Make this election into the greatest anti-fascist referendum in world history! This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny on November 5!
Result must be not a squeaker but a crushing landslide, enough prevent challenges and shake the world into awareness that there will be no new fascist era; defeating Trump will also help defeat the desperate CRINKS bloc of Putin, Xi, Orban, the Ayatollah, and Kim;
The clear responsibility of the United States is to take the lead in vanquishing fascism worldwide, since thanks to FDR this country is the only great power that never succumbed to a fascist regime at home, never allied with fascism as the USSR did from 1939 to 1941, and never appeased fascism in Europe or the Pacific on the model of Sir Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Daladier at 1938 Munich conference; the time to be worthy of this tradition is now!
To defeat Trump, voters must understand the process that has made him possible. The overriding factor here is the gutting of the US economy by Wall Street in the context of neoliberal globalization and the offshoring of production, destroying millions of American jobs, lowering the standard of living, and featuring mass foreclosures after the Lehman Brothers subprime derivatives crisis of 2008; these problems were exacerbated by a series of covert operations where the official explanations were unable to convince large parts of the population; nonetheless, these covert operations were sufficient to trigger a series of forever wars in the Middle East, spreading disorientation and demoralization, and destroying much of the public trust in the government. Conflicts and resentments were also stoked by the fragmentation of society into contending rival identity groups.
The analysis therefore begins with the devastation wrought by a third of a century of economic globalization and immiseration, with 60,000 factories lost, a decline of 50% in the average standard of living, and millions of foreclosures: a new great depression spread out over three decades!
Globalization in turn has produced a hundred million broken souls forced to confront a world of unfathomable despair, forcing many to turn away from reality into a world of vicarious living, psychosis, and magic, giving up on their own lives and devoting all their energies to a charismatic demagogue through a process of narcissistic symbiosis;
The critical feature of psychosis is the rejection of objective reality, a reality does not depend on the subjectivity or opinions of the person involved. The interface of human society with objective reality is largely located in production. Production means the creation of tangible physical wealth by means of creating commodities in agriculture, manufacturing industry, mining, scientific research, and other branches. With deindustrialization and the postindustrial service economy, an important reality principle of the nation is lost.
The expansion of higher education is certainly positive, but the benefits are radically reduced by the prevailing academic doctrine of postmodernism, which asserts that there is no such thing as reality, truth, or objectivity. All of these are scorned as social constructs concocted by ruling imperialist elites for the purpose of oppressing the masses. Such a philosophy cannot reassert a reality principle.
But how do millions of broken souls or wounded souls become organized into a fascist mass movement, which is in turn the indispensable precondition for the radical destruction of existing institutions (cfr. Project 2025) and the creation of a totalitarian fascist dictatorship based on economic austerity and looting?
Fascist movements often start from a single troubled individual with the charisma for a career as a demagogue. Here a cruel and distant father often plays a key role: Adolf Hitler, for example was thoroughly brutalized by his father. Something similar appears to have happen to Trump. Convinced by the brutal father that he is incompetent and unloved, the future demagogue attempts to compensate through a series of narcissistic behaviors full of megalomania and magical thinking. Narcissistic symbiosis emerges when disciples, fellow travelers, and groupies afflicted by similar problems but with far less charismatic potential gather around the future Duce. With the help of corrupt institutions and financing from greedy oligarchs who want to use a fascist movement for strike breaking, political counter-organizing, and the destruction of working-class or farmers’ institutions that tend to fight austerity, in embryonic fascist movement is established. It could easily be crushed during this phase, but naïve devotion to legal formalism is often prevented viable governments from defending themselves against the nascent storm troopers and squadristi.
Thus the beginning phase of folie à deux or small-scale shared psychosis grows exponentially with the number of belongers into mass psychosis, mass insanity, and the folie à millions.
