American Fascism

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Resist! July 23, 2018

Hard Truth: You Can’t Vote Out Fascism. You Have to Drive It From Power!

By Perry Hoberman Counterpunch (7/20/18) I’ve been noticing a increasing phenomena on MSNBC and other mainstream media outlets: as the Trump/Pence regime resorts to ever more outrageous behavior, the various pundits — when asked to explain this or that monstrous action or statement — just shake their heads and admit that they’re simply baffled as to why anyone would do something so irrational, so clueless, so counterproductive, so cruel. There’s an unspoken implication that the regime can’t possibly understand what they’re actually doing — which in turn suggests that this can’t go on forever, that the whole thing will implode due to their painfully evident incompetence and/or…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE July 20, 2018

What America Has Become: Migrant Children Detail Horrific Experiences Done In Our Name In Border Patrol Stations & Concentration Camps

“The way I have been treated makes me feel like I don’t matter, like I am trash.” [Editor’s Note: Nothing better exemplifies the degradation of this nation than the institutionalized, for-profit terrorizing and abuse of immigrant families and — most especially — their kidnapped children. As we can expect, many of the most brutal and base among us are drawn to manning the icy holding cells and hidden interrogation rooms of the appropriately named ICE. But make no mistake; as long as this casual corporate brutality continues we are all — every single taxpayer and voter — collectively responsible…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know July 20, 2018

Chris Hedges: Demagogues Always Infect The Governed With Their Own Psychosis

“Lies pour out of the White House like flocks of pigeons.” “Tens of millions Americans, especially women, undocumented workers, Muslims and African Americans suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator. All this is by design. Demagogues always infect the governed with their own psychosis. Lies pour out of the White House like flocks of pigeons. … Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of a human mind than than reality itself. In which through sheer imagination…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know, Trumpenstan, Your Brain On Politics July 20, 2018

Beyond Logic & Reason: Historian Explains How Donald Trump And The Far Right Weaponized ‘Chaos Magic’ — Just Like The Occult

[Editor’s Note: This is an insightful explanation from a different perspective of what the Trump movement is all about and how it seems impervious to the blunders, blatant lies and immorality of it’s leader. Excellent read. — Mark L. Taylor] By Chauncey DeVega Salon (7/16/18) Almost two years after Donald Trump’s once-unthinkable election victory, social scientists and other researchers have reached some clear conclusions about how and why it happened. Racism, sexism, nativism and social-dominance behavior were key factors in Trump’s support among white voters. Christian nationalism, along with the fear that white people will soon lose demographic power…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Trumpenstan July 16, 2018

No Exaggeration: America Now Has Its First Fascist President

It already has! By Robert Zaller Portside (7/11/18) In 1935, the third year of Hitler’s Third Reich, Sinclair Lewis published a novel called “It Can’t Happen Here,” speculating on the possibility that fascism might come to America. This spring, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein wondered in an articletitled “Can It Happen Here?” whether a native fascism might now at last be in the offing. Note to Sinclair and Cass: it has happened here. In Donald J. Trump, America now has its first fascist president. I don’t say this loosely or pejoratively to describe a politician I don’t like. I say it with…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Police State America July 16, 2018

ICE Agents Claims Of ‘Just Following Orders’ May Not Shield Them From Personal Liability For Children’s Suffering, Legal Scholars Warn

[Editor’s Note: Falling back on the mindless and morally empty excuse of “just following orders” does not exonerate soldiers, police or prison guards from bearing personal moral or legal responsibility. This was one of the principles that came from the Nuremberg Trials of World War II Nazi war criminals. Be careful what orders you follow, officers. — Mark L. Taylor] By Julia Conley Common Dreams (7/11/18) A new report finds that individual Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents could be held personally liable for the suffering of families and children under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy—and warns that the…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Democrats, Resist!, Rethuglicans July 12, 2018

