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?

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