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So a year from now...

Al-O-Meter said:
I'm the one who wants the war to end in the most unfavorable terms for Ukraine and the most favorable terms for Russia and I definitely want the option for Russia to invade again in the future whenever they want.
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Yep
 
Al-O-Meter said:
Meh. I'm used to it. At least you went to the trouble of writing down the argument you wished I'd made.
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Your unwillingness to post that Ukraine should get security guarantees or that trump should put them in the deal made it already.
 
fishonjazz said:
Your unwillingness to post that Ukraine should get security guarantees or that trump should put them in the deal made it already.
Click to expand...
Ukraine should get security guarantees. Happy? Trump isn't the one conducting the negotiations, and the deal at issue isn't a peace treaty or even a cease fire agreement where such guarantees should appear, but there should be some sort of security guarantees in the peace treaty.

What I object to is blowing up peace negotiations using the excuse the peace treaty that doesn't yet exist isn't acceptable, then pulling the logical jujitsu of insisting those who want to end the war want more people to die in the war.
 
Al-O-Meter said:
Ukraine should get security guarantees. Happy? Trump isn't the one conducting the negotiations, and the deal at issue isn't a peace treaty or even a cease fire agreement where such guarantees should appear, but there should be some sort of security guarantees in the peace treaty.

What I object to is blowing up peace negotiations using the excuse the peace treaty that doesn't yet exist isn't acceptable, then pulling the logical jujitsu of insisting those who want to end the war want more people to die in the war.
Click to expand...
I too object to blowing up peace negotiations. trump and vance shouldn't have started the negotiations by calling zelensky a dictator, saying that ukraine started the war and insulting zelenskys attire. Probably shouldn't have given away bargaining chips from the beginning as well.
trump never wanted the peace negotiations to go well. Or he is an idiot and bad at negotiation deals. Or both.
 
fishonjazz said:
trump and vance shouldn't have started the negotiations by calling zelensky a dictator, saying that ukraine started the war and insulting zelenskys attire.
Click to expand...
That wasn't a negotiation. It was a grip-and-grin press conference, or at least that is what it was supposed to have been.

If you want a bad guy at that press conference that went off the rails, the bad guy is JD Vance. Thus far I've appreciated what he's brought as a right hand, but JD Vance blew up that press conference. For 40 minutes, Zelensky kept making references to what he wanted with the slight dig here and there. For 40 minutes, Trump deflected and kept things on the rails. At the 40 minute mark, JD Vance in rapid succession insulted Zelensky's effect on peace negotiations and reminded Trump that Zelensky appeared with the Democrats at what was effectively a campaign event to defeat Trump. JD Vance pulled the pins on two grenades and the presser became the stuff of legend.

That said, the presser never should have happened. Zelensky made clear before going in that he wasn't going to sign the agreement. Zelensky lied to set everything up, but Trump was handing it until JD Vance reminded Trump that Zelensky was working with his enemies to keep him out of power and possibly put in prison.
 
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Al-O-Meter said:
That wasn't a negotiation. It was a grip-and-grin press conference, or at least that is what it was supposed to have been.

If you want a bad guy at that press conference that went off the rails, the bad guy is JD Vance. Thus far I've appreciated what he's brought as a right hand, but JD Vance blew up that press conference. For 40 minutes, Zelensky kept making references to what he wanted with the slight dig here and there. For 40 minutes, Trump deflected and kept things on the rails. At the 40 minute mark, JD Vance in rapid succession insulted Zelensky's effect on peace negotiations and reminded Trump that Zelensky appeared with the Democrats at what was effectively a campaign event to defeat Trump. JD Vance pulled the pins on two grenades and the presser became the stuff of legend.

That said, the presser never should have happened. Zelensky made clear before going in that he wasn't going to sign the agreement. Zelensky lied to set everything up, but Trump was handing it until JD Vance reminded Trump that Zelensky was working with his enemies to keep him out of power and possibly put in prison.
Click to expand...
That was all planned by Vance and trump. trump never wanted the peace negotiations to go well. The outcome was what trump wanted the outcome to be. Or trump is an idiot. Or both.
 
fishonjazz said:
That was all planned by Vance and trump. trump never wanted the peace negotiations to go well. The outcome was what trump wanted the outcome to be. Or trump is an idiot. Or both.
Click to expand...
Zelensky wanted to come to the white house to sign the deal. He could have signed it five days before, but insisted on coming to sign in person. It wasnt an ambush, that is a lie. Zelensky is a moron that has been back and forth so many times I think he may be bipolar. He certainly is a coke head.