Want Justice In America? — The Old ‘Be Nice’ Routine Won’t Get Us There

By George Goehl OurFuture.org (7/9/18) We should be skeptical of the motivation and messengers behind calls for civility. We hear people say that what is happening to migrants in the United States right now is un-American. I wish that were true. Sadly, American history is full of periods where children of color were routinely taken from their parents. Resistance and organizing, on the other hand, are truly American. In fact, many of our nation’s best moments have been when we heeded the call to stand down hatred and racism. The Trump Administration has been off the rails since day one. But Donald…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism July 12, 2018

Govt. Officials Have Donated To White Nationalist 1st District Congressional Candidate Paul Nehlen

By Alex Kotch Sludge (7/3/18) Breitbart News may have rejected him. Twitter may have banned him from its services. But multiple public employees appear to have stuck with Paul Nehlen, an openly anti-Semitic white supremacist running on the Republican ticket in Wisconsin to replace House Speaker Paul Ryan. Sludge has found that one State Department employee, a Wisconsin county supervisor and two public university professors have all donated to Nehlen’s current campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records. None of these donations were returned. Laurence Berg, a pathologist and elected member of the LaCrosse County, Wisconsin Board of Supervisors, made…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know, Trumpenstan July 12, 2018

Dark Foreboding: Is the American Democratic Experiment Over?

By William Boardman Reader Supported News (9/10/18) Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the worldThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. – William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919 Apocalyptic thinking has been with us for a long time, and it sometimes ushers in actual apocalypses, albeit at human scale, without biblical finality. For a century now, the Yeats poem above has served as an increasingly common reference point for those who fear apocalyptic events approaching. Today such…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Trumpenstan July 9, 2018

Trump’s Growing Acts Of Brutality Are Conditioning Nation To Accept Greater Fascist Barbarism To Come

Babies in cages were no ‘mistake’ by Trump but simple test-marketing for barbarism. By Fintan O’Toole Irish Times (6/26/18) To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism. It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is….

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Democrats July 5, 2018

Democrats Still In Deep Denial About The True Nature Of What We Are Up Against

It would be wrong for the Democrats to seek reconciliation while the Republican Party organizes government to recognize only its ideology as legitimate. By Kaitlin Byrd The HuffPost (6/3/18) Democratic politicians have a seemingly endless well of good faith for their Republican colleagues. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and even Bernie Sanders all speak with the language of decency, full of assurances that Republicans will be heard, understood and engaged. They offer appeals to morality, norms and shared values as if saying it often enough will make it true. But there is no salvaging the Republican Party. Its leaders are beyond…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know July 5, 2018

Trump, Obama & The Darkly Tangled Bipartisan Roots Of American Fascism

By Tony McKenna Counterpunch (7/4/18) The latest Trump scandal hitting the news – the interment of children in cages, the forcible separation of screaming toddlers from their parents. It seemed to have touched a level of inhumanity which is breathtaking, even by the standards of the current US administration; an administration which already feels like the court of Caligula set to an episode of bad reality TV, with a soundtrack handily provided by the loony toons. Fortunately, the president has stepped back, has issued a decree which will reverse the vile and traumatising project of cleaving immigrant parents…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE July 2, 2018

In ‘Stunning Indictment’, ICE Officers Call For Own Agency To Be Dissolved Amid Growing Outrage Over Immigration Policy

***** “How To Talk To ICE? Give ’em The Cold Shoulder.” — Protest sign, La Crosse, WI (6/30/18) By Julia Conelly Common Dreams (6/29/18) As the demand to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spreads across the country—and with community members building protest encampments outside ICE facilities in several cities this week—some officers with the 15-year-old agency have now added their voices to the growing call to dissolve it. The agency’s targeting of undocumented immigrants has weakened its employees’ ability to carry out other work, argued 19 officers who signed the letter, which was obtained by the Texas Observer. The agents work in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism July 2, 2018

