Fascism watch thread/news and discussions

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caltrek
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Billionaire Capitalists Like Musk and Thiel Want to Kill Democracy
by Robert Reich
May 28, 2024

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) Elon Musk and entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret billionaire dinner party in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and reinstall Donald Trump in the White House. The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s former Treasury secretary.

Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on his X platform.


Conclusion:
If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power—as Musk, Thiel, and other billionaires are now putting on full display. Inequalities of power in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.

Under fascist strongmen, no one is safe—not even oligarchs.

If we want to guard what’s left of our freedom, we must meet the anti-democracy movement head on with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from oligarchs like Musk and Thiel and neofascists like Trump.

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/b ... emocracy
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The white supremacy strategy at the core of Trump's plans for a second term

May 25, 2024 at 7:50:22 BST

Of all the disturbing things that could happen if Americans decide to send Donald Trump back to the White House this November, the most corrosive and far-reaching is his plan to institutionalize racism and racial bias into our federal government. An officially sanctioned scheme to deliberately elevate the interests of white Americans—which Trump and his enablers at the Heritage Foundation are planning in plain sight—would damage the nation in ways that most people may not understand.

But as the 2024 election approaches, the four out of 10 American citizens who do not identify as “White alone”‘ should try to imagine what a second Trump term would look like. People from racial backgrounds historically subjected to discrimination—including Black people, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans—can currently take solace in knowing federal laws, however imperfectly enforced, still exist to deter open and egregious examples of racial prejudice against them. These include principles of equal protection and employment nondiscrimination that have existed to provide redress to those in the labor force for generations now.

However, the Heritage Foundation drafters of Project 2025, Trump’s blueprint for governance if he is again elected, intend to radically redefine what “racism” actually means. For them, “racism” is quite literally reimagined and reconfigured as anything that they perceive as a threat to the continued hegemony of white Americans. We are already seeing an implicit reappraisal of “racism” and civil liberties in several Republican-dominated states, as white people seek to preserve and maintain the racial dominance they have enjoyed in this country since the days of its founding.

If Trump is elected this November, these efforts will become national policy, even as laws that exist to protect against actual racism and racial bias in our society will go largely unenforced at the federal level. Instead, those same laws will be selectively applied and altered to target so-called racism against white people. This transformation is intended to encourage similar efforts in Republican-controlled states, which will then be validated by conservative judges. As explained by MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem, Project 2025 is ultimately a “path to unraveling multicultural democracy” with a goal of enshrining white dominance as the law of the land.

In recent years, the Republican Party has consciously and deliberately abandoned almost all efforts to present itself as anything but a group devoted to maintaining white power and white supremacy. The political weapon they choose to wield: blame. White Americans—particularly middle- and working-class white Americans—are routinely indoctrinated by right-wing media to believe that their inability to make economic headway in American society is due to the encroachment of other races upon their “status” as white people.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5 ... econd-term
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San Antonio U.S. Rep. Chip Roy says he wants to 'ethnic cleanse' white progressives

In a tweet defending Donald Trump's plan to deport 20 million migrants, Roy said he wants to deport "white progressive Democrats - with a special bonus for rich ones with an Ivy League degree."

By Michael Karlis on Fri, Jun 21, 2024 at 4:54 pm

https://www.sacurrent.com/news/san-anto ... s-34866152


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Trump Amplifies Calls to Jail Top Elected Officials, Invokes Military Tribunals


A post that Mr. Trump circulated on Sunday called for Liz Cheney to be prosecuted by a military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.

By Chris Cameron
July 1, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/p ... =url-share

"SNIP...........

Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.

Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies.

One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.

“Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”
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weatheriscool wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2024 10:56 am
Trump Amplifies Calls to Jail Top Elected Officials, Invokes Military Tribunals


A post that Mr. Trump circulated on Sunday called for Liz Cheney to be prosecuted by a military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.

By Chris Cameron
July 1, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/p ... =url-share

"SNIP...........

Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.

Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies.

One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals.

“Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”
Utterly deranged.
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wjfox wrote: Tue Jul 02, 2024 5:30 pm
No other presidential election in American history has ever been this important, and if Trump wins democracy is truly and thoroughly finished.
And yet the majority just does not seem to understand the danger.
And worse yet, at least a quarter of the country is actively wishing for tyranny, so long as they're the ones on top.
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Head of group responsible for Project 2025 threatens violence if people challenge their "revolution"

Source: Salon

Published July 3, 2024 12:17PM (EDT)

The president of the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind a project to reshape federal government as a tool of conservative causes, issued a warning to opponents that a "second American Revolution" could turn bloody if they resist.

Kevin Roberts appeared on the Real America's Voice network to celebrate a string of Supreme Court rulings that weakened the federal government's administrative reach and provided absolute immunity to Donald Trump and potentially other presidents for "official acts."

“We’re in the process of taking this country back,” Roberts declared. “No one in the audience should be despairing.” Roberts, arguing the need for a "vigorous executive," said that the "radical left" was furious because his side is "winning." "And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be," he said.

Last weekend, Roberts appeared on MSNBC to defend Project 2025, the plan to stack the federal civil service with Republican loyalists and enact a litany of policies, including the dissolution of the Department of Education, removing guardrails to protect American consumers and privatizing Social Security.
Read more: https://www.salon.com/2024/07/03/head-o ... evolution/
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It's not exactly a leak; the transcript has been publicly available for over two years now. MSNBC just dug it up.

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/do ... transcript
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Vakanai
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wjfox wrote: Wed Jul 17, 2024 8:26 pm
Trump is very much a self styled American Hitler, whether he admits it or not.
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similar vibes

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YIKES! Perhaps, it'll be best if I retract my prior statement regarding preferring him as AI Czar. I mean, this guy is quite unapologetically Cyberpunk brought into reality by every possible metric.

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator’s benefactor. But they’re both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society.

NewRepublic
In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.

Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit. In 2013, Thiel invested in Tlön, a software startup co-founded by Yarvin. In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trump would pay off.

Since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised—and parroted—Yarvin’s ideas.

Patchworks - Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.

In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”
----------------------------------------------------------------

Seems Vance is an order of magnitude more dangerous than Trump is, in ways even Steve Bannon might blush. Cyberpunk was meant as a warning, not an instruction manual.
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