The Latest in Amerikaner Fascism

Reflections on Recent Outrages

Publicly at least, the dominant media and dismal Dems are still having a hard time putting the pieces together even now.

I’m going to interrupt my series on revolution briefly to write/say a few things about the escalating fascist insanity that the Weimar (and perhaps soon Vichy) Democratic Party and the so-called liberal media just can’t bring themselves to properly call fascist.

I have been tracking and reporting on this Amerikaner Republi-fascism and Democratic enabling of it for more than eight years now.  You can review my recent Substack posts and CounterPunch essays for some of my reporting and commentary on that. These are especially useful, I think/hope:

“Peril and Possibility: Republi-Fascists, Weimar Dems, and Post-Election Scenarios,” CounterPunch, September 13, 2024

“My  Recent Refuse Fascism Interview”: https://paulstreet.substack.com/p/my-recent-refuse-fascism-interview

“Dispatch on American Political Dystopia,” CounterPunch, August 30, 2024

What most deserves mention and horror since those pieces went up?

After the second failed assassination attempt on the fascist Trump by a deranged white male in criminal possession of a military assault weapon – the one two days ago did not include shots – the brazen hypocrisy of the fascist Trump campaign was on shameless display.  Trump’s Republi-Nazi running mate JD Vance said that the nation’s political rhetoric had become too heated but absurdly called the Democrats the leading culprits in their regard. Herr Vance said that Democrats can’t call Trump “a threat to democracy and a fascist” and not expect violence to follow when “some crazy person” decides “to take matters into their own hands.”

Trump went on  Fox News Digital to claim that last Sunday’s  golf course gunman “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it...Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out. They use highly inflammatory language I can use it too — far better than they can — but I don’t.”

There are five key problems with this language.

First, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump and Trumpism are open, explicit, and in fact (as I have documented at length in dozens of essays and two books) fascist threats to democracy.  Vance’s complaint amounts to instructing people to shut up about the objective reality of Trump because telling the truth about the malignant orange monster and the movement and party behind him will provoke violence.  

Second, the Democrats don’t actually call Trump a fascist to any remotely appropriate or significant degree – a topic I’ll get into at the end of this commentary.

Third, the Republi-fascist Party is singificantly responsible for the nation’s lethal saturation by weapons, including 115 guns for every 100 Americans and 15 to 18 million military assault rifles in circulation. In brazen defiance of super-majority public opinion and in lockstep alignment with the fascist National Rifle Association, the nation’s Reichmost major party recurrently blocks meaningful gun reform and thereby helps ensure that “crazy persons” like Thomas Crooks and Ryan Routh have easy access to weapons of mass destruction like AR-15s.

Fourth, contrary to Vance and Trump’s claims, neither Crooks nor Routh were motivated by Democrats’ rhetoric on Trump.

Fifth, the Democrats aren’t in the ballpark compared to the Republi-fascists when it comes to heated and violence-inducing political rhetoric.  Trump continues, for example, to absurdly call the centrist capitalist-imperialist Kamala Harris both a “communist” and a “fascist” — “ideologies at the opposite ends of the left-right political spectrum” (as the Associated Press had the decency to report). 

Trump regularly calls Harris a threat to democracy. He claims without evidence that the “Marxist” Harris-Walz campaign is scheming to “steal” the 2024 election.  He says that Harris and her party will “destroy our nation.”  He has continued with his Hitlerian lie claiming that the Democrats are bringing in illegal immigrants to register them to vote.

The orange fascist maniac recenrlt posted this online in response to news that the mega pop star Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.”  We can be quite certain that Swift’s managers have had to ramp up their security precautions in light of that insane post, whicch seems likely to motivate some “crazy person” to “take matters into their own hands.”   

Speaking of reckless and violent rhetoric that puts lives at risk, Trump and Vance have doubled down on Trump’s Hitlerian “presidential debate” claim that illegal Haitian immigrants are eating local residents’ dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio – a bizarre charge that may have been planted in his head by a far-right racist and conspiracy nut who has joined him on the campaign trail in recent weeks (Laura Loomer).