Michael Moore Asks If People Are Ready To Die To Protect Democracy From Trump: ‘Fascism is at the door step’

[Editor’s Note: I have one quibble with Moore’s assessment and that is, fascism is not “at the doorstep”, it is already in the living room setting fire to the house and kidnapping the children. We are far beyond politics as usual. — Mark L. Taylor] By Martin Cizmar the Raw Story (6/29/18) Bill Maher has long been warning that Donald Trump is instituting a slow-moving coup to undermine American democracy. He found a likeminded guest in Michael Moore, who appeared on HBO’s Real Time on Friday night. Moore laid out what he sees as the best way to fight Donald Trump—all…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Rethuglicans July 2, 2018

Art Jones: The Illinois Republican Party’s Well-Earned Nazi Mascot

“They didn’t put up a third-party candidate? That’s great! That’s fantastic!” By Natasha Korecki Politico (6/29/18) CHICAGO — Illinois Republicans botched four opportunities to stop an avowed Nazi from representing their party in a Chicago-area congressional district. Now they’re paying the price. Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier who will appear on the November ballot as the GOP candidate against Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski, has become campaign fodder for Democrats as they seek to defeat Gov. Bruce Rauner. And some Republicans even fear the taint from Jones‘ extremist views poses a threat to the party up and down the ticket. “First,…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, History They Don't Want You To Know, M. Taylor Columns, Police State America, Resist!, War State America June 28, 2018

Your Choice: Where Would You Be In This Picture?

Go along or resist. Stand up or lay down. Speak out or be silent. There will be no neutral. By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (6/31/18) The arrival of government detention — concentration — camps for an oppressed and dehumanized minority group means that politics in America is about to become far more personal and much, much more consequential. The kidnapping of children into for-profit concentration camps has added an especially grotesque dimension. The forcible separation of parents from their infants and children into concentrations camps have made it official: We are living in a fascist state now. With…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, History They Don't Want You To Know, M. Taylor Columns, Rethuglicans, Trumpenstan, War State America June 28, 2018

History Of Fascist Spain Government Child Abductions Will Become Model For Trump’s Kidnapping Program

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.” — Winston Churchill By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (6/28/18) As the brutal Trump child kidnapping program continues on with arrogance, cruelty and casual incompetence we are going to see many of the 2,300-plus children now incarcerated permanently stolen from their parents; they will never be reunited. There are already reports of parents deported back to Central America while their children remain in U.S. concentration camps. (And make no mistake, that is the proper term for these camps. And, no, it is not “separation”, it is kidnapping.) History provides insight on where this will go…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America, War State America June 28, 2018

‘Calculated Sadism’ — Detained Children Forced To Recite Pledge Of Allegiance ‘Out of Respect’ For Country That Tore Them Away From Parents

By Julia Conley Common Dreams (6/25/18) While tearing children away from parents under a policy designed to keep asylum seekers from entering U.S. society, the Trump administration is forcing those same children to pledge their allegiance to the country that is actively trying to expel them. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week stating that families would be detained together under his “zero tolerance” immigration policy, but thousands of children remain separated from their parents. The Washington Post on Monday detailed the conditions in which many of those children are living, in detention centers like Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas, describing “a converted…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, History They Don't Want You To Know June 28, 2018

‘On Contact’ — Chris Hedges & Ralph Nader Get Real On What’s Happened To Our Government

It’s been a well funded, brilliantly orchestrated 40-year long corporate coup d’etat. In this “On Contact” interview consumer advocate and political activist Ralph Nader and journalist Chris Hedges outline the problem and Nader lays out a path of resistance that would only take one percent of citizens to become involved. Before one can reform a system however, that system must be thoroughly understood and seen with unblinking clarity. You will find both in this fast moving discussion. Along the way Nader gives insight on what has gone amiss in the courts and American law schools and the true…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Police State America June 25, 2018

