back to normal," the nazis lick their wounds for a while and then come back stronger.

Aren't you tired of "normal" yet?

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.

Obviously I originally wrote this before the crisis that is a second Trump presidency came to pass, but I think it's still pretty relevant in a political-media environment where influential, otherwise analytical people, keep saying "this is not us" and asking how it's possible for Trump to transform America into an overt fascist dictatorship, seemingly overnight. The reality is that America has literally *always* been a covert fascist dictatorship where the illusion of democratic rights have been subject to the whims of a ruling class who're able to override, curtail, or otherwise eliminate those democratic rights (particularly for certain types of people) at the first sign of trouble for capitalism and their larger financial interests - as demonstrated by the ease with which Trump has been able to install an overt fascist dictatorship in the brief time since he's taken office. Furthermore, anyone familiar with how American "democracy" works has always known this is reality, but have relied on standards, norms, and decorum to prosecute an argument that it would never happen. All of which isn't to say that things haven't changed under Trump, only that what Trump is doing has always been the "break glass in case of emergency" option for the ruling class in a country that has always been dominated by oligarchic power no matter what flowery words about "freedom" and "equality" the founding slaveholders used to describe it.

The simple truth is that America is not really a "country" in the way that our friends in Europe have "countries." Rather the United States even as we know it today, is the result of thirteen public-private partnerships with the British Crown, primarily in the business of genocidal land theft and slavery, reorganizing as a "state" for the purposes of escaping British regulation on those businesses. It was always foundationally capitalist, undeniably white supremacist, and fundamentally oligarchic in nature, and the rich people who really own and control this country have always meant it to be possible for a figure like Trump (backed by Oligarchs like Musk) to save them from you, the extracted class, by easily dismantling the trappings of democracy - then, as now, the ruling class would prefer fascism to sharing with the plebs, on all fronts, and particularly in the exercise of political power.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that we as a people have to *allow* the installation of an overt fascist order because a bunch of cracker oligarch slavers wanted to keep a pull-string dictatorship in their back pockets in case the help got any ideas about deposing them. We don't have to take this, and we can absolutely overthrow the entire damn fascist fuck barrel order by organizing to end it. But if you're waiting for the system itself to react to stop the Pork Reich because "this is not us" I'm sorry to say you've fundamentally misunderstood what America is and who it really exists to benefit. As Stafford Beer once noted, the purpose of a system is what it does, and despite what propagandists and fools have lead you to believe, the American system of governance is currently functioning precisely as designed, and for precisely the people it was created to benefit in the first place - even under Trump.

I might have to post about this again if and when Trump actually signs the order, but I wanted to highlight this Guardian post because White House staff secretary Will Scharf really goes out of his way to give away the whole fascist game of Calvinball going on here.

This is fascist ideological policing 101 and yet another example of the crass word games these nazis are using to create a fascist dictatorship in America. Scharf openly admits that it's NOT just criminal activity the regime intends to target, but literally "what *we* would consider to be improper activities" - and by we, he means the fascist Trump administration of course. Furthermore Scharf goes on the clarify the government intends to prevent student loan forgiveness for federal employees that "support" illegal immigration and foreign terrorist organizations, and as we just discussed yesterday "support" is a nebulous term that means whatever the fascists want it to mean, and by pre-emptively declaring anyone who opposes Israel's genocide in Gaza to be "pro-Hamas" the regime has the ability to accuse anyone protesting a genocide funded, armed, and supported by the American empire, of "supporting foreign terrorist organizations." Have you posted criticism of Israeli crimes against humanity in Gaza online? Have you publicly objected to cruel ICE raids targeting hard-working migrants and their children? Then these fascist assholes literally mean people like you when they're discussing who this will target.

A lot of people are going to ignore this because "it's just student loan forgiveness for federal employees" and American attitudes towards students and loan forgiveness have been poisoned by a mainstream discourse that has taught them to hate college students and assume anyone getting loan forgiveness is a parasite who is getting away with something *they* don't have access to. The fact is however that the Trump regime is asserting the government's right to marginalize anyone who doesn't agree with their odious ideological positions, and that opposing those positions makes you ineligible for rights and support services that are by design, legally open to everyone who qualifies. Historically speaking, this is always how fascist regimes and ideological dictatorships start. They don't build Dachau on day one, they start by restricting access to government services and denying the benefits of a larger democratic society to targeted marginalized groups "regular" people don't like very much for typically hateful reasons. Once they've got you to agree that the government has the right to punish and revoke the rights and privileges of *some* people for ideological reasons, you've now handed them a skeleton key and a proof of concept model for doing it to literally anyone the fascist regime says is "bad" or even just "wrong."

#Fascism #Trump #StudentLoans #NaziGermany #IdeologicalPolicing #PoliceState #USPol #WillScharf

A) America was clearly a mistake.

B) Even after decades of study, the crass greed and dipshittery of fascists continues to astound me.

C) None of this is legal.

Source article:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-bible-one-few-meet-152511088.html

#Fascism #Fundies #Grift #Trump