The week in fascism (so far)

 

We're only halfway through the week, and it's been, shall we say, a bit weird. Okay. Really weird. The authoritarians are doing their worst, as usual. This is just a very partial list:

A Kremlin-run troll farm has been pushing a fake Harris video. Thankfully they've been caught.

An Ohio county sheriff has found his inner Stasi Chekist and is demanding the addresses of any county resident who posts a Harris/Walz yard sign.  He also uses a lot of eliminationist rhetoric. There's something oddly un-American about that.

Supreme Court Justice Alito is apparently besties with a right-wing German aristocrat who is also obsessed with ending reproductive freedom. Nothing weird about that...oh who am I kidding. 

William Kristol (a columnist I would have almost never endorsed a couple decades ago) has reminded us once more that it really is okay to tell the truth and call Trump a threat to democracy. He and his co-author rightly refer to the threats against the Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio as pogroms, which is a genuine possibility. 

A significant number of the death threats targeting Springfield Ohio are from some foreign actor. We just don't know yet which nation or organization is involved as of this post. My money is on Russia, but honestly there are a number of plausible culprits. 

Those threats of violence targeting Springfield, OH include Wittenberg University and Clark State College, forcing classes to flip online for at least the remainder of this week. 

Trump wants to hold a rally in Springfield. The mayor is against it. JD Vance is going to keep on spreading lies, and like Trump continues to incite violence. Normal aspiring leaders of a democratic nation don't behave like that.

Trump's personal Judge and Bad Janet impersonator Aileen Cannon failed to disclose a trip to a right-wing event. She tends to do that a bit. We should ask a lot of questions, including when she will resign or be impeached.

Of course, Trump is still threatening to imprison his political opponents, much like dictators do in places like Russia, Venezuela, ad nauseam. There is nothing normal about this sort of behavior in a democracy, and the media is badly failing at doing the job of pointing that out.

This has been an exhausting week so far, and is once more a stark reminder of how exhausting it was to endure the four years of Trump's term in office. Does anyone outside of Trump's cult of personality really want that?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ozymandias

When I think of our current era and all of its dictators and would-be dictators, there is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley that rings as true now as it did when he wrote it:     I met a traveller from an antique land,     Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone     Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,     Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,     And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,     Tell that its sculptor well those passions read     Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,     The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;     And on the pedestal, these words appear:     My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;     Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay     Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare     The lone and level sands stretch far away.” His poem was a stark warning. Follow these men (they are almost always men) to your ruin and grave, or perhaps a ditch or nearby river. For y
Read more

Could a Russian Revolution End the Ukraine War?

Image
A Russian revolution ending the Russo-Ukraine war? Oh, that would be so wonderful. As Zeihan explains in a short video, it's complicated. Any sort of palace coup is a non-starter, apparently. The people Putin has surrounded himself with generally view the world no differently from him, and they come from the same KGB/FSB background. So, don't expect the elites to necessarily change stripes and turn on Putin. A mass uprising that becomes a revolution? Zeihan doesn't see that as a prospect in the short term. I don't either. Yes, the sanctions are causing some discomfort, but not to the extent that a critical mass would very violently demand a change. Will the regime crumble? Eventually. In the meantime, Ukrainians must continue to fight for their existence, and anyone living in the nations that successfully declared their independence when the USSR crumbled at the start of the 1990s need to keep a watchful eye for what might be lurking on their borders. Regrettably, we li
Read more

Leap Day 2020 retrospective

It is difficult to believe that four years have passed since the last Leap Day. That particular day in 2020 was a strange day. By that point in late winter 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was well-underway. I probably was not the only one doom-scrolling the developments in China, the EU, and NYC by that point. Although I lived and still live in a somewhat more isolated portion of the US, we do sit at a crossroads when it comes to the Interstate and US highway systems, and we do have our own airport which at the time had flights to and from Atlanta (if you flew Delta) and Dallas (if you flew American Airlines). There was certainly some business tourism into my city at the time, even as the proverbial storm clouds drew near. I was still a couple weeks away from passing by a fraught meeting administrators would be holding, and was already getting a lot of advice from my parents (more directly from my mom) about what to stock up on.  Although there was already plenty of reason to want to avoid
Read more