The charge has led to racist/nativist bomb and mass shooting threats that have targeted Haitians and closed schools and other public  buildings in Springfield, adding to the climate of fear and hatred that Trump has been consistently promoting in the hope of encouraging right-wing violence.

The morally diseased racist Vance went on last Sunday’s talk shows to say that "media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes…If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He said the quiet, violence-inducing part out fascist loud! The women-hating/-baiting RepubliNazi Vance is willing to “create stories” to advance racist, nativist, and fascist narratives - ugly storylines that have fueled the murder of significant numbers of people across the country (Buffalo, New York, El Paso, Texas, and Pittsbugh, Pennsylavania among other locales) in recent years.

Two days before the latest Trump assassination drama last Sunday, Trump was in California falsely without the slightest hint of evidence that that violent US crime has spiked as a result of an influx of migrants.  Trump preposterously claimed that “the voting system isn’t honest since millions and millions of ballots are sent out all over the place. Some people get two, three, four or five times.” And Trump absurdly charged that “Harris and the Biden administration are secretly flying in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.”

All of this insane and inflammatory, violence-promoting rhetoric is consistent with the richly fascist essence of Trump’s politics, evident to some of us (ranging from centrists like The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik to semi-progressive Democrats like Robert Reich, Christian leftists like Chris Hedges, radical cultural theorists and social critics like Henry Giroux and communist Marxists like myself) who were snottily accused of “boy who cried wolf” alarmism before the 2016 election.

Even now, nearly four years after January 6, the Democrats and what passes for liberal media – laughably called “radical left” by the Republifascists (as if Wolf Blitzer, Dana Bash, Rachel Maddow, and Joy Reid advocate the dictatorship of the proletariat!) — refuse to call the nation’s rightmost/Reich-most party fascist.

A prolific liberal and anti-communist historian recent told me that Tim Walz “says it all the time.”  A search of Walz’s speeches does not substantiate that claim. During the (far and away) most widely heard speech of his life (seen by tens of millions) – his acceptance of the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention last month – Walz steered clear of the scary “F-word” (fascist/fascism).

Last night I heard MSDNC’s leading woke imperialist Joy Reid and a Colorado Congressman agreeing that Donald Trump should behave more decently and not do nasty things like post "I Hate Taylor Swift." They think his rhetoric is kind of provocative.

Ya think?  Donald “Dark-Skinned Immigrants are Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is a fascist, okay?

The Dems calls Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump a felon, an accurate but problematic term of abuse since mass racist felony marking is a huge form of racial oppression in the Amerikan white supremacist prison state.  The Dems call Trump and Vance “weird,” and “extreme,” “threats to democracy,” and even sometimes “authoritarian,” but the taboo on saying “fascism” and “fascist” is still in strong force (yes, there are rare exceptions) in Democratic Party and “liberal” media discourse.

What’s that all about? One again I refer readers to the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian (the prolific radical thinker, philosopher, and activist who sets liberal and left intellectuals’ eyes rolling and keyboards snarking):

“Why do the Democrats avoid calling out the actual fascist nature of Trump and the Republicans? Because, to acknowledge the fact that one of the two ‘legitimate’ ruling class parties of this system is fascist can call into question the legitimacy of the system as a whole. [And]…the Democratic Party is deathly afraid of mobilizing masses of people in the way that would be necessary to decisively defeat the fascists, because the Democrats fear that this could lead to things ‘getting all out of control,’ threatening their whole system.”

100%! Getting real about (a) how supposedly democratic and progressive “America” hatched a fascist movement that took over one of its two viable political parties and (b) what is required to defeat fascism raises deep questions about US capitalism-imperialism and the Democratic Party — question that “the party of inauthentic opposition” (as Sheldon Wolin once accurately labelled the dismal Democrats) prefers kept in the closet.   

In other Amerikan Reich news, we recently learned that the Christian Fascists on the Supreme Court and in Georgia murdered the Black woman Amber Nicole Thurman, 28, in the summer of 2022. According to Pro-Publica:

‘In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.

Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.

There are almost certainly others.

Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light.’

As a comrade said to me yesterday, “the bodies” created by the Christian fascist Dobbs ruling “are piling up.”