Some Fascism Updates

A Vote Suppression Order, "a Political Military," and Bipartisan Imperialism

A Vote Suppression Order

A recent development in White House fascism is Mein Trumpf’s vicious vote-suppressing executive order saying that (a) people can’t register to vote in US elections without first showing documentary proof of US citizenship and (b) all ballots must be received by Election Days.

This order is about trying to consolidate fascist rule in four ways:

(i) Advancing and cementing into neofascistic law-by-fiat the Big Hitlerian Lie that a significant number of non-citizens vote in US elections at the behest of the (supposedly “radical Left”) Democratic Party. (This baseless claim is at the heart of Trump’s preposterous charge that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election and thereby justified his attempt to overthrow and cancel that election.)

(ii) Abrogating the US Constitution’s granting of primary power over the management of elections to state governments. A leading election integrity specialist told CBS News that Trump’s latest fascist order attempts a "federal takeover of the constitutional authority of local and state governments to run elections" and "seeks to seize authority over election technology and processes at the state and local level ... all while bypassing congressional approval.” The specialist adds that implementing the order would state and local taxpayers billions of dollars.

(iii) Disenfranchising a vast, disproportionately poor and nonwhite swath of the electorate by canceling the voting rights of people who lack passports (possessed by just half of the US population) or copies of their birth certificates or other proofs of citizenship.

(iv) Rolling back the boost that Trump thinks mail-in ballots give to the other capitalist party, the Democrats.

This is yet more cause for skepticism over the notion that we can rely on electoral politics to remove the Trump fascist regime.

Imperialist David French on the Non-Firing of Fascists Hegseth and Walz

The news has been agog with reports and commentary on the Trump Defense Department’s failure to maintain proper imperial communications security for a top-level discussion of US plans to bomb Houthi bases in Yemen. As most of my readers know, the infamous phone chat included the “woefully unqualified” Christian Fascist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, MAGAt National Security Adviser Michael Walz, and Trump’s socio-pathological neo-Nazi promoting Vice President JD Vance. It was conducted on the easily intelligence-hacked phone app Signal and “inadvertently” included Jeffrey Goldberg, the centrist and Zionist editor of The Atlantic.

A New York Times opinion piece by the imperialist Times columnist David French is titled “The Worst Part of Pete Hegseth’s Group Chat Debacle.” At first glance I rolled my eyes at the title, thinking “here we go, the author of course won’t say anything about the criminal horror of the United States bombing the Hell out of another poor country in the Middle East yet again.”

My eye roll was justified: French shows not a hint of a wisp of a scent of an iota of concern for the people of Yemen, for the criminality of the Washington’s bombing of that country (which has killed at least 53 people and injured dozens more), the justness of the Houthis’ cause — righteously closing sea lanes to the Suez Canal in response to the US-Israel genocide in Gaza.

But of course: French is a longtime conservative Republican, a former National Review senior writer who boasts of garnering a Bronze Star for his participation in the criminal US invasion of Iraq.

Still, French put his finger on something very important — the fact that Hegseth and Walz will keep their jobs after this egregious security breach because Trump’s government is too politicized along MAGA lines for Trump to get rid of operatives he installed to implement his fascist, white supremacist agenda. That is the best (and my!) interpretation of these imperialist reflections from French:

‘The way to handle a security breach like this is to immediately, especially in the case of Hegseth, suspend him from his duties pending investigation. And I would say the same with the national security adviser, who inadvertently brought Goldberg into the chat…Nothing destroys a leader’s credibility with soldiers more thoroughly than hypocrisy or double standards. When leaders break the rules that they impose on soldiers, they break the bond of trust between soldiers and commanders. The best commanders I knew did not ask a soldier to comply with a rule that they didn’t also follow. The best commanders led by example. So what example has Hegseth set? That he’s politically loyal, but also that he’s careless? And when you’re careless in the military, people can die. And that’s why I say, if he has any honor at all, he will resign.

…the implications for national security are grave… This incident is occurring in a larger context. If the present course of action holds, which is the administration tries to brush it off and holds no one to account, then what you’ve had is a further reaffirmation that the American military is becoming a political military.