View: https://x.com/JJBenson/status/1895786636736413995
 
Al-O-Meter said:
This is garbage content for people who want their views affirmed. All of those videos rely on redefining fascism into terms so generic that literally any government on earth through all of human history could be considered fascist. Some of them are so retarded as to go with the argument that leader of this government once made a speech using a sentence that was similar to a sentence used by another leader of a fascist government and so fascism. It is content meant to appeal to morons.

Fascism is a form of socialism with a top-down controlled economy. The United States ain't that and we aren't headed in that direction.
Click to expand...
I would probably not speak of “morons” if I were you. You completly ignore the psychological profile/world view of fascist minds. If you don’t want to look into ideas and concepts, in depth, thats on you, it’s not a crime. It will leave you not understanding fascism in America, however. You really do miss the clear connection. But, I feel all this is an effort you use to avoid painful truths, with the intent of pleasing your fellow trolls. Again, I would not throw the term “morons” lightly. Noted scholars of fascism, like Paxton, Griffin, and Payne(described below) are not “morons”. In all likelihood, they know more than you. Or me.

I’ve posted this before. A brief history of American fascism. One could call it Americanism, since that notion encompasses our long existent fascist ideology lurking beneath the surface. You call my description “generic fascism”. Well, I do believe one needs to understand the.psychology of fascism. Something Trump clearly reflects in his rhetoric.

Trump’s fascist sympathies and leanings are an Americanized fascist movement. Fascism is always unique to the culture and beliefs endemic to the society and culture in which it appears.

In the United States, this uber nationalistic fascist movement can de termed “Americanism”. I cannot agree with AI-O-Meter’s dismissal of Trumpism as an Americanized fascist irrational upswelling, in our national psyche. An eruption of irrational forces.

It is not something foreign to the United States. It’s been there, under the surface, erupting periodically, for a long time in our national psyche. Don’t let anyone dismiss it, because it reflects poorly on our current state, and it must be recognized, not dismissed.


many people recalled a famous saying often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Because Lewis’s novel is the best remembered of the many warnings against American fascism in the interwar years, he has latterly been credited with the admonition, but they are not Lewis’s words.

The adage probably originated instead with James Waterman Wise, son of the eminent American rabbi Stephen Wise and one of the many voices at the time urging Americans to recognize fascism as a serious domestic threat. “The America of power and wealth,” Wise cautioned, is “an America which needs fascism.” American fascism might emerge from “patriotic orders, such as the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution… and it may come to us wrapped in the American flag or a Hearst newspaper.” In another talk that year, he put it slightly differently: American fascism would likely come “wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution.”

An American fascism would, by definition, deploy American symbols and American slogans. “Do not look for them to raise aloft the swastika,” Wise warned, “or to employ any of the popular forms of Fascism” from Europe. Fascism’s ultra-nationalism means that it works by normalizing itself, drawing on familiar national customs to insist it is merely conducting political business as usual.

Samuel Moyn recently argued in these pages against comparing Trump’s policies to fascism, because his administration is “pursuing causes with roots deep in American history. No analogy to Hitler or fascism is needed to explain these results.” But this presumes that fascism does not have its own deep roots in American history. It is arguable—not to say, exceptionalist—to presuppose that anything indigenously American cannot be fascist; this begs the question of American fascism rather than disputing it. Experts on fascism such as Robert O. Paxton, Roger Griffin, and Stanley G. Payne have long argued that fascism can never seem alien to its followers; its claims to speak for “the people” and to restore national greatness mean that each version of fascism must have its own local identity. To believe that a nationalist movement isn’t fascist because it’s native is to miss the point entirely.

Paxton has argued influentially that fascism is as fascism does. But conspicuous features are recognizably shared, including: nostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain “bloodlines” over others. Fascism weaponizes identity, validating the herrenvolk and invalidating all the other folk.

“Fascism must be home grown,” admonished an American lecturer in 1937, “repeating the words of Benito Mussolini, that fascism cannot be imported,” but must be “particularly suited to our national life.” Logically, therefore, “the anti-Negro program” would provide “a very plausible rallying cry for American fascists,” just as anti-Semitism had for Germans. Others recognized that the deep roots of anti-Semitic evangelical Christianity provided equally plausible rallying cries for an American fascism. Wartime patriotism and the Allied triumph soon gave Americans permission to regard fascism as an alien and uniquely European pathology, but “the man on horseback,” the despot who could ride reactionary populist energies to power, had been a specter in American politics since at least as early as the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the 1830s.