As this process expands through the role of complicit media, the result is mass psychosis or collective insanity, with a society totally alienated from objective reality and descending into delusions and paranoia stoked especially by fear and panic: see the recent examples of immigrant caravans and foreigners used to stampede voters;
This process entails a massive moral, intellectual, and spiritual degradation of the individual, which occurs unconsciously, behind the back of its victims, with increased levels of irrationality, hatred, and sociopathic behavior;
In the postwar period, the United States has been the scene of cultural changes which have weakened the prevailing personality type and facilitated the growth of mass psychosis. This can be identified as David Riesman’s other-directed or heteronomic personality, in which the inner sense of duty and morality atrophies in comparison to the hegemony of the peer group and its opinion leaders which embody the imperative of conformism. The other directed individual, constantly oriented towards the shifting opinions of shifting peer groups, has often been too weak to resist the ideology of a crumbling society.
The culmination of mass psychosis is found in the Russian, Italian, German, and other totalitarian states of interwar Europe, followed later by the Chinese communist dictatorship and Putin’s neo-Byzantine police state;
Italian fascism grew out of the horrors of trench warfare in World War I, followed by four years of intensive class struggle and economic depression; German Nazism was also a product of World War I, compounded by the hyperinflation of 1923, and by the severe deflation triggered by the crash of 1929; as a result of these, traditional society and practical thinking were severely disrupted, opening the door to the demagogues and their violent black shirt and brown shirt thugs.
The salient feature of economic globalization has been the impoverishment of most of world society, and the psychic shocks or epidemic of psychosis radiating outward from the 60,000 factory closures and cutting in half of the standard of living. The absolute prerequisite for rolling back neoliberal globalization is a return to broad-based prosperity to be enjoyed by all persons in society. It goes without saying that super rich financier oligarchs must be coerced into paying their fair share. Where there are economic institutions that are indispensable for the nation but which cannot survive under existing oligarchical management, the likely answer is to nationalize assets like Boeing, Space X, Twitter X, and others, with the intent of operating them indefinitely as a public sector like the classic Tennessee Valley Authority.
Deindustrialization must be rolled back and replaced by advanced manufacturing, the flight of the runaway shops into low-wage markets must be impeded, and the decline in the standard of living, life expectancy, and years of education immediately reversed. (We should recall that an adequate standard of living for the coming decades will far exceed the standard of living available in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when the decline began. Immense technological advances have been realized since the depredations of globalization began, and an adequate standard of living must be one under which households can provide nutrition, square meters of living space, health care, recreation, years of high quality education, culture, music, travel and other inputs sufficient to qualify the children of the house to take their places in the economy of 2050 or 2060. Economic expansion requires the provision of a standard of living aimed at the distant horizons that are visible today, and this is an absolute imperative. Economic austerity must be seen as intolerable, and must never be invoked apart from the briefest periods of national emergency.
Biden Harris program to rebuild the economy is on the right track, especially as supplemented by the Harris Walz program of a new round of assistance for distressed individuals and families. In addition to the measures passed and now being implemented, we must go back to the Build Back Better legislation that failed to pass. Biden’s emphasis on the $400 billion early childhood initiative, calling for universal prekindergarten/preschool for three and four-year-olds was nothing short of an educational revolution capable of restoring the United States to its pre-globalization preeminence in the educational field – especially when combined with Biden’s plan for two years of free community college all across the nation, supplementing and replacing high school as the standard preparation for apprenticeships, careers, and college.
But there is one more political reform that must precede the healing of society.
In the original classic Italian fascism, the demagogue and dictator Benito Mussolini enjoyed the title of Il Duce – The Leader, derived from the Latin word dux, written by the Romans as dvx. The various Führers and Caudillos were modeled on him.
In the mass psychosis that we study today, the leader is no longer to be called the Duce; this person should be identified as the Inducer, meaning the one who conceives one of the earliest forms of psychosis and then succeeds in making them into a political commodity that so many disciples and dupes are willing to submit to. The authorities on collective psychosis teach that the best way to reduce collective insanity in a society below the danger level of fascist domination is to radically reduce or eliminate the influence of the Inducer. The Inducer can be de-platformed, jailed, defeated in elections, impeached or otherwise deprived of political office, encouraged to go into exile, or otherwise radically diminished. When the Copperhead demagogue Clement Vallandigham scored some successes in disrupting the Union war effort in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, using his emergency war powers, exiled him to the Confederate States of America. Vallandigham later returned to support the McClellan candidacy of 1864 and later to conspire for the secession of several states along the Ohio River. But his planned second phase of insurrection for secessionism never materialized.
