Showing posts with label fascism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fascism. Show all posts

December 7, 2024

There won't be a mea culpa big enough for those trying to normalize Trump if you're wrong. This means you, Jon Stewart. By Hal M. Brown

 


This RawStory article, "Trump's plan to jam through appointments enters new 'extreme' phase: says expert" prompted me to react.


Excerpt:

The plan already being discussed among a group of House Republicans involves Trump dismissing the Senate “against its will,” which would allow him to stack the government with whomever he chooses in the resulting "recess," wrote Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional law professor at Yale University. 

“This is flagrantly unlawful,” he told readers in an op-ed published Friday in The Atlantic. Even more than that, Amar said the threat from House Republicans should be exposed as “an autocratic move that is not just unlawful but contemptuous of constitutionalism.”

The scheme, according to the Yale professor, would see House Republicans manufacture an “illusory” disagreement to spark the president’s adjournment power.

“First, the House of Representatives would pass a resolution calling for a recess,” he wrote. “The Senate would then (in all likelihood) refuse to pass the resolution. Trump would then declare the houses to be in ‘disagreement’ and adjourn both houses for as long as he likes.”

The "recess-appointments spree" would ensue from there, Amar said.

He noted the other Washington maneuver gaining traction that Trump could pull to get his nominations through the finish line – through a Senate vote to recess itself after the incoming president’s inauguration, “allowing him to unilaterally make a series of ‘recess’ appointments.”

“That plan may formally be legal, but it is plainly improper,” Amar wrote.

My reaction:

What would keep Trump from pressing the fast forward button on becoming an American Hitler? If he is thwarted in his nominations by Congress his next step could be to dissolve the body permanently.

Whether Congress would stop meeting if ordered to do so would remain to be seen. If they did meet and voted against him he could ignore their votes.

This would certainly lead to mass protests and there's a good chance it would cause him to declare a national emergency and invoke martial law and order the armed forces to break up demonstrations. People  likely would die if his orders are followed. The Kent State Massacre would look like a picnic. 


The big if is whether the military would go along with this. If they decided not to this could lead to a quiet, that is a non-compliant coup, or an active coup. 

If it was a active coup, instead of tanks protecting the White House and attacking Congress they could be surrounding the White House with cannons pointing at it.

 

If all this came to pass, the generals would install a temporary president. I don't see Trump as being literally arrested. Trump, protected by the Supreme Court for these acts, could not be prosecuted but this would be still be a coup. 

Despite being protected by the Secret Service faced with an overwhelming force military would not be engage in battle. They would have no choice but to stand by if the White House was surrounded and soldiers demanded Trump be surrended or they would enter and remove him. 

Thus Trump, if he didn't leave voluntarily, would be physically removed by a cadre of soldiers who would allow his Secret Service detail to accompany him. They'd all be flown to Mar-a-Lago in a military transport, not Air Force One. The Supreme Court would probably call an emergency meeting and declare that this was unconstitutional, which it would be, but they'd have no power.

New presidential elections would be called to be held in six to nine months. Trump would be allowed to run but the elections would be supervised by the military and be fair. If the people who believed Trump's promises that he'd make their lives better decided they wanted a ruthless dictatorship the generals would have to accede and allow Trump to become president again. 


I would hope that by this time enough gullible Trump voters would have realized they'd been betrayed and misled, and that this was not what they voted for. Thus iff he did end up running he'd lose. The Republicans would be given a second chace to free themselves from Trump and MAGA and nominate someone else. This would also give the Democrats time to have an open convention and hopefully nominate a better candidate than Kamala Harris.

Of course Trump is making sure he is portrayed as Mister President-to-be Nice Guy Normal as evidenced by his meeting with President Macron to celebrate the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral today and having a a 60 Minutes interview with Kristen Welker tomorrow.


Maybe all of this glory will mute Trump's dictatorial desires to exact revenge against his enemies and spitefully ram though the 2025 Agenda to turn our federal goverment into a heartless freedom-chipping machine where people are like dead trees and would be reduced to wood chips and disposed of. 