America’s New Normal: We Have Sprinted Across The Threshold To Fascism

By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (6/25/18) Even by Donald Trump’s bottom-scraping standards, the past week has been a head-spinning, heartbreaking gut punch to the nation. As Trump, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions II and White House resident Hitler Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels look-a-like Stephen Miller ramped up the federal child kidnapping and imprisonment scheme any doubts about what we are facing should have gone up like an out-of-control dumpster fire. In case you haven’t noticed, we have spun far, far beyond the run-of-the-mill Republican vs Democrat, conservative vs liberal, right vs left paradigm of usual American…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism June 25, 2018

America’s Newest Dystopian Horror: Warehousing Children In An Old Walmart

The irony is horrific on many levels By Emily Peck The HuffPost (6/22/18) When the news broke last week that migrant children from Central America are being housed in an old Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, it was just the latest indication that the U.S. is fast turning into some kind of dystopian hellscape. Walmart has long been a symbol of some of the most dehumanizing and ruthless inclinations of American capitalism. The multibillion-dollar retailer relies on a low-wage workforce to peddle cheap goods to many people who are just getting by. Walmart’s recently made an effort to both improve conditions for…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Rethuglicans June 25, 2018

Trumpenstein Isn’t THE Problem, He’s The Creation Of The Republican Far Right

By William Boardman Reader Supported News (6/24/18) The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages. – Paul Krugman, New York Times column, June 21, 2018 Economist Paul Krugman is a smart Princeton professor who won a Nobel Prize, and most of what he says in this column is heartfelt, decent, and humane. His argument is relatively simple: since there is no present immigration crisis,…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism June 25, 2018

A Brief Fascist History Of “I Don’t Care” Slogan On Melania Trump’s Coat

By Giovanni Tiso Overland (6/22/18) This article was sparked by the jacket that Melania Trump wore as she travelled to a detention camp for migrant children, but my intent isn’t to argue that she or her staff chose that jacket in order to send a coded message to the president’s far-right followers. It is, rather, to highlight some of the historical echoes of that phrase – ‘I don’t care’. The echoes of which someone ought to have been aware, especially in an administration that includes – to put it mildly – several far-right sympathisers. And also to show that the…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, M. Taylor Columns, Trumpenstan June 21, 2018

‘Womp, Womp’ — You Think Things Are Bad? Steel Yourself As Former Trump Aide Reveals All

As practised and professional a liar as he is, in that moment Corey Lewandowski was the most honest man in America. By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (6/21/18) Sometimes there is moment, a single glimpse, a small flash of reality that slices through mountains of reports and hours of media, and reveals more insight than weeks of punditry. It may be an unguarded flash in a politician’s eye, a shift in posture at a critical moment, a small gesture, a reflexive, unguarded retort, a certain tone of voice that suddenly embodies the core truth of a person or…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Police State America June 21, 2018

There Is No Excuse: The Immorality Of Authoritarian Order Followers

Authoritarian Fool Tool [Editor’s Note: In light of recent government child kidnappings in the southwest a Commoner Call reader forwarded this short video . I don’t agree with the speaker’s view on socialism (there is such a thing as democratic socialism) but I do find most of this comments on the immorality of the ‘just following orders’ defense to be insightful. Every ICE and Border Patrol officer needs to understand that their personal involvement in the child kidnappings makes them complicit in the crimes and mars them with guilt and shame. There was no honor in what they have done….