Lincoln observed that the U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact, and that fixating on one small technicality cannot be allowed to bring down the entire edifice of government. The survival of the Republic is the supreme law, as the Romans knew. Free speech is the rule, but no right is limitless, as Justice Holmes pointed out with his celebrated remark that free speech does not cover yelling fire in a crowded theater. Such limitations should be borne in mind in a time like ours, when the distemper of collective psychosis is abroad in the land.
Historical examples from Machiavelli to Sir Neville Chamberlain to Macarthur prove that appeasement weakens the appeaser and guarantees defeat; an obsession with escalation in the style of Herman Kahn is part of the same problem;
To avoid a potential strategic crisis, President Biden must free Ukraine from all artificial constraints in using US and NATO weaponry;
Suicidal Russian human wave attacks have advanced into the town of Vuhledar and are threatening the important transport hub of Prokovsk near Donetsk; Ukraine continues to destroy Russian oil facilities and aviation assets; on the political side, signs of instability and chaos have emerged in the free world coalition supporting Ukraine, including France (neofascists around 30%), Canada (Poiliėvre), Germany (AFD as largest party with one third of the votes in Thuringia and Saxony), and now Austria (“Freedom Party” as largest party with about 30%), to say nothing of the United States; as Macarthur stated to the Congress, in war, there is no substitute for victory, and the world needs Ukraine to start winning victories during this month of October;
Biden should also urgently set in motion a crash program on the scale of the World War II Manhattan Project (as seen in the movie Oppenheimer) using lasers, particle beams, and other new physical principles to shoot down ballistic missiles of all types; recent events show that Iran and its proxies intend to overwhelm the expensive conventional interceptor rockets used by the Israeli defense systems of Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow by a continuous barrage of hundreds or thousands of missiles; but a laser-based ABM defense would use directed energy to destroy incoming warheads; the Israeli Iron Beam system is close to deployment, and the United States needs a layered ABM system based on directed energy to deal with Putin’s threats over Ukraine and the menace of the crinks in general; the spinoffs from such a program, like the Kennedy moonshot, would fuel a 20 year economic upswing;
Concerning the potential for a new era of good feelings: by the end of The War of 1812, Americans were disgusted with the greed and pro-British wartime treason of the formerly great Federalist party, which utterly collapsed over the course of a few years; patriots were horrified by the Federalist embrace of New England secessionism at the 1814 Hartford Convention, and also by the vile partisanship of Federalist demagogues;
The result in those days was the 1816-1824 “Era of Good Feelings,” roughly identical with the presidency of James Monroe, a time when the governing Democratic Republican party had no opposition;
As Madison was succeeded by Monroe, the watchword was nationalism in the sense of nationbuilding and fixing the problems revealed by the late war: national defense was strengthened, and expanded second bank of the United States provided a uniform currency, the 1816 protective tariff shielded the infant industries from British economic warfare, and congress voted funding for infrastructure by extending the Cumberland Road to Wheeling, West Virginia on the Ohio river; the backers of these measures included John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and the young John Calhoun, who thus managed to revive Hamilton’s American System of political economy, which was later carried forward by Abraham Lincoln;
After the victories of John Paul Jones against the Royal Navy, by Oliver Hazard Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie, and by Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans, the national mood was described as optimism, exultation, goodwill, unity, and national pride, expressed as a renewed sense of national purpose and patriotism; notice that all of these are antithetical to Trump, with his crippled America and American carnage doctrines; Henry Clay’s Missouri compromise of 1820 neutralized many sectional issues for 30 years, giving the Union time enough to acquire overwhelming economic superiority over the slave states; the era of good feelings was terminated with the coming of demagogue Andrew Jackson in 1828;
Harris and Democrats run rings around MAGA fundraising; are funding and fielding a vastly superior ground game for government; have normal candidates who are not psychotic, weird, or creepy; they have a program for the future in sharp contrast to Trump’s sad cult of his own last hurrah; are bolstered by prestigious defectors and blocks of voters coming from the traditional Republican party; have not attacked and offended the main components of society, starting with women; are getting decisive endorsements from civil society ranging from the biggest labor unions to Taylor swift and Bruce Bpringsteen; have not sponsored an insurrection for the violent overthrow of the government; have a national ticket with no convicted felons and a staff free of jailbirds; and enjoy a solid, stable, and growing lead in the few honest public opinion polls!