I think Jon Stewart is naive and misguided when he rips into the media for scaring people about Trump (read article).

Excerpt:

Jon Stewart decried the media’s panicked coverage of President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming second term, saying that it’s not helpful to get the public “s***ting our pants this early.”

Before interviewing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders on his latest Weekly Showpodcast episode, the Comedy Central comedian, 62, opened the hour acknowledging that America is currently in a “transitional period where we are not sure about whether the ground we are standing on is solid.”

“Although the news media seems convinced that we are the Roadrunner and the Coyote and the Coyote has run over the cliff, and we just looked down and realized there’s nothing under our feet and now we are plunging to our deaths,” Stewart quipped in reference to the famous Looney Tunes characters. “Because the news media is always very circumspect.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen when Donald Trump takes over,” he said, adding that while “we should be prepared” for all outcomes, “I don’t know how helpful it is to get us s***ting our pants this much, this early.”

Using a metaphor to describe his feelings about the Democrats losing the election, he said: “In the joint custody agreement that we now have in America, the kids are going to live with Dad for the summer and you just have to f***in’ eat it.”

Jon, I hope you think about this. There is good cause for freedom loving Americans to be (no asterisks) shitting in their pants. Stewart's summer with Dad won't be merely three months of Hell. It will last at least four years.

There is a very good chance Stewart and everyone else trying to normalize Trump are dead wrong. Maybe in the next year or two they will rue the day they helped people let their guard down and helped pave the way for the end of the American experiment in democracy. 

Dishonorable mention for trying to normalize Trump: Joe Scarborough and MikeBrzezinski for going to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, and kudos to Rachel Maddow for calling them out on this.

Trump, not merely through his words, but through his nominees, has shown us what he wants to do. There will be no mea culpa big enough to come from people not taking this seriously.



Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)


December 6, 2024

Why Christofascist Hegseth is so important to Trump, By Hal M. Brown

 


To answer the question in my title: the reason Hegseth is so important is the last part of the word Christofascist. Forget the Christo, it is the fascist part that counts. For a fascist leader to succeed he must have control of the military which must be led by committed fascists. 

As of today, Trump is all in on Pete Hegseth - (the image above his Truth Social is my AI) and well he should be. He needs him. Perhaps more than anyone else in his administration Trump needs to have a yesman as Secretary of Defense.

The Senate dare not disagree. After all, he claims to have a mandate to do whatever he wants to do with the country. Of course, Homer Donald, you did not win a mandate....

Putin can more or less honestly claim he had an electoral mandate. Hitler eventually did have an electoral mandate. Trump insists that he also has a mandate. Of all his many lies this may be the most egregious. With his claiming a mandate he is justifying everything he intends to do to drastically change the way the country is governed. 

In the process of staffing his government prior to taking office he is facing his first test. He is getting minimal, but significant, pushback from enough Republicans in the Senate to stop some of his nominations. This gets me to the following:

The words above jumped out when I saw them in the Salon article 

Trump ushers in a Christian "deep state": MAGA moves to gut the Constitution.



I don't see the danger of the United States being governed by something like a Taliban with nukes and 3,400 fighter/jets, even though we see articles like another article in Salon:

How Christofascists became the heart of the MAGA movement


The reason I take issue with this is shown in the photo above. The two people flanking Trump may be Christofascists, but Trump is only a transactional Christofacist. He's no Mullah 

Hibatullah Akhundzada.


As long as Trump is president, Christian Nationalism will not be as dominant as people like Hegseth and others in the movement want it to be. Trump is basically a transactional person in all ways and I have little doubt that he is an atheist. He fakes being religious, but what anybody with any sense knows what he is really thinking when he's posing for pictures with religious leading praying over him especially if he hasn't had lunch yet.