The Pittsburg Courier was one of many African-American papers that not only saw affinities between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America, but also traced causal connections. “Hitler Learns from America,” the Courier had declared as early as 1933, reporting that German universities under the new regime of the Third Reich were explaining that they drew their ideas from “the American pathfinders Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard,” and that “racial insanities” in America provided Nazi Germany with “a model for oppressing and persecuting its own minorities.” The African-American New York Age similarly wondered if Hitler had studied “under the tutelage” of Klan leaders, perhaps as “a subordinate Kleagle or something of the sort.”

At the same time, in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America. This foundational work of African-American revisionist historiography appeared amid the tumult of the Scottsboro Nine’s persecution and as Jesse Owens’s medal haul at the Berlin Olympics was seen as both a joke against Hitler and a rebuke to Jim Crow America. In no way coincidentally, then, Du Bois implies in his study more than once that the white supremacism of Jim Crow America could indeed be regarded as “fascism.” A half-century later, in a neglected but remarkable essay, Amiri Baraka made Du Bois’s notion explicit, arguing that the end of Reconstruction “heaved Afro America into fascism. There is no other term for it. The overthrow of democratically elected governments and the rule by direct terror, by the most reactionary sector of finance capital… Carried out with murder, intimidation and robbery, by the first storm troopers, again the Hitlerian prototype, the Ku Klux Klan, directly financed by northern capital.”

It would take another decade or so for white American historiography to absorb the argument, when, in 2004, Paxton observed in The Anatomy of Fascism that a strong argument could be made for the first Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction South being the world’s earliest fascist movement:

After the KKK was resurrected in 1915, the second Klan claimed as many as five million members by the mid-1920s, a degree of proliferation in American society that represented one out of every three or four white Protestant American men. When Mussolini burst onto the world stage in 1921, many Americans across the country instantly recognized his project, as newspapers from Montana to Florida explained to their readers that “the ‘Fascisti’ might be known as the Ku Klux Klan,” and “the klan… is the Fascisti of America.” Comparisons between the homegrown Klan and Italian fascism soon became ubiquitous in the American press; the resemblance was not superficial.

Dorothy Thompson, the celebrated journalist and anti-fascist campaigner and Sinclair Lewis’s wife at the time, similarly earned the sobriquet of “Cassandra” for prophesying that fascism in the US would look all too familiarly American when it arrived. (Thompson enjoyed the riposte that Cassandra was always proven right in the end.) “When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model,” she said, but an American dictator would be “one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.” And the American people, Thompson added, “will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief!’” A year later, a Yale professor named Halford Luccock was also widely cited in the press when he told an audience: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’” And Luccock went on: “The high-sounding phrase ‘the American way’ will be used by interested groups, intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, tear gas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties.”
A few years later, Thompson wrote again in similar terms, saying she was reminded of what Huey Long himself had once explained to her: “American Fascism would never emerge as a Fascist but as a 100 percent American movement; it would not duplicate the German method of coming to power but would only have to get the right President and Cabinet.” FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace, issued his own warning. “American fascism will not be really dangerous,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1944, “until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”

Now, in 2020, we find ourselves with an America First president. Arguments that Donald Trump can only be understood in relation to the modern conservative movement in America, best framed by the turn to the right under Barry Goldwater or Lee Atwater’s famous Southern Strategy, assume a rupture with American politics of the interwar period that was not necessarily evident at the time. To give just one example, Goldwater was described more than once during his presidential run in 1964, by both his supporters and his critics, as an “America First” politician.

Nor is it only Trump’s critics who see fascist tendencies in his administration’s rhetoric glorifying violence and disregarding the rule of law, democratic processes, and civil liberties; the president and his supporters regularly embrace traditions of American fascism themselves. “America First” was initially the favorite slogan of American xenophobic nativist movements and politics from 1915 to 1941, starting with Woodrow Wilson’s loyalty test, demanding that immigrant “hyphenate Americans” prove they were for “America First,” followed by its use as a rallying cry to keep America out of the League of Nations and from ratifying the Treaty of Versailles. Warren G. Harding also ran on an America First campaign in 1920, even as the slogan was being appropriated by the second Klan, which regularly marched with the legend on banners and used it in recruitment ads. It was invoked on the floor of Congress by supporters of the nativist and eugenicist Immigration Act of 1924. Then it was assimilated by self-styled American fascist groups of the 1930s, including the German-American Bund and the virulently anti-Semitic “America First, Inc.,” before it was adopted by the America First Committee of 1940–1941, when Lindbergh used it to convince Americans that “Jewish interests” were seeking to manipulate the United States into taking part in a European war.

