Fascism watch thread/news and discussions

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caltrek
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Election Logistics Firm Sues Perpetrators of Voter Fraud Smear Campaign
by Cameron Langford
September 12 , 2022

Introduction:
HOUSTON (Courthouse News) — Election logistics firm Konnech Inc. says in a lawsuit filed Monday its founder and his family had to leave their home due to threats from supporters of True the Vote, a voter fraud conspiracy group spreading lies that the company is a vehicle of the Chinese Communist Party to control American elections.

Making claims of defamation and computer fraud, Konnech sued True the Vote Inc., a Texas nonprofit, its founder Catherine Engelbrecht and board member Gregg Phillips in Houston federal court.

Started and led by Eugene Yu, a U.S. citizen of Chinese descent, Konnech sells election logistics software called PollChief to U.S. governmental entities, which they use to manage poll workers and coordinate distribution of equipment and technical support staff to polling places.
Though its software is meant to help county, city and local governments run elections more efficiently, Konnech underscores the limits of its services in its lawsuit.

“Konnech’s software products are not involved in any way in the registration of voters, the production, distribution, scanning, or processing of ballots, nor the collection, counting or reporting of votes," the complaint states. "Indeed, Konnech never handles any ballots and no ballots or other voting counts ever enter any of Konnech’s computer servers.”
Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/electio ... campaign/

caltrek’s comment: What is potentially fascist about this case revolves around the targeting of Konnech by vigilantes using threats of violence and physical intimidation based on nothing more than unfounded allegations by True the Vote. Of course, all of this is subject to proof in the courts, but if convincing evidence of Konnech’s claims are forthcoming, a substantial portion of the assets of True the Vote should be turned over to Konnech by way of restitution of damages.

Freedom of speech relates to prior restraint by the government. It does not protect slander and libel.
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The Nazification of American Society and the Scourge of Violence
by Henry Giroux
October 14, 2022

Introduction:
(Counterpunch) Violence in the United States surpasses the unthinkable and increasingly resides in the space of apocalyptic rage, manufactured ignorance, and the normalization of a pervasive culture of ritualized barbarism. As civic culture collapses and truth succumbs to conspiracy theories, censorship, and the white washing of history, politics is emptied of democratic values, shared responsibilities, and a viable moral compass. Lawlessness is fueled by a diminishing lack of accountability in the political realm leading to an upsurge in racism, domestic terrorism, mass shootings and increasing threats of violence. Acts of violence erupt in even the most protected and secure spaces extending from schools to supermarkets, engulfing every facet of American life. We now live in a time marked by a politics of displacement, disappearance, erasure, patriotic frenzy, and political repression. Human suffering has been turned into a spectacle of racist aggression.

Violence, once hidden or proclaimed to be on the fringe of American society, is now at the center of power and everyday life and has become normalized. Violent threats are now repeatedly lodged against election officials, public health workers, teachers, librarians, as well as almost any politician who refuses to accept the lie that the presidential election was stolen. The threats of violence by a political movement of white supremist and election denying extremists has reached an all time high as has its insane accusations, threats, and hate mongering. For example, influential pedlars of hate, particularly QAnon members, now claim that the Democratic Party is filled with blood sucking satanists who abduct and sexualize young children. The fallout from these kind of threats is too extensive to document here one example, as reported by The Daily Beast, captures the vicious lies mainstreamed by such groups and how they incentivize violence among their followers:
  • On August 11, Libs of TikTok falsely claimed Boston’s Children’s Hospital was performing hysterectomies on children. On August 15, Matt Walsh falsely said the hospital was putting “every toddler…on a path to sterilization and butchery before they can even talk.” Unsurprisingly, the hospital has since faced a deluge of threats, hate mail, and harassment ever since.[1]

[1] Wajahat Ali, “It’s Time to Call MAGA a National Security Threat,” The Daily Beast (September 16, 2022). Online: https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-time- ... ty-threat
Read more of the Counterpunch article here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/1 ... violence/

caltrek’s comment: The now deceased founder of Counterpunch Alexander Cockburn was considered by many, perhaps unjustly so, as being a Stalinist. So, this is hardly just another “liberal” take on the situation.
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The condemnation of the Democratic party contained in the article cited below is a little more extreme than I think is merited. Still, the warnings concerning fascism in America are well taken.


Dear Liberals: Stop Your Smug Celebration of the Midterms
by Paul Street
November 23, 2022

Introduction:
(Counterpunch) Liberals and some progressives are feeling smug and self-satisfied over the mid-term elections.

How grotesque.

Yes, there was no red wave. The at least non-fascist major capitalist party, the Democrats, will keep the US Senate for two more years. MAGA candidates backed by the malignant narcissi-fascist Donald Trump did badly, something that is helping cost him support from leading Republican politicos and billionaire donors and raising questions about his viability as a 2024 presidential candidate. A bunch of ghastly election-denier/-stealer MAGA candidates vying for offices in charge of electoral processes and machinery (secretary of state, attorney general, and governor) lost in key contested states where they would have been able to monkey with the next presidential election.