There are no indications that Trump has any kind of religious faith. Whether or not Trump stays in office until he dies the presumed next in line to lead the nation as president, or by then the position may have another name, is J.D. Vance. My impression is that he's as transactional as Trump and when it comes to Christian Nationalism. I think his views are more nuanced. He went from being an athiest to an orthodox Catholic. Read the following:

J.D. Vance Used to Be an Atheist. What He Believes Now Is Telling.

He’s not an evangelical Christian. He’s a Catholic—of a very specific type.

It may be especially relevant that Vance is married to a Hindu. 

Where does this leave the country? If we are not on the brink of becoming a Christofascist country we are well on the road to becoming a fascist country of a type unique to America. Fascism is simply defined as an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government. For us to become truly fascist Trump has to geld Congress.

What we have in common with nascent fascist regimes is that the rising dictator plans to centralize power under the leader and turn any elected governing body into a ceremonial rubber stamp for public consumption. For example Wiki tells us the following:

Greater German Reichstag (German: Großdeutscher Reichstag) after 1938, was the national parliament of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Following the Nazi seizure of power and the enactment of the Enabling Act of 1933, it functioned purely as a rubber stamp for the actions of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship — always by unanimous consent — and as a forum to listen to Hitler's speeches. In this purely ceremonial role, the Reichstag convened only 20 times, the last on 26 April 1942. The President of the Reichstag (Reichstagspräsident) throughout this period was Hermann Göring.

Likewise Wiki tells us that the Russian Federal Assembly since the 2003 elections, the Federal Assembly (of Russia) has been referred to by analysts and observers as being a rubber stamp institution.

What all countries that turned into fascist regimes have in common is that they had a military to back them. Trump needs Hegseth to make sure, or try to make sure, that the military does his will. If Trump has to pray with Hegseth and say it is God's will to obey his commands he will do it.


So far Trump is only on the verge of ignoring what Congress, particularly the Senate, may do to thwart his plans. He's a psychopathic megalomanic and doesn't tolerate people who stand up to him. It remains to be seen whether he'll play the democracy game if some of his nominees don't get approved by the Senate. 

I have no doubt he has advisors like stone-cold sociopath Steve Miller who will explain to him that as president he has incredible power and shouldn't put off using it and take the first step to neutering Congress by doing what he can to force them into recess to make his appointments. If he can't manage to pull this off I can see him going full bore dictator and declaring a national emergency and initiating martial law. He couldn't get his crowd to do it,  but now could order soldiers to shut down the US Capitol. 

This would be the final test of whether the line against tyranny will hold and stop the forces of fascism. It would be up to the military to decide whether they are loyal to a person or to the Constitution. 

The Capitol isn't far from the White House. Military leaders would be faced with a stark choice. Instead of watching tanks heading to the Capitol Trump could look out the window and see them with their cannons pointed towards, not away from, the White House.


Here are more of the images that came up when I looked for Trump and Hegseth hugging. Note that none of the hands look right. Bottom right is closest to real but Trump's fingers a too long. I dediced to look into this and found a couple of articles.

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

Do you know you can comment on every blog story? On the bottom of the halbrown.org page is the Disquis comment section.


Below: Comment section is on halbrown.org. Be the first to make a comment.











September 20, 2024

Ethnonational fascism or Nazism, Trump and Vance have made it clear this is the America they want and many are hatefully happy about this , by Hal M. Brown, MSW


Trump and Vance and many Americans want to have Haitians and other immigrants hunted down, rounded up, bused to airports, and deported. I made the images above with Perchance Photo AI. I wasn't able to have the AI program show these people surrounded by armed soldiers, some in Humvees with machine guns, so you will have to imagine this.

I just read the following in RawStory: 

Inside Trump's new front in the Haitian hysteria push: Charleroi

Excertps:

Donald Trump doubled down on his false claims that Haitians are stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Then, he tossed another small Rust Belt community into the national spotlight.