American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn’t mean they’re not fascist, it means they’re not European and it’s not the 1930s. They remain organized around classic fascist tropes of nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity, celebration of an authentic folk and nullification of others, scapegoating groups for economic instability or inequality, rejecting the legitimacy of political opponents, the demonization of critics, attacks on a free press, and claims that the will of the people justifies violent imposition of military force. Vestiges of interwar fascism have been dredged up, dressed up, and repurposed for modern times. Colored shirts might not sell anymore, but colored hats are doing great.
Reading about the inchoate American fascist movements of the 1930s during the Trump administration feels less prophetic than proleptic, a time-lapse montage of a para-fascist order slowly willing itself into existence over the course of nearly a century. It certainly seems less surprising that recognizably fascistic violence is erupting in the United States under Trump, as his attorney general sends troops to the national capital to act as a private army, armed paramilitary groups occupy state capitols, laws are passed to deny the citizenship and rights of specific groups, and birthright citizenship as guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment is attacked. When the president declares voting an “honor” rather than a right and “jokes” about becoming president for life, when the government makes efforts to add a new question of citizenship to the decennial census for the first time in the nation’s history, and when nationwide protests in response to racial injustice become the pretext for mooting martial law, we are watching an American fascist order pulling itself together.
 
Red said:
I would probably not speak of “morons” if I were you. You completly ignore the psychological profile/world view of fascist minds. If you don’t want to look into ideas and concepts, in depth, thats on you, it’s not a crime. It will leave you not understanding fascism in America, however. You really do miss the clear connection. But, I feel all this is an effort you use to avoid painful truths, with the intent of pleasing your fellow trolls. Again, I would not throw the term “morons” lightly. Noted scholars of fascism, like Paxton, Griffin, and Payne(described below) are not “morons”. In all likelihood, they know more than you. Or me.

I’ve posted this before. A brief history of American fascism. One could call it Americanism, since that notion encompasses our long existent fascist ideology lurking beneath the surface. You call my description “generic fascism”. Well, I do believe one needs to understand the.psychology of fascism. Something Trump clearly reflects in his rhetoric.

Trump’s fascist sympathies and leanings are an Americanized fascist movement. Fascism is always unique to the culture and beliefs endemic to the society and culture in which it appears.

In the United States, this uber nationalistic fascist movement can de termed “Americanism”. I cannot agree with AI-O-Meter’s dismissal of Trumpism as an Americanized fascist irrational upswelling, in our national psyche. An eruption of irrational forces.

It is not something foreign to the United States. It’s been there, under the surface, erupting periodically, for a long time in our national psyche. Don’t let anyone dismiss it, because it reflects poorly on our current state, and it must be recognized, not dismissed.


many people recalled a famous saying often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Because Lewis’s novel is the best remembered of the many warnings against American fascism in the interwar years, he has latterly been credited with the admonition, but they are not Lewis’s words.

The adage probably originated instead with James Waterman Wise, son of the eminent American rabbi Stephen Wise and one of the many voices at the time urging Americans to recognize fascism as a serious domestic threat. “The America of power and wealth,” Wise cautioned, is “an America which needs fascism.” American fascism might emerge from “patriotic orders, such as the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution… and it may come to us wrapped in the American flag or a Hearst newspaper.” In another talk that year, he put it slightly differently: American fascism would likely come “wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution.”

An American fascism would, by definition, deploy American symbols and American slogans. “Do not look for them to raise aloft the swastika,” Wise warned, “or to employ any of the popular forms of Fascism” from Europe. Fascism’s ultra-nationalism means that it works by normalizing itself, drawing on familiar national customs to insist it is merely conducting political business as usual.

Samuel Moyn recently argued in these pages against comparing Trump’s policies to fascism, because his administration is “pursuing causes with roots deep in American history. No analogy to Hitler or fascism is needed to explain these results.” But this presumes that fascism does not have its own deep roots in American history. It is arguable—not to say, exceptionalist—to presuppose that anything indigenously American cannot be fascist; this begs the question of American fascism rather than disputing it. Experts on fascism such as Robert O. Paxton, Roger Griffin, and Stanley G. Payne have long argued that fascism can never seem alien to its followers; its claims to speak for “the people” and to restore national greatness mean that each version of fascism must have its own local identity. To believe that a nationalist movement isn’t fascist because it’s native is to miss the point entirely.

