American Fascism

The iconic image of U.S. military torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison during the Cheney/Bush Iraq war redefined America’s image around the world. By John Kiriakou Reader Supported News (5/20/18) Most of you probably know that I was a former CIA officer, that I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, and that I spent 23 months in a federal prison for my troubles. I’ve never second-guessed myself. I know I did the right thing, even if the cost was high. I lost my federal pension, my job, my security clearance, my life’s savings, even my wife. Still,…

“Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose worldviews are not just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain. Some polarization is healthy — even necessary — for democracy. And indeed, the historical experience of democracies in Western Europe shows us that norms can be sustained even when parties are separated by considerable ideological differences. “But when societies grow so deeply divided that parties become wedded to incompatible  worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely…

These recent incidents are part of a broader government scheme to wield immigration authority to silence activists both within and beyond the US borders.  By Carrie DeCell The Guardian (4/20/18) The Trump administration has explained that its so-called “extreme vetting” program is intended to bar individuals from the United States based on their attitudes toward this country. It is the fulfillment of a campaign promise to resurrect a cold war–era “ideological screening test” for admission into the United States. If the growing number of activists who have been denied admission or removed from the country in recent months is any indication, that test…

  By Will Carless Reveal/The Center For Investigative Reporting (4/19/18) Editor’s note: To provide a full picture of what hate speech victims experienced, we have not edited out offensive language. It was the day after the 2016 presidential election. Melissa Johnson was walking out of a Trader Joe’s in the heart of San Diego when a shiny BMW pulled up alongside her. The driver was a man in his late 30s. Dark hair. Green eyes. Her first thought: He’s kind of hot. The car slowed down. Then the man shouted at her through the open window. “Fuck you, nigger, go back…

  By David M. Perry In These Times (3/26/18) When Mark Conditt was a teenager, he participated in a club called Righteous Invasion of Truth. RIOT kids were homeschooled and religious, and spent their club time playing war games, practicing weapons skills, and reading the Bible. As a community college student in 2012, he wrote blogs against homosexuality and abortion. In 2018, he planted bombs in Austin, Texas, appearing to target African-American communities, then blew himself up as police closed in. The question isn’t whether Conditt was a terrorist, but where was this terrorist radicalized? More important, who else is being radicalized…

  By Andre Damon World Socialist Web Site (10/23/17) The militarist diatribe by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general, at a White House press briefing last week laid bare an open secret of American politics: behind the façade of democratic rule, the United States increasingly resembles a military dictatorship. Firing back at criticisms of President Donald Trump’s handling of the October 4 deaths of four US soldiers in Niger, Kelly called members of the US military “the best one percent this country produces.” He then announced that he would take questions only from journalists who were…

  By Aaron Sankin & Will Carless Reveal/Hate Report (2/23/18) In this week’s roundup: the waning power of the KKK, the argument over whether a New Mexico school shooter was a racist finally seems settled, and a meme turns “Black Panther” hatred on its head. In 2017, the number of active Ku Klux Klan chapters dropped by nearly 45 percent, from 130 in 2016 to 72 the following year, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. These figures provide hard data for a trend we’ve been hearing about anecdotally: the rapidly waning importance of the KKK within the white supremacist…

  TTBook/WPR (2/24/18) Dutch philosopher Rob Riemen [author of “To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism & Humanism”] warns that we’re just at the beginning of a new age of fascism. He says the trivialization of society and dumbing-down of liberal democracies is fueling a new generation of charismatic leaders whose doctrine of blame and resentment is just as toxic as it was in the last century. ***** Rob Riemen is a writer and the founder of the Nexus Institute. He studied Theology at Tilburg University and remembers this time as his magic mountain-era, after Thomas Mann’s masterpiece ‘The Magic…

  By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, Ali Winston, special to ProPublica, and Jake Hanrahan, special to ProPublica ProPublica (2/23/18) Late last month, ProPublica reported that the California man accused of killing a gay and Jewish University of Pennsylvania student was an avowed neo-Nazi and a member of Atomwaffen Division, one of the country’s most notorious extremist groups. The news about the murder suspect, Samuel Woodward, spread quickly throughout the U.S., and abroad. Woodward was accused of fatally stabbing 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein and burying his body in an Orange County park. The report, it turns out, was also taken up in the secretive online chats…

An old campaign photo of Arthur Jones from his race for Milwaukee mayor.   By Lois Beckett The Guardian (2/4/18) A neo-Nazi Holocaust denier is set to become the Republican nominee for a congressional seat in Illinois, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Sunday. The prospective candidate, Art Jones, is not a steadfast supporter of the Republican president. Ten months ago, in remarks filmed at a neo-Nazi retreat in Kentucky, he ranted about how Donald Trump had “surrounded himself with hordes of Jews including a Jew in his own family, that punk named Jared Kushner”. “I’m sorry I voted for the son of a…

  By Sam Levine The Guardian (2/7/18) In California’s Central Valley an unexpected item is popping up for sale in souvenir stores: Confederate flags. There’s a growing market for the hate symbol. “There’s been an atmosphere of comfort for folks that were holding these very extreme conservative views,” said Angel Garcia, an activist in Tulare County, an agricultural region where Confederate imagery has become commonplace in immigrant communities. While California is seen as the national leader of the liberal resistance to Donald Trump, it has also become increasingly polarized, with wars between the right and the left breaking out across the region, from…