“Likewise, a small 4,000-person town, Charleroi, Pennsylvania,” Trump said. “Have you ever heard of it? Charleroi. What a beautiful name. But it’s not beautiful now. It’s experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris.

“So, Pennsylvania: Remember this when you have to go to vote,” Trump added. 

///////

The language (is) in the X post by the nonprofit America 2100 is markedly similar to what Trump would say at his campaign rally the following day.

“It isn’t just Springfield; it’s happening everywhere,” the post reads. “In Charleroi, Pennsylvania — a low-income town of just 4,000 — the immigrant population has increased by 2,000% over the past two years. It’s almost all Haitians.”

The America 2100 post was boosted when Donald Trump Jr. re-posted it only 10 minutes later.

This led me to look up the post referred to in the article.

 If you want to know how our country has decended into a hellhole of hate where armed enforcers hunt down and deport human beings just read this posts on this thread in X. The X account is from America2100.org.


This is what their website says:


Consider what another country could have had as their "about us" description.


Here are two of the posts. Clicking will not go to X. It will only only enlarge the images.



Here are three posts by people who no doubt say they are Christian. They are a representative sample of other posts on the various replies on this X account.

1) Yep ,they need to go home .. Voodoo and animal sacrifices are a big part of their heritage.

It could be the answer to missing pets .🤔🤫

America has very different beliefs .

2) Wait until our corrupt, Marxist leaders arm them and tell them to turn on us. This IS not going to end well on so many levels. Defend your home and family.🙏🙌🇺🇸

3) So treat it like rampaging bands of Cherokee in the 1800s and annihilate them

Let's take a somewhat deep dive into what ethnic nationalism or enthnonationalism is (from Wikipedia).

Ethnic nationalism, also known as ethnonationalism, is a form of nationalism wherein the nation and nationality are defined in terms of ethnicity,[2][3] with emphasis on an ethnocentric (and in some cases an ethnocratic) approach to various political issues related to national affirmation of a particular ethnic group.

The central tenet of ethnic nationalists is that "nations are defined by a shared heritage, which usually includes a common language, a common faith, and a common ethnic ancestry". Those of other ethnicities may be classified as second-class citizens.

The study of ethnonationalism emerged in the early 20th century in the interwar period between World War I and World War II, with the "redrawing of the political map of Europe in part along ethnic and national lines according to a proclaimed “right of peoples” to self-determinationand the rise of fascist ethnocentric ideologies (including Nazism)

Increased international migration as a function of contemporary globalization has also given rise to "ethno-national" movements, including reactionary "nativist" groups focused on exclusionary identity politics. In the developed world, such trends have often taken on an explicitly xenophobic and racist character, as seen in the example of "white nationalism" in the United States.

Below with my bold: 

In 2018, Tendayi Achiume, a UN Special Rapporteur on racism, released a UN Human Rights Council report which states that "more than 75% of the world's known stateless populations belong to minority groups" and highlights the role of ethnonationalism in the international deprivation of citizenship rights. In the report, Achiume re-stated that international human rights law prohibits citizens from discriminating against non-citizens on the basis of their race, descent, national or ethnic origin and she also stated that citizenship, nationality, and immigration laws which discriminate against non-citizens are violations of international law. She also noted the role of laws restricting marriage rights with respect to certain national, religious, ethnic or racial groups, which she said were "often deployed by states to preserve notions of national, ethnic and racial "purity"." Achiume called ethnonationalist politics the "most obvious driver of racial discrimination in citizenship and immigration laws" and driven by populist leaders defining nations "in terms of assumed blood ties and ethnicity".

United States 

(My bold) Since the 2016 US presidential election, ethnonationalism has been pushed to the fore of the American political consciousness by the identity politics of Donald Trump surrounding what it means to be a "true" American, which has resulted in ethnocentric ideals becoming "a robust predictor of vote choice for Trump" among white Americans.

