Mass Death, Catastrophe, War, and Fascism Normalized

Part 1: Republikaner Retribution and Genocide Joe

“F these guys”

Author notes: 1. “Part 2*: Israel’s Final Solution and the Manufature of Mass Idiocy and Hopelessness” will go up tomorrow. 2. I am burning out on two essays per week. Starting next week and lasting through the holiday season, TPSR will consist of some hopefully pithy audio reflections on Mondays and a single substantive essay on Thursdays.

Shit is out da box even as the dominant United States media-politics culture tries to make it all seem like same old business as usual: lots to superficially see between commercials and nothing to deeply understand or radically oppose.

The “world’s greatest country” is now a shooting gallery, for example. Awash with 125 firearms for every 100 people and with more than 40 million military-style assault weapons, Armed Madhouse USA is  now averaging two mass shootings per day.

The slaughters don’t make the national news anymore unless the body count is at least ten. The bigger ones are followed by the usual NRA-cancelled dead- end debate of (a) “it’s the guns” (which it is) versus (b) “it’s mental illness” and/or “moral failure.” No serious gun reform ever follows despite huge majority support for gun control.

Everyone knows it’s just a matter of time until the next Columbine, Aurora, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, El Paso, Lewiston, Maine, etc.

Oh well..

Another example: capitalism-generated environmental calamities are standard old news now.  Mass death and destruction occurs with increasing regularity in epic hurricanes, cyclones, wildfires, floods, and tornados whose extreme intensity and reach are driven by “anthropogenic”/capitalogenic climate change.  Boats full of African climate refugees sink in the Mediterranean again and again.  Smoke fills the air across vast swaths of the planet during newly extended and ferocious fire seasons.

As the Huxlean-Orwellian-Chomskyean media can’tbring itself to say, this is what happens when humanity lets fossil fuel-addicted capitalism turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. (Exxon-Mobil scientists predicted the warming that would result decades ago. The corporation then buried the projection, joining the rest of comanding heights fossil capital in trashing the climate science it pioneered. Capital values profit over livable ecology.)

A “Shining City on a Hill… Full of Fascists”

Meanwhile, as the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian wrote just days before January 6 : “The unavoidable truth is that this country, the much-proclaimed ‘Shining City on a Hill, is full of fascists—in the government at all levels and in large parts of the society as a whole.” Nearly three years ago, a fascist US president sparked an attempted coup, trying to negate the peaceful transfer of power after losing an election.  Thousands of his frothing Amerikaner backers stormed and trashed the US Capitol, after which  a solid majority of his party’s Congresspersons voted not to certify the winner.  The president, Donald “Take Down the Mags” Trump, was furious that metal detectors were kept in place to keep openly fascist Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers from bringing AR-15s to the Attack on the Capitol – an attack he wanted to physically join.

(Hey, remember January 6th? That was some heavy shit!)

This orange-brushed brute has a good shot of regaining power next year. He is on a virulent campaign tour holding hate rallies promising virulent white nationalist “RETRIBUTION” and legitimizing the use of lawless political violence in the name of law and order – a classic fascist calling card. He makes holy martyrs out of the hundreds of thugs who were jailed for trying to carry out a white nationalist putsch on January 6. He calls these fascist goons “political hostages.” A Trumpist January 6th Chorus has been formed to promote his classically fascist persecution narrative.

Tbhe putschist leader Trump is promising to invade Mexico when he gets back in power. This rabid wannabe strongman has suggested that the US needs to deport all Marxists and socialists currently living on its soil. 

He chose to announce his re-election campaign in Waco, Texas, a holy site for Amerikan fascists thanks to the immolation there of the demented, far right Branch Davidian religious cult in a 1993 federal raid.  If that seems shocking, consider where Trump went to campaign on the last night of his failed, Covid-19-sunk 2020 presidential campaign. He visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a Trumpist teenybopper named Kyle Rittenhouse had the previous August used an illegally owned AR-15 to murder two people at a Black Lives rally.