Jack Smith’s summary of evidence cleared for publication by Judge Chutcan is the screenplay for the most lurid film noir of our time, how a cabal of criminals tried to disenfranchise 83 million voters to seize state power!
Told that VP Pence’s life was in danger, the orange tyrant responded “so what?”, thus approximating Mussolini’s favorite slogan of “I don’t care!” (“me ne frego”); “make them riot” was a favorite slogan in the Trump camp in the days leading up to January 6; as he prepared the coup, Trump relied only on his own insurrectionist lawyers, many now indicted, and scorned his official white house counsel; by January 6, with all legal delays exhausted, Trump turned to his last line of defense: an armed fascist mob!
This and much else proves that Trump as a choreographer of the coup was acting as a private individual pursuing his own private interest, and not as President or any kind of us government official; therefore, the Supreme Court’s recent invention of an anti-constitutional immunity or license to kill for presidents will not save him!
In debate, Vance showed himself to be a compulsive liar just like Trump, but more skillful; Vance babbles about censorship, which she seems to think occurs whenever the crackpot RFK junior is denied an hour of prime time by the networks to expound his bizarre and highly dangerous theories of health and life;
Rumor has it that Vance and his billionaire owners are well aware of Trump’s rapid mental deterioration, and are preparing a scenario whereby Vance would lead the cabinet in ousting the orange dotard using the XXV Amendment, giving state power to Vance as the puppet of a kitchen cabinet of ultra-reactionary billionaire finance oligarchs: Trump wants only unprincipled scoundrels who will not assert the constitution, but unfortunately for him, nothing prevents such degenerates from directing their evil intent against him;
In Lebanon, the Israelis continue the decapitation and decimation of the Hezbollah death cult, and claim to have destroyed one half of Hezbollah ’s much touted arsenal of missiles and rockets; Hezbollah expects others to secure their aims, including a cease-fire, but if they really want a cease-fire, Hezbollah and Hamas should speak for themselves and sue for peace or simply surrender on humanitarian grounds; otherwise, figures like Sinwar are cynically exploiting their own astronomical losses in hopes of turning world public opinion against the Israelis;
On the first anniversary of the October 7 suicide attack, Palestinians in the US threaten to vote against Harris, showing the same bankrupt Muslim Brotherhood ideology which has tragically marred Palestinian history; Biden is right to note that the proxy militias are totally irrational; if the uncommitted make good on their threat, they will be the prime targets of MAGA’s program of gestapo raids, concentration camps, and boxcar deportations for up to 25 million people;
The only pause in the Gaza fighting with hostage release so far has been the Biden cease-fire of late last November; Sinwar like Netanyahu routinely rejects Biden’s cease-fire proposals; such eagerness to enable Trump’s demolition of the U.S. Constitution will lose them any remaining goodwill in much of us; backlash against pro-Hamas vigils on October 7 may be considerable;
Biden’s peerless mastery of economics, statecraft, and legislation continues: wisely declining to use the Taft-Hartley act to protect greedy bosses despite the fishy ILA leader, he has extracted robust wage increases for the Longshoremen and postponed the automation issue beyond the election into next year;
September job creation has exceeded 250,000, according to the Labor Department’s next to last report before the November 5 election;
For Harris and Walz, the great untapped issue remains Trump’s cataclysmic mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, when he opened the door to a contagion which has killed 1.2 million Americans and counting.