Paxton has argued influentially that fascism is as fascism does. But conspicuous features are recognizably shared, including: nostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain “bloodlines” over others. Fascism weaponizes identity, validating the herrenvolk and invalidating all the other folk.

“Fascism must be home grown,” admonished an American lecturer in 1937, “repeating the words of Benito Mussolini, that fascism cannot be imported,” but must be “particularly suited to our national life.” Logically, therefore, “the anti-Negro program” would provide “a very plausible rallying cry for American fascists,” just as anti-Semitism had for Germans. Others recognized that the deep roots of anti-Semitic evangelical Christianity provided equally plausible rallying cries for an American fascism. Wartime patriotism and the Allied triumph soon gave Americans permission to regard fascism as an alien and uniquely European pathology, but “the man on horseback,” the despot who could ride reactionary populist energies to power, had been a specter in American politics since at least as early as the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the 1830s.

The Pittsburg Courier was one of many African-American papers that not only saw affinities between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America, but also traced causal connections. “Hitler Learns from America,” the Courier had declared as early as 1933, reporting that German universities under the new regime of the Third Reich were explaining that they drew their ideas from “the American pathfinders Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard,” and that “racial insanities” in America provided Nazi Germany with “a model for oppressing and persecuting its own minorities.” The African-American New York Age similarly wondered if Hitler had studied “under the tutelage” of Klan leaders, perhaps as “a subordinate Kleagle or something of the sort.”

At the same time, in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America. This foundational work of African-American revisionist historiography appeared amid the tumult of the Scottsboro Nine’s persecution and as Jesse Owens’s medal haul at the Berlin Olympics was seen as both a joke against Hitler and a rebuke to Jim Crow America. In no way coincidentally, then, Du Bois implies in his study more than once that the white supremacism of Jim Crow America could indeed be regarded as “fascism.” A half-century later, in a neglected but remarkable essay, Amiri Baraka made Du Bois’s notion explicit, arguing that the end of Reconstruction “heaved Afro America into fascism. There is no other term for it. The overthrow of democratically elected governments and the rule by direct terror, by the most reactionary sector of finance capital… Carried out with murder, intimidation and robbery, by the first storm troopers, again the Hitlerian prototype, the Ku Klux Klan, directly financed by northern capital.”

It would take another decade or so for white American historiography to absorb the argument, when, in 2004, Paxton observed in The Anatomy of Fascism that a strong argument could be made for the first Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction South being the world’s earliest fascist movement:

After the KKK was resurrected in 1915, the second Klan claimed as many as five million members by the mid-1920s, a degree of proliferation in American society that represented one out of every three or four white Protestant American men. When Mussolini burst onto the world stage in 1921, many Americans across the country instantly recognized his project, as newspapers from Montana to Florida explained to their readers that “the ‘Fascisti’ might be known as the Ku Klux Klan,” and “the klan… is the Fascisti of America.” Comparisons between the homegrown Klan and Italian fascism soon became ubiquitous in the American press; the resemblance was not superficial.

Dorothy Thompson, the celebrated journalist and anti-fascist campaigner and Sinclair Lewis’s wife at the time, similarly earned the sobriquet of “Cassandra” for prophesying that fascism in the US would look all too familiarly American when it arrived. (Thompson enjoyed the riposte that Cassandra was always proven right in the end.) “When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model,” she said, but an American dictator would be “one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.” And the American people, Thompson added, “will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief!’” A year later, a Yale professor named Halford Luccock was also widely cited in the press when he told an audience: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’” And Luccock went on: “The high-sounding phrase ‘the American way’ will be used by interested groups, intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, tear gas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties.”
A few years later, Thompson wrote again in similar terms, saying she was reminded of what Huey Long himself had once explained to her: “American Fascism would never emerge as a Fascist but as a 100 percent American movement; it would not duplicate the German method of coming to power but would only have to get the right President and Cabinet.” FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace, issued his own warning. “American fascism will not be really dangerous,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1944, “until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”

Now, in 2020, we find ourselves with an America First president. Arguments that Donald Trump can only be understood in relation to the modern conservative movement in America, best framed by the turn to the right under Barry Goldwater or Lee Atwater’s famous Southern Strategy, assume a rupture with American politics of the interwar period that was not necessarily evident at the time. To give just one example, Goldwater was described more than once during his presidential run in 1964, by both his supporters and his critics, as an “America First” politician.