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Resist! June 18, 2018

‘Nice’ People Always Make The Best Nazis

“You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.” By Steadfast Slovak The Daily Kos (6/14/18) The best Nazis. I’ve been thinking a lot about Naomi Shulman’s quote, “Nice people made the best Nazis.” The people who just wanted to get along, who looked the other way and ignored politics, “[t]hey were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.” And I’ve realized, sadly, reluctantly, that I’ve filled my life with people who would be great Nazis. The people that I love would have been great Nazis. And in this time of Trump, in this ugly period of…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Media Hits & Misses June 18, 2018

Censorship: Editorial Cartoonist Critical Of Trump Fired From Pittsburgh Newspaper

Rob Rogers had been with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for 25 years. By Lydia O’Connor HuffPost (6/14/18) A veteran editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was fired Thursday after he and the newspaper’s management clashed over some sketches critical of President Donald Trump. Rob Rogers, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who had been with the Post-Gazette for 25 years, announced his own ouster on Twitter. Earlier this month, he’d revealed that he was working through “unresolved” issues with the paper’s leaders over certain cartoons that they’d declined to publish. A broader push for less negative Trump coverage in the paper has been linked to John…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Rethuglicans June 14, 2018

Rise Of The British Radical Racist Right Parallels What Is Happening In U.S.

By Owen Jones The Guardian (6/13/18) Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were a menace. So were the Nazi sympathies of many British aristocrats in the 1930s. Today’s ascendant far right poses its own unique dangers, using familiar tropes that have been fuelled and legitimised by the political and media elite – and there is all too little appreciation of where Britain could be heading. Brexit, for the Tory right, was a national revolution: not simply a recalibration of Britain’s relationship with the EU but a blunt instrument to roll back progressive social norms. Those deemed to be critics or opponents were now enemies of the people, saboteurs, traitors,…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism June 14, 2018

Why Fascism Is So Tempting — And How Your Data Could Power It

TED Talk (6/8/18) In a profound talk about technology and power, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari explains the important difference between fascism and nationalism — and what the consolidation of our data means for the future of democracy. Appearing as a hologram live from Tel Aviv, Harari warns that the greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient and capable of control. “The enemies of liberal democracy hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy,” Harari says….

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Trumpenstan, Your Brain On Politics June 11, 2018

Trump Mind Virus: America’s Normalization Of The Grotesque

By Gary Younge The Guardian (6/8/18) During the presidential election the Huffington Post’s US site carried the following editor’s note at the end of every story about the Republican nominee: “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims – 1.6 billion members of an entire religion – from entering the US.” Shortly before 6am on that long election night – in between Trump’s winning Iowa and being declared the victor in Pennsylvania – the Washington bureau chief announced that the note would…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Trumpenstan June 7, 2018

Above The Law: ‘Dear Leader’ Trump’s Authoritarian Movement Is Reaching An Inevitable Conclusion

“The imperial stage of this presidency has well and truly begun.” By Jack Holmes Esquire (6/4/18) While you were enjoying the second weekend of summer, the president and his allies were waging a sustained campaign to suggest the law does not apply to him. Things kicked off with the (probable) leak of a letter Trump’s legal team sent to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, published by The New York Times, in which we learned that Trump essentially has unlimited power and authority—you know, like a king. The letter suggested that: Trump cannot, by virtue of being president, obstruct justice. Trump can “terminate…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism June 7, 2018

Watch: Facility Staff Call Police As U.S. Senator Attempts To Examine Conditions Of Detention Center For Immigrant Children

“Children should never be ripped from their families and held in secretive detention centers.” [Editor’s Note: There is powerful symbolism in the fact that this nation has been reduced to imprisoning poor immigrant children fleeing violence in an old Walmart with blacked out windows. The image says it all of what America has become. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore) was quoted on MSNBC saying up to 1,000 children are locked up in the facility. And as the second story linked below shows, such brutality is already being turned against citizens. That is the way of tyranny. Resist … while you…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Right Wing Religion June 7, 2018

God Help Us: The Legislative Assault By Christian Nationalists To Reshape America & Our Lives

By David Taylor The Guardian (6/4/18) The emboldened religious right has unleashed a wave of legislation across the United States since Donald Trump became president, as part of an organised bid to impose hardline Christian values across American society. A playbook known as Project Blitz, developed by a collection of Christian groups, has provided state politicians with a set of off-the-shelf pro-Christian “model bills”. Some legislation uses verbatim language from the “model bills’” created by a group called the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation (CPCF), set up by a former Republican congressman which has a stated aim to “protect religious freedom, preserve…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Economic Injustice, FEATURE June 4, 2018