The right-wing hero Rittenhouse conducted these extradjucial executions as part of a fascist paramilitary gang called the Kenosha Militia. He was later invited to meet his malignant orange master for a photo-op in Mar a Lago,

The leading international fascist and former Trump advisor and January 6 instigator Steve Bannon half-jokingly says “we’re the Trump Davidians.” A podcaster with a large far-right audience including Trump or at least Trump’s advisors, Bannon likens Trumpenhouse’s 2023 campaign language to the discourse of the Slave Confederacy's intelligence arm during the US Civil War. "What I didn't realize,” Bannon has told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, “was that 'Come Retribution,' according to some Civil War historians, served as the code words for the Confederate Secret Service's plot to take hostage -- and eventually assassinate -- President Abraham Lincoln.” (Bannon digs that. He no doubt dreams about some armed neo-Redeemers taking out Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as a forceful way to elect the new Christian Fascist US Speaker [see below] to the world’s most powerful and dangerous job.)

Trump has at least 70 million Americans on his side. Most of them are down with his Hitlerian Leviathan Lie about the last presidential contest. There is not a single piece of evidence, not a single more court ruling that could convince his army of backers that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen from their Dear Leader.

Even as his fascist movement recruits election workers and public officials to skew the 2024 vote count, even while Amerikaner thugs prepare to intimidate voters in “enemy” (Democratic Party) precincts next year,  Trump leads the highly unpopular Joe Biden in five of the handful of contested states that determine US presidential election outcomes under the absurd US Electoral College system. So what if the wannabe strongman president for life Trump faces 91 felony counts for grave crimes against the rule of law and “democracy,” along with civil suits for business fraud and sexual violence? In the large neofascist media-politics bubble, the charges against Trump are seen as proof of his Christ-like martyrdom at the hands of the Marxist-globalist-fascist-Woke Radical Left America-Hating Deep State.  Many in Trump’s demented, conspiratorialist base now regualarly threaten violence against mainstream capitalist politicians and public officials they absurdly consider part of a “radical left” plot to “destroy our great country.”

Since Trump grudgingly left office, the corrupt women-hating Christian Fascist Supreme Court that he and the crooked former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appointed has re-imposed US states’ right to re-impose tnhe female enslavement of forced motherhood on pregnant women and girls (fourteen states now ban abortion, and five more have severely restricted it). This lethal Court has blown up affirmative action in college admissions, re-legalized Jim Crow in the provision of commercial services, attacked environmental regulations, and rolled back gun control (even as normalized US mass shootings skyrocket) along with other horrific rulings.

Seventeen “red” (Republi-fascist-controlled) states have passed laws making it a crime for teachers to tell basic truths about race and racism in American history past and present. These and other right-wing states are now engaged in a sadistic attack on transgendered youth.

Red (small trown and rural) America is rife with assault rifles and with angry white Amerikaners who threaten librarians, teachers, school boards, election officials, election workers, and public health officials. The revanchists are on a book-banning binge, stripping school and public library shelves of volumes that relate Black, Latino, Native American, female, gay, lesbian and transgender history and experience.

A vast Republi-Nazi communications network eggs the Trumpist-fascist base on with an endless stream of paranoid, conspiratorialist messaging about the supposed global-Marxist plot to crush western white civilization. The far-right talk radio freak Marc Levin likens Joe Biden to Joe Stalin. He is a frothing maniac to whom Trump thrown praise.

This is all takes place in a nation stocked with 125 guns for every 100 people, including 44 million military style assault rifles, weapons of war that are disproportionately owned by the right. White natonalist genocide is much closer around the historical corner than all but a few “wolf criers” dare to pubicly acknowledge. Fascists are abundant in the nation’s vast army of gendarmes, ex- and current military, and prison guards. AR-15 toting neo-Nazis lurk on the dark web, waiting for the next Trumpy trigger to livestream a racist slaughter.

Meanwhile, the hardcore MAGA-fash Trump-Gaetz wing of the nation’s ever more far righmost major party has put a previously unknown Christian Fascist, a semi-erudite troglodyte with ill intent, atop the US House of Representatives.  Sitting two heartbeats away from the presidency and in position to shut down the US government in eleven days, “MAGA Mike” Johnson proudly acknowledges that the US is not a democracy and hopes to make it even less of one.  He doesn’t go for the separation of church state. He looks forward to passing a national abortion ban, considers homosexuality a disease, and says that prayer is the solution to the nation’s insane gun violence epidemic.  This loathsome Amerikaner blames mass shootings on abortion and the teaching of evolution.  