So you had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, leading attorneys in the military, the JAG officers, JAG generals in the military, relieved for political reasons. Then you have the secretary of defense retained in spite of the fact that he violated every standard of operational security in a way that would lead any other soldier to face dramatic consequences. He’s still in office, and as of the moment of this recording, there seems to be no indication that he’s either going to step down or be fired.

So what does that say? It says that we’re replacing standards of professionalism with standards of political loyalty. I have seen far greater consequences applied to service members for far lesser security breaches than the kind of hand waving that we’re seeing now from the administration, where it’s minimizing what occurred, denying that it’s significant. This is not the way any other soldier would be treated under similar circumstances, but the rule is there’s one standard for MAGA, especially the MAGA loyalists, and there are other standards for everybody else.

And if you make the American military more political than professional — then you make the American military more like the Russian military. You make the American military more like the military of totalitarian states. And as fearsome as many of those militaries can look on paper, I guarantee you political militaries, pound for pound, are much less effective than professional militaries.

The stakes are, what are we doing to the very culture of the United States military? Are we telling it that the days of professionalism are over and the days for political loyalty have begun?”

Now, make no mistake: David French shows here that he is an ugly American imperialist. His main concern is that a “political military” is “much less effective than a professional military.”

“Less effective” at what, pray tell? At mass murderously advancing US imperial ambitions and power around the world — as French would never say.

Beyond Mere Loyalty

But yes, French is right: the criteria for holding top military command positions for the Trump fascist regime (the words I just italicized are from language French would or could never use at the Times) is political loyalty to Trump and MAGA. And here there’s a lot more to say than French lets on. A writer in the Times reader comments attached to his Times essay got close to the truth on this:

“She/Miami, FL: It's not a matter of if but when the military now sent down to the border will turn their guns on Palestinian protesters with trigger happy bully boy Hegseth and the prejudiced, illogical Rubio in charge. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio openly conflates students protesting the extremist government's policy in Gaza with Hamas terrorists and antisemitism. Armed with a 1798 statute, last used in the war of 1812 he can get rid of all accused of gang membership, but with the little used 1952 McCarthy times statute, he can attempt to eject lawful permanent residents) When the military is sent in to control the protests, on campus, maybe in cities, it won't just be the visa dependent and lawful permanent residents who are harmed, but the citizens of the U.S., who dare disagree with the coup d'etat perpetrated against their government.”

Why is the longtime drunk, women abuser, workplace bungler, and former Fatherland/FOX News host Hegseth atop the US Department of “Defense” in the first place? Because he is an open Christian white nationalist neofascist who Trump47 is counting on to do what Trump45’s second Secretary of Defense refused to do during the George Floyd Rebellion in the summer of 2020: deploy the US military against protesters and political enemies inside the imperial homeland itself. Bear in mind that Hegseth and the sadistic dog-killing MAGA director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem are due to celebrate Adolph Hitler’s birthday — April 20th — by reporting to Mein Trumpf on the advisability of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act to effectively declare martial law inside the USA — the great Land of Liberty.

This is the US Secretary of Defense who will soon be reporting to Mein Trumpf on the advisability of declaring martial law inside the United States

The Chats Might Have “Endangered American Pilots”

The dismal Weimar-Vichy Dems in Congress contained their critique of SignalGate within the narrow confines of US imperialism. The party’s Representatives on the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday merely “argued that the chats were vulnerable to interception by an adversarial power and would have endangered American pilots if the conversation had been given to the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia group that has sophisticated air-defense systems.” Never mind the criminality of the US bombings, the civilian Yemeni casualties, the justness of the Houthis’ cause, and the abject imperialist nature of the United States’ massive and lethal, genocide-backing presence in the Middle East. And never mind the urgent need for millions and millions of Americans to rise up to demand that the Trump fascist regime must go. It’s long past time for purportedly decent people to stop acting like Wes Anderson characters in a Quentin Tarantino movie, to steal the writer Jeff Sharlet’s clever metaphor for the Congressional Democrats who sat through Trump’s March 4th hate speech to Congress.