Meet The Radical Economist Behind The One Percent’s Quiet Takeover Of America

Stealth and deliberate deception. By Lynn Parramore Institute For Economic Thinking (5/30/18) Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, FEATURE, Rethuglicans, Trumpenstan, War State America May 31, 2018

Trump’s Leverage: Study Links White American Intolerance With Support For Authoritarianism

By Noah Berlatsky NBC News (5/27/18) Since the founding of the United States, politicians and pundits have warned that partisanship is a danger to democracy. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, worried that political parties, or factions, could “allow cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” to rise to power and subvert democracy. More recently, many political observers are concerned that increasing political polarization on left and right makes compromise impossible, and leads to the destruction of democratic norms and institutions. A new study, however, suggests that the main threat to our democracy may not be the hardening of political ideology, but rather…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, M. Taylor Columns May 31, 2018

Lost Children Of The Holocaust: A Cautionary Tale Of Tragedy For Today’s America

By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (5/31/18) Recent stories about the forced separation of migrant children from their parents and systematic abuse at the paws of the US Border Patrol have been alarming. This practice and abuse began with the Obama administration and is now ramped up by Trump. Such state-sponsored terror tactics are common in authoritarian regimes. Under the Pinochet regime in Chile the children of murdered activists and labor organizers were handed over to the families of police and government officials to be raised as their own. The same thing — and much worse — happened…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Your Brain On Politics May 31, 2018

American Far Right Propaganda & Imagery Draws From German Nazis

By Michael Tymkiw The Conversation (5/29/18) For many people, events such as the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, with its torchlight parade, eagle-emblazoned shields and Nazi flags, bring with them uncomfortable reminders of fascist visual culture from the 1920s to 1945. While individuals and organisations associated with the far right have long appropriated elements from fascist visual culture, the sheer brazenness with which symbols and images were appropriated in Charlottesville, the ensuing violence and the proliferation of photographs and videos depicting these events made the spectre of fascism seem disconcertingly close. If we wish to understand how the far right…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Trumpenstan, War State America May 28, 2018

In Our Name: Agency Documents Reveal Physical & Sexual Abuse Of Migrant Kids, Teens By Border Patrol

The authoritarian, fascist mind: ”Just following orders”. By Gabe Ortiz Daily Kos (5/24/18) Internal government documents dating back to 2009 and obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago School of Law, detail horror stories of child abuse, physical and sexual assault, verbal abuse and medical negligence at the hands of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. The details should be a national security concern, because border agents were already “monstrous” under Barack Obama, and under Donald Trump they have been unleashed and stand to endanger untold numbers: “In one…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, Resist! May 28, 2018

A Graduation Message Appropriate To The National Challenge Of This Memorial Day

By John Whitehead Rutherford Institute (5/21/18) “When the rivers and air are polluted, when families and nations are at war, when homeless wanderers fill the highways, these are the traditional signs of a dark age.” — Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times Those coming of age today will face some of the greatest obstacles ever encountered by young people. They will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Their privacy will be eviscerated by the surveillance state. They will be the subjects of…

ALL ARTICLES, American Fascism, M. Taylor Columns, Resist! May 28, 2018

Trump Attack On Kneeling Football Players Echoes 1934 When A German Soccer Team Was Banned For Not Giving Nazi Salute

By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (5/28/18) The NFL football player kneeling protest has from the get-go been cynically manipulated and leveraged by Donald Trump to stir racist animosity and jingoistic faux patriotism among his core supporters. The “taking a knee” by mostly black football players began as a peaceful protest by then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as a statement against racial injustice and the never-ending epidemic of police shootings and brutality against blacks across the nation. Those who objected to the peaceful protests tried to reduce it to an issue of people doing their jobs and there…