Nor is it only Trump’s critics who see fascist tendencies in his administration’s rhetoric glorifying violence and disregarding the rule of law, democratic processes, and civil liberties; the president and his supporters regularly embrace traditions of American fascism themselves. “America First” was initially the favorite slogan of American xenophobic nativist movements and politics from 1915 to 1941, starting with Woodrow Wilson’s loyalty test, demanding that immigrant “hyphenate Americans” prove they were for “America First,” followed by its use as a rallying cry to keep America out of the League of Nations and from ratifying the Treaty of Versailles. Warren G. Harding also ran on an America First campaign in 1920, even as the slogan was being appropriated by the second Klan, which regularly marched with the legend on banners and used it in recruitment ads. It was invoked on the floor of Congress by supporters of the nativist and eugenicist Immigration Act of 1924. Then it was assimilated by self-styled American fascist groups of the 1930s, including the German-American Bund and the virulently anti-Semitic “America First, Inc.,” before it was adopted by the America First Committee of 1940–1941, when Lindbergh used it to convince Americans that “Jewish interests” were seeking to manipulate the United States into taking part in a European war.

American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn’t mean they’re not fascist, it means they’re not European and it’s not the 1930s. They remain organized around classic fascist tropes of nostalgic regeneration, fantasies of racial purity, celebration of an authentic folk and nullification of others, scapegoating groups for economic instability or inequality, rejecting the legitimacy of political opponents, the demonization of critics, attacks on a free press, and claims that the will of the people justifies violent imposition of military force. Vestiges of interwar fascism have been dredged up, dressed up, and repurposed for modern times. Colored shirts might not sell anymore, but colored hats are doing great.
Reading about the inchoate American fascist movements of the 1930s during the Trump administration feels less prophetic than proleptic, a time-lapse montage of a para-fascist order slowly willing itself into existence over the course of nearly a century. It certainly seems less surprising that recognizably fascistic violence is erupting in the United States under Trump, as his attorney general sends troops to the national capital to act as a private army, armed paramilitary groups occupy state capitols, laws are passed to deny the citizenship and rights of specific groups, and birthright citizenship as guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment is attacked. When the president declares voting an “honor” rather than a right and “jokes” about becoming president for life, when the government makes efforts to add a new question of citizenship to the decennial census for the first time in the nation’s history, and when nationwide protests in response to racial injustice become the pretext for mooting martial law, we are watching an American fascist order pulling itself together.
Click to expand...
CRT, DEI, and woke were always code for “yucky minorities” who these Nazis hated. It’s just sad that too many dumb Americans didn’t see through these extremely thinly veiled accusations. But I guess whatever they see on teevee and social media they believe is truth and good faith arguments.

And yes, its well past time we admit that Trump is a racist and we are living in a fascist regime.

apnews.com

War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon's DEI purge

References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and women and minorities are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content.
apnews.com apnews.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.


View: https://bsky.app/profile/falrising.bsky.social/post/3ljr7jmdjvs2j
 
The Thriller said:
CRT, DEI, and woke were always code for “yucky minorities” who these Nazis hated. It’s just sad that too many dumb Americans didn’t see through these extremely thinly veiled accusations. But I guess whatever they see on teevee and social media they believe is truth and good faith arguments.

And yes, its well past time we admit that Trump is a racist and we are living in a fascist regime.

apnews.com

War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon's DEI purge

References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and women and minorities are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content.
apnews.com apnews.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.


View: https://bsky.app/profile/falrising.bsky.social/post/3ljr7jmdjvs2j
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That’s disgusting! My dad was in the Battle of Okinawa. Last battle before the bombs were dropped on Japan. Most intense air battle of war. Hundreds of Kamakazis.
 
The Thriller said:
CRT, DEI, and woke were always code for “yucky minorities” who these Nazis hated. It’s just sad that too many dumb Americans didn’t see through these extremely thinly veiled accusations. But I guess whatever they see on teevee and social media they believe is truth and good faith arguments.

And yes, its well past time we admit that Trump is a racist and we are living in a fascist regime.

apnews.com

War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon's DEI purge

References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and women and minorities are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content.
apnews.com apnews.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press.


View: https://bsky.app/profile/falrising.bsky.social/post/3ljr7jmdjvs2j
Click to expand...

Shameful
 
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