Early voting and mail-in voting are now on in many states; persons of good will are urged to bank their votes now, and then help their discouraged, disoriented, or intermittent neighbors to get on the scoreboard against totalitarian fascist dictatorship on or before November 5.
At United Nations, Trump unmasks yet again as a coward and aspiring satellite satrap at the wretched level of Hungary’s Orban; Benedict Donald’s degradation contrasts with the heroic patriotism of Zelinski;
Remarks by Harris in support of Ukraine after meeting with Zelinski show a true understanding of why allies and alliances are indispensable for the United States, delivered with true presidential decorum and demeanor, shaming the orange hooligan;
Harris continues to pull ahead nationally and in most swing states despite structural underestimation of her lead; New York Times polling continues to offer a tissue of fantastic lies designed to demoralize and disorient American voters; twenty states are now voting;
After almost 2 months, Ukrainian forces still occupy large parts of Kursk Province in a colossal humiliation for the would be Emperor Putin of Moscow the Third in Rome, according to the apocalyptic prophecy of Filofei of Pskov; Putin’s weakness and harebrained scheming opened the door to a power struggle behind the scenes;
Ukraine has destroyed one quarter of Russian oil production and six months’ worth of ammunition and missiles; the corrupt generals are so feckless that Putin is replacing them with KGB thugs devoid of military experience; the central bank is charging 19% interest, inflation is 30%, and the only Russians not crushed by death are the doomed recruits headed to the front who have just collected a $20,000 recruitment bonus;
The Kremlin is a byzantine labyrinth where the modern boyars and pretenders known as Siloviki plot Putin’s overthrow; these intriguers care about nothing but having a seat when the music stops; a new time of troubles looms;
Given impressive Ukrainian gains, it is time for Pres. Biden to overrule the reported Jake Sullivan appeasement faction in the administration and authorize Ukraine to use us weaponry against military targets without limitation; as Gen. Macarthur would say, Russia is already waging war against ukraine to the limit of its strength, and could not the more at war with Kyiv; Putin is too weak to open any new fronts, and knows that waging nuclear war would be suicide for him;
The current media buzzword of “escalation” belongs to the micromanagement typical of cabinet warfare in the 18th century, or to the pathos of LBJ choosing bombing targets for Vietnam every night, or to the elaborate but obsolete fantasies of Herman Kahn; in actual warfare, the beginning of hostilities produces a situation of uncontrolled and unpredictable surprises, not a gradual continuum; the only reliable maxim is that there is no substitute for victory;
The late Hassan Nasrallah was the world’s most important nonstate terrorist of the present day; with this week’s hecatomb of its entire chain of command, Hezbollah appears decapitated and paralyzed, leaving the Houthis as the sole Iranian proxy capable of combat; the business model of the islamist militia appears increasingly obsolete;
Actions against New York Mayor Eric Adams and a score of city officials suggest the existence of a politically motivated “Get Adams” task force in a corrupt department of justice; Adams is accused of accepting $100,000 in free or discount travel from the government of Turkey, but Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court is alleged to have accepted $4 million in unreported gifts, and Trump’s alleged receipt of $10 million from Egypt has been ignored;
This is blatant selective and vindictive prosecution, and should be thrown out of court immediately; observers say the case offered by the SDNY is far from a slam dunk, and estimate chances of conviction at 50-50, far short of the usual 95% conviction rate in federal courts; ultra-left AOC demands the mayor’s resignation, while Jayapal joins in;
Priggish AG Garland and deputy Lisa Monaco have been viewed as feckless and dithering, but there is also a sinister side: they indicted Sen. Menendez and Mayor Adams, but have delayed any action against Trump for a year, and still have not moved against reps. Jordan, Perry, McCarthy, and Biggs, all of whom have defied subpoenas;
The FBI, sometimes referred to as TrumpLand, has long attempted to indict any black elected official; in addition, all the lurid news about democratic corruption may help save four congressman in the New York suburbs who were ousted in the aftermath of the coup against gov. Cuomo in the 2021, and who are now highly vulnerable, including D’esposito (NY-04), Williams (NY-22), Molinaro (NY-19), and Lawler (NY-17);
We should be aware that the cumulative effect of removing moderate democrats like Cuomo, Menendez, and Adams is to push the party into the arms of unelectable ultralefts; this process recalls the effects of the FBI’s Brilab entrapment program of the early 1980s, which targeted Sen. Harrison Williams and other union linked, pro-labor democrats; this caused a gentrified estrangement of the democratic establishment from working-class voters which was a big factor in a dozen years of republican domination.
