Vichy Times: On "Anticipatory Obedience"

Some News Not "Fit to Print"

I’ve been writing and speaking here about Vichy Dem capitulation — advance surrender really — to the insane Republi-fascist Amerikaner takeover of the United States in the wake of Mein Trump’s so-called election mandate (more on the illegitimacy of that “mandate” in my next post).

Two quick examples for your consideration this morning.

+1. This Tweet/X-post from Hakeem Jeffries, successor to Nancy Pelosi as US Democratic Party Leader in the US House of Representatives:

HakeemJeffries@RepJeffries

Presidents come and Presidents Go

Through it all.

God is still on the throne.

There you have it: “I won’t use my position in the US Congress to mobilize a mass movement for the removal of the lethal fascist lunatic who Noam Chomsky correctly described five years ago as ‘the most dangerous criminal in human history.’ I will acquiesce as this malignant Hitler-channeling maniac wreaks havoc on our country, inflicting damage well beyond his remaining time in the White House. I surrender in advance to the fascist madness because at some point Herr Trump will be gone. And anyway, God up in space determines what happens down here.”

Note that Jeffries says the big guy in the sky is “still” sitting up in the big cosmological king’s seat. Isn’t “God’s” reign eternal? Is Jeffries’ worried that Trump’s top oligarch Elon “Seig Heil” Musk might send up a rocket to knock Yaweh off his “throne”?

+2. Yesterday’s Sunday New York Times. The paper contained an efficient, well-crafted front-page summary of key parts of Trump’s first week Shock and Awe campaign by the Times’ leading White House correspondent Peter Baker. Here’s a key and chilling selection from Baker’s report:

‘In his first full day back in the White House, President Trump reveled in his return to power and vowed to do what no president had ever done before. “We’re going to do things that people will be shocked at,” he declared.

Of all the thousands of words that Mr. Trump uttered during his fact-challenged, talkathon-style opening days as the nation’s 47th president, those may have been the truest. No matter that much of what he was doing he had promised on the campaign trail. He succeeded in shocking nonetheless.

Not so much by the ferocity of the policy shifts or ideological swings that invariably come with a party change in the White House, but through norm-shattering, democracy-testing assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.

He freed even the most violent of the rioters who assaulted the Capitol in his name four years ago. Out of pique over questions of loyalty, he stripped former advisers facing credible death threats of their security details. Disregarding a law passed with bipartisan support and upheld by the Supreme Court, he allowed the Chinese-owned TikTok app to remain in use in the United States despite serious national security concerns.

Not satisfied to simply eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, he ordered government workers to snitch on anyone suspected of not going along or face “adverse consequences,” a practice familiar to anyone of a certain age who lived in Russia. He fired at least a dozen inspectors general who monitor departments for corruption and abuse in a late-night purge on Friday, ignoring a law requiring him to give Congress 30 days’ notice and provide specific reasons.

In doing so, Mr. Trump in effect declared that he was willing and even eager to push the boundaries of his authority, the resilience of American institutions, the strength of the nearly two-and-a-half-century-old system and the tolerance of some of his own allies. Even more than in his first term, he has mounted a fundamental challenge to expectations of what a president can and should do, demonstrating a belief that the rules his predecessors largely followed are meant to be bent, bypassed or broken.’

Baker quotes Dartmouth political scientist Brandan Nyhan on the remarkable early capitulation to this fascist assault demonstrated by the nation’s leading institutions: “He’s using the tools of government to challenge the limits on the post-Watergate presidency,” Nyhan told Baker. “Some of these efforts will be turned back by the courts, but the level of anticipatory obedience we’re seeing from business, universities and the media is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

“Anticipatory obedience”! I’ll have to remember that phrase. Or switch it up by calling it “preemptive submission.”

Elite surrender is the main theme in yesterday’s Times column by the paper’s leftish liberal Op Ed writer Michelle Goldberg, who titled her commentary to “Harvard’s Capitulation.” By Goldberg’s chilling account:

‘Under the cover of rolling back unpopular left-wing excesses, Trump’s team is trying to assert political control over American higher education, and it seems to be pushing on an open door…. Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.

In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard Crimson reported.

“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak, from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said [a right-wing leader]. In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in line.’

Yes indeed.

And speaking of the media and capitulation at elite “liberal” institutions, yesterday’s Times itself provided a prime example of anticipatory Vichy-like obedience at the top of page 21 of its first section. There you can read a half page report about the narrow 51-to-50 vote US Senate confirmation of Pete Hegseth as Trump’s Secretary of Defense. In this report you can learn that this is the closest Senate vote for a Defense Secretary confirmation since 1947. You can learn about the allegations of domestic and sexual abuse against Hegseth. You can learn about his history of excessive drinking and about his woeful administrative inexperience, badly suited to handling the Pentagon’s $850 billion budget and overseeing its 1.3 million active-duty troops.

But you won’t in this report read one single word about Hegseth’s Christian fascism, which I (with no special claim of originality) described at length in a recent PSR, where I wrote this:

“A longtime FOX/Fatherland News host and full-on white nationalist MAGA fascist, Hegseth proudly wears large tattoos representing his identity as a Christian Crusader. He wears a t-shirt that bears a picture of the US flag along with this clever expression: ‘A Pledge a Day Keeps the Commies Away.’ He sees himself and his fellow ‘true Christians’ as enlisted in a holy war against ‘domestic enemies’ he accuses of trying to take down God and country: LGBT folks, non-Christians, leftists, liberals, feminists, and anti-racists. The Christian Fascist theologian atop Hegseth’s religious order (Doug Wilson) preaches that women should have no authority in home or society and says that the years of Black chattel slavery were a time of welcome ‘harmony between the races.’ The religious expert and pastor Brad Onishi told the “Public” Broadcasting System (‘P’BS) five weeks ago that ‘If you want to be the kind of president who uses the Insurrection Act, to call in the military against uprisings in American cities, to use military force against protesters, Hegseth is the man for the job.’”

That’s very much “the kind of president Trump wants to be.” Mein Trumpf showed that during the George Floyd Rebellion in the summer of 2020, when opposition from his military officials blocked his wish to deploy federal troops against the millions who rose up to protest racist police violence. He expressed his desire to use the military against protesters again and again during the 2024 campaign.

Think about it. The majority Republi-fascist United States Senate has just installed the Christian Crusader Fascist as Secretary of Defense. Yes, the top official of the world’s most lethal killing machine, is now the egregiously unqualified Amerikaner Nazi Pete “Pig of Death” Hegseth - and the Sunday Times report on his confirmation says absolutely nothing — not a single word — about his Christian white nationalist world view and the grave fascistic menace he poses to humanity at home and abroad.

It says nothing also about his past advocacy for the pardoning of egregious war criminals or about the fascist oligarchs who spent big money to persuade the Republi-fascist Senator Joni Ernst [Rf-Iowa] — a former rape victim and female military officer — to cast a critical vote for Hegseth despite credible sexual assault charges against him and despite his past declared opposition to “women in combat roles.”

That strikes me as “anticipatory obedience.”