Data from the 2016 American National Election Studies (ANES) has revealed a positive association between ethnonationalism and anti-immigrant attitudes among white Americans, whose opposition to immigration is "often grounded in fears of the threat that immigration poses to the robustness of America's national identity" that is shaped by the belief set concerning the traits of "true" Americans. 

This is the Nazified America many people want. So much for America as the melting pot that democracy loving Americans cherish.

The image of the United States as a melting pot was popularized by the 1908 play The Melting Pot. This is from the play:

David, the hero, proclaims:

There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth [He points east]—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,—black and yellow—

VERA: Jew and Gentile—

DAVID: Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!


It makes me think that a large minority of the country wants the people going into the melting pot are melted to death.

___________________

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March 2, 2023

Chauncey DeVega's quote should be terrifying and mind-boggling

 By Hal Brown

Click above to enlarge image
Pictured above, would be Queen of the New Confederacy Marjorie Taylor Greene holding a $2400 Honey Badger firearm, because inquiring minds probably don't want to know. I am not an expert on firearms. I used Google Image search (here) to find out about the weapon.

The following paragraph is from Chauncey DeVega's article in Salon. 

Stop mocking Marjorie Taylor Greene

It's not just trolling. Republican threats of civil war should be taken seriously

We have just experienced a nightmare here in America (and the world) where what many "centrists" and "mainstream" political thinkers and voices said was impossible came true. If someone in 2015 or 2016 had told you that a professional wrestling heel, fake billionaire, willful ignoramus, white supremacist cult leader and TV host, a man credibly accused of rape many times, a failed casino owner and real estate developer, con artist would become president of the United States, make choices in response to a pandemic that would kill at least a million Americans, bring the country and its democracy to a breaking point, attempt a coup, surrender America's interests to its enemies such as Russia, commit an endless number of serious crimes while in office, be impeached twice and almost win reelection, and then announce a second presidential candidacy all the while not being held responsible for his crimes many people would – and did — mock any person willing to say such a thing. They labeled it "Trump derangement" syndrome. We all know what happened next.

Fo those who mercifully have forgotten:

Click above to enlarge

It should be as terrifying as it is mind-boggling that the things described above actually occurred. That there is a significant minority of the entire population of the United States who are happy about this is is beyond the pale, that is, outside the bounds of morality, good behavior or judgement in civilized society.

The reasons how and why the things DeVega describes in chilling words happened have been addressed by political and social scientists and by mental health experts. I don't feel like delving into these when others have done a thorough job.* I really am devoting this blog about it to share DeVega's description.

The portion of the DeVega article that Salon highlighted, the concluding sentence, follows:


Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other Republican fascists and the larger white right and their allies are very dangerous. Your laughter does not change that fact. Your laughter will not save you from them or the new American nightmare they are forcing into being. He who laughs last laughs loudest. The laughter of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other American fascists will be very deafening indeed.
About DeSantis from: 

Introducing the first-ever, sort-of-annual Bulls**t Awards: Not just for Republicans! by Brian Karem in Salon


Mini-Me Bullshit award goes to Ron DeSantis, who while proving to be smarter than Trump (at least in some ways) has the charisma of roadkill and the smell of a dead skunk in the middle of the road. (That's a reference to an obscure song lyric — actually, DeSantis is so far to the right he's off the road). He mimics Trump's fascism in every move he makes, but takes it even further as he tries to turn the state of Florida into a Disney version of Germany in 1937. 

Here's Loudon Wainwright III singing Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* Footnote:

 DeVega regularly addresses these topics. For example just in the past week:

The science behind why conservatives are so easily triggered


Addendum:

I wanted to use the sign I made to use to illustrate yesterday's blog, DeSantis's great Florida fascist experiment, with a new background. I changed the background and also added five new elements.

\
Thanks to Chauncey DeVega for his retweet:


Hair of the dog, anybody? I have discovered who some of the FoxNews morning audience are. By Hal M. Brown

Above is a photo I took this morning of a commercial aired on FoxNews. It is for Redneck Rivera Whiskey. It costs $25 a bottle. This is how ...