Elections and Rule of Law are “Incidental” for the Amerikaner Base
Super, but guess what? In the United States as elsewhere, fascism is a ferocious and many-sided movement beneath and beyond elections. And our ugly Amerikaners love losing and being out of power. Electoral loss or stalemate doesn’t subdue or restrain them one bit. To the contrary, it feeds their sense of white-patriarchal-Christian-nationalist victimization, encouraging them to double down on conspiratorial madness and the use of violence to keep the ungodly liberal-“radical left” and nonwhite enemy at bay. Keep an eye out for escalated right wing insanity and mayhem.

In a brilliant post-midterm essay titled “Donald Trump is (Still) the President of White America,” Erin Aubry Kaplan makes a critical point worthy of lengthy quotation:

(Politico) Then it hit me: Trump was, and continues to be, the chief executive not of a nation, or of the Republican Party, or even of a cult, but of a culture — namely a culture of white supremacy.

This is actually worse than it sounds. Even very “woke” Americans tend to see white supremacy as an isolated dynamic synonymous with racism, the “bad” America. But what many people don’t realize is that white supremacy is a culture that is much broader and deeper than that. It is about racialized power, an assumed authority of white people (chiefly men) to set and enforce the social and moral order as they see fit, often in the service of values that on their face sound noble, like tradition or family.
Read more of the Counterpunch article here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/2 ... midterms/

Read more of the Erin Auburn Kaplan article in Politico here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine ... 00069597?
Last edited by caltrek on Thu Dec 01, 2022 11:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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wjfox wrote: Thu Dec 01, 2022 7:04 pm
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Hate Leader Nick Fuentes Is Recruiting Incels
by Kristen Doerer
December 22, 2022

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) The former president of the United States wanted his guests to be seen. His meeting with Ye, a.k.a. Kanye West, had already been postponed since the rapper’s antisemitic outbursts this fall had made him a public pariah. But two days before Thanksgiving, Trump led Ye and his entourage to a public table at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The group included a former Trump adviser as well as a young man named Nick Fuentes, an adviser on Ye’s fledgling 2024 presidential campaign—and one of America’s most virulent white nationalists.

Cue a familiar firestorm: Trump’s Republican allies distanced themselves from his behavior without denouncing the man himself. Trump, fresh from his own campaign announcement, said he did not know who Fuentes was, yet failed to condemn him or his ideologies in multiple statements about the dinner.

But for Fuentes, the meeting was a profound success, and perhaps the greatest example of his years-long effort to bring his extremist ideologies into the mainstream. The 24-year-old hosts a nightly broadcast with a cult-like following among young white men who believe they have lost their rightful place in the United States. For the last five years, Fuentes has pushed a vision for an “America First” movement that fuses white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism in calling for a nation dominated by white Christian men.

In tying himself most recently to Trump—a man accused of sexual assault by 19 women, and who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”—Fuentes is advancing one of his latest strategies for cultivating followers: making overtures to men who feel aggrieved by women.

Over the past year, Fuentes has made a point of speaking directly to these men—many of whom identify as “incels”—in numerous appearances on his nightly livestream, far-right podcasts, and Telegram. Historically, incels defined themselves as “involuntary celibate,” but the term has become inextricably associated with misogynist incels, men who blame women for their problems and believe women owe them sex.
Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... g-incels/

caltreks comment: When I was a teenager and into my young adulthood, I often heard the word "macho" bandied about. My initial understanding of the word from the context I usually found it in was "tough guy." At a point early in my professional career, a Hispanic supervisor of mine explained that there can be more nuance to the word than that. Instead of "tough guy" something more like "tough guy protective of women" or "tough guy protective of family." Mr. Fuentes seems to want to be a tough guy that rejects that protective role, or at least define it according to his own highly authoritarian terms. In the process, not only minimizing the protective aspects, but also potentially robbing women of a voice in the affairs of the day. He seems to want to harken back to a time where the warriors of the tribe set the rules, a hallmark of fascism.

Curiously, we also see a parallel development in places such as Afghanistan. There we see a blend of Islam with extremist fascistic practices. Yet, such practices represent an extreme interpretation of the Quran. Other interpretations result in much more moderate and (especially in Western and women's eyes) reasonable practices.
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Caltrek the amount of fascists in the USA alone is unreal. The worst part is that some are more feral about it not realizing that if they ever got their goals they would be the first to go since they are feral. Its why I have been worried because its simple stuff and yet folks still don't get it. Hell even if the USA went full on tech style and slightly fascist it would not pan out the way these folks think at all.
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