“MAGA Mike” wants to cripple the federal government’s ability to tax the rich while complaining about the skyrocketing federal deficit, which he’d like to use to justify tearing up yet more of the US welfare state including Medicare and Social Security. Never mind that the under-taxing of the nation’s grotesquely wealthy Few is the main thing driving US government debt.

The Republi-fascists are panting and pining to replace formerly normative bourgeois democracy, American-Style, with authoritarian neofascist governance,  Amerikaner-style.  This is their project for 2024-25. They are primed for one-sided civil war.

If and when they grab the full reigns, a very distinct possibility in 2024-25, they will have been enabled in their eliminationist undertakings by the ongoing normalization of mass death and fascism that is rife in US media.  Beyond occasional MSNBC and CNN spots and New York Times commentaries bemoaning the right-wing “populist” extremism afoot, the general tendency in US media is still very much to frame the nation’s politics as part of the normal conflict between the (unmentionably neo-)“liberal” Democrats and the “conservative” (LOL) Republicans.

Genocide Joe

Think this essay is a campaign commercial for the dismal dollar-drenched Democrats?  Think again. Still clinging to a failing bourgeois democratic constitutional order that is badly tilted to the right, these capitalist-imperialists are deeply complicit in the ongoing and deepening political catastrophe. They are the party of Weimar. Democratic Party-affiliated “liberals” disproportionately own and manage the nation’s commercialized, fascism-fueling war and entertainment media. Their weak and deeply conservative corporate Democratic president Joe Biden – a pathetically uncharismatic bumbler elected by the chance occurrences of Covid-19 and the George Floyd murder – has betrayed one liberal- and progressive-sounding campaign pledge after another (a recent grotesque example among many is Biden’s asinine decision to keep building Trump’s nativist border wall).  He has failed miserably to counter the Republi-fascist menace head on again and again (refusing, for example, to use his clear authority to guarantee abortion rights across the US after the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson decision.)

The Democrats are historically a bigger imperialist shedder of blood than the (also blood-soaked and imperialist) Republicans, and US president Joe Biden is a living monument to and agent of that record. He is a despicable warmonger who as a US Senator in the fall of 2002 led the charge for the US Congress’s blank check advance approval of George W. Bush’s criminal, mass-murderous invasion of Iraq. As president, Biden has spent billions on the expansion of an inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine – a miserable stalemate that has killed hundreds of thousands while nudging the risk of nuclear war to its highest level in decades.  He is gearing up for a military confrontation with the world’s number two superpower, China, in East Asia.

Now Biden is deeply complicit in Israel’s racist and genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. He has signed on fully with US imperial outpost Israel’s escalated mass slaughter of Palestinians in a wildly disproportionate, collectively punitive response to the Islamo-fascist group Hamas’s gruesome October 7^th terror attack in southern Israel.  “Genocide Joe” quickly flew to Tel Aviv to pledge complete US support for the Zionist occupation and apartheid state of Israel as it wages a criminal war on people (half of whom are children) stuck in the criminally sieged concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip. Biden has even stooped to the level of questioning the civilian casualty reports coming out of Gaza as Israel buries Palestinian children in rubble day after day. 

The scenes of devastation resulting from the US-Israel attack are the result of l unlawful collective punishment including the merciless bombing of hospitals, schools, bakeries, apartment complexes, and refugee camps. This is US-sponsored Israel doubling and tripling down on its 75-year “Nakba” (Arabic for “catastrophe”) against the Palestinian people. With Washington providing critical military support and political and diplomatic cover, Israel pretends to justify one Holocaust (the one it inflicts on the Palestinians) with another (the one the Nazis inflicted on European Jewry).

The US cable news normalizes and justifies this brazen flouting of law and  human decency.

More on US-Israel’s horrific crimes and fascism tomorrow….

* Part 2 will appear tomorrow morning.