Seven Fascist Things That Happened Recently

Dear readers and listeners, this is me trying to keep both myself and you up to date with at least some of the FASCIST avalanche that is falling all around is here in the United States. Some of the latest:

+1. The big ugly budget bill that Trump signed on July 4th slashed food assistance and medical coverage for the poor in order to pay for giant tax cuts for the super wealthy and for a 270% increase in the budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, making ICE the largest federal “law enforcement agency” in US history.

Think ICE’s brutal, racially profiled kidnapping and family-separating raids on workplaces, homes, traffic intersections, parks, and courts have been horrible so far? Just wait until the new money and weapons kick in. You ain’t seen noth’n yet.

This is fascism.

(For what it’s worth, the big fascist bill is opposed by two in three Americans.)

+2. “Alligator Alcatraz,” the immigrant concentration camp that the sado-fascists Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis have hastily constructed in the remote Everglades (where Trump boasts that escapees will be “eaten by wildlife”) is a vast torture chamber. Legal US residents with green cards are being subjected there to Gitmo-like conditions. They are denied access to medicine and fed food that is crawling with maggots. Bright lights are kept shining on them 24 hours a day.

Try "Alligator Auschwitz.”

This too is fascism.

+3. Two mornings ago, MacArthur Park, located in a heavily Latino section of Los Angeles, was raided by masked heavily armed federal agents in armored vehicles, military trucks, and on horses while a helicopter hovered above. The occupiers brought a big truck-mounted gun. Fatherland (Fox) News Channel “reporters” were embedded with the raiders and broadcast the operation live. Los Angeles’ Democratic mayor Karen Bass arrived to protest this dystopian show of fascist force. US Border Patrol chief Herr Gregory Bovino said this to Fatherland News: “I don’t work for Karen Bass. Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

That was fascist.

(Please recall what Gestapo Barbie — Trump’s sadistic Nazi Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem — said in Los Angeles right before federal cops through US Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) to the ground and handcuffed: the National Guard and US Marines were occupying Los Angeles to “liberate” it from “socialist” rule. How fascist was that? Fascist like Herr Trump calling New York City Democratic Party mayoral nominee Zhoran Mamdani a “100% communist lunatic” and threatening to strip him of his US citizenship and deport him?)

+4. Speaking of Los Angeles, I have recently seen a video in which masked federal agents in West LA kidnap an Iranian American woman and hold her to the ground as she goes into medical seizure. Her husband screams “why are you doing this? Why are you doing this? She’s sick, she’s bad, call 911! My God. Why are you doing this?” Offering no explanation and no hint of where they will be taking the sick and distressed woman, the ICE gendarmes threaten the husband with arrest for “interference.”

Fascism.

+5. Trump had the Pentagon fly three B2 Stealth bombers, the same planes that recently bombed Iran, fly over the White House right after he signed his highly unpopular big fascist budget bill on July Fourth. That was without precedent in US history: a military flyover to celebrate the “commander in chief” signing a law (a fascist and oligarchic law to boot). And not just any flyover — B2s, the same ones that just criminally bombed Iran. At the cost of millions of taxpayer dollars, Mein Trumpf ordered a chilling exhibition of imperial military superpower to demonstrate his authoritarian political dominance over the homeland

That was pretty damn fascist.

+6. Caught between Trump’s recurrent statements of concern that some of his friends in farming and hospitality are worried about losing their cheap immigrant workers and Trump and Trumpism’s persistent xenophobic nationalist/racist war on brown-skinned immigrants, Trump’s RepubliNazi Secretary of Agriculture claimed that Fortress America can deport all its immigrant farmworkers and replace them with technology and slackers who are now compelled to work to keep their Medicaid. "I can’t underscore enough,” Brooke Rollins said, “there will be no amnesty. The mass deportations will continue. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation and with 34 million able-bodied people on Medicaid we should be able to do this fairly quickly.”

Never mind that most of what fruit and vegetable tenders and pickers do defies automation and that most Medicaid recipients are already working. The claim that people at the bottom of society are lazy and refuse hard work is a key part of the fascist world view, as was explained years ago by the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley.

Dr. Stanley has left the United States, observing that it is now under “a fascist regime.”

+7. Imagine a US president from one of the nation's two long-ruling capitalist parties saying that he HATES everyone aligned with the other reigning bourgeois party. Oh wait, you don't have to imagine that. Mein Trumpf, who has taken his party over to fascism (which is capitalism without previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law, among other things), actually said that to great applause from frothing white Amerikaner volk at a hate rally in Iowa. There Trump vomited up this lovely comment about the Democrats while trumpeting his big fascist bill: “I hate them…I really do, I hate them, I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country.”