Documents of WCR: excerpts from the September 25, 2024 speech by Kamala Harris in Pittsburgh endorsing the American System of political economy, Hamiltonian dirigism, and industrial policy:
I will engage in what Franklin Roosevelt called “bold, persistent experimentation…”.
The third pillar of our opportunity economy is leading the world in the industries of the future and making sure America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century. (Applause.)
One of the recurring themes in American history is that when we make an intentional effort to invest in our industrial strength, it leads to extraordinary prosperity and security, not only for years but for generations.
Think of Alexander Hamilton having the foresight to build the manufacturing capabilities of our new nation. Think of Lincoln and the transcontinental railroad. Think of Eisenhower and the interstate highway system; Kennedy committing America to win the space race and spurring innovation across our society.
From our earliest days, America’s economic strength has been tied to our industrial strength, and the same is true today.
So, I will recommit the nation to global leadership in the sectors that will define the next century. We will invest in biomanufacturing and aerospace; remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies; expand our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing — (Applause) — so the next generation of breakthroughs from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear are not just invented but built here in America by American workers. (Applause.)
And we will invest in the industries that, for example, made Pittsburgh the “Steel City” by offering — (Applause) — tax credits for expanding good union jobs in steel and iron and manufacturing communities like here in Mon Valley. (Applause.)
And across all these industries of the future, we will prioritize investments for strengthening factory towns — this is so important — for strengthening factory towns; retooling existing factories; hiring locally and working with unions, because no one who grows up in America’s greatest industrial or agricultural centers should be abandoned.
Trump has accused Harris of fascism in five recent speeches, even as Vance whines about this term as divisive, thus putting the question of fascism on the November ballot! Trump also claims that Harris is a marxist, communist, and socialist- but which candidate is aiming at totalitarian dictatorship?
Trump’s base turnout strategy is failing, since the lunatic fringe is not sufficiently numerous despite his efforts to dumb them down; this forces him to launch more and more obscene, absurd, and weird political gambits; democrats and all persons of good will should ignore his raving and focus on getting supporters to the polls as early voting and mail-in voting are beginning in many states;
But what is Fascism? To distinguish fascism from other right of center political beliefs, and to counteract the obfuscations of the New York Times and others, a reality-based conceptual framework needs to be established.
As I have long argued, the question of political terminology in the English language has a vast importance which is frequently ignored. The media use of the term “conservatism” is the most egregious of these abuses. For the media, everything right of center is conservative, thus lumping together raving reactionaries and fascist hooligans together with the very few actual conservatives, despite the fact that each of these terms means something incompatible with the others.
Conservatives are often economically comfortable people devoted to traditions and the status quo. Reactionaries tend to reject the status quo and want to turn the clock back to some more primitive form of society, where they hope to be better off. The term conservative has to do with the desire to keep, preserve, or conserve beliefs, institutions, and practices. On a superficial level, it is not threatening but rather it sounds somewhat reassuring. Fascists, who are themselves fanatical extremists devoted to the most radical and savage retrograde transformations of thought and society, are understandably eager to present themselves in the guise of conservatives. But fascists do not want to conserve anything of importance, often preaching palingenesis, meaning a radically new form of humanity itself.
The benefits of refusing to camouflage fascists by pretending they are conservatives could be immense. My personal estimate is that a new style book policy along these lines for Democrats, progressives, liberals, teachers, professors, intellectuals, sociologists, historians, and everyday Americans of goodwill could easily generate a bonus of 3% or more in the popular votes cast for the Harris-Walz ticket. This in turn might be enough to decide the election. In any case, there is absolutely no reason to persist in the folly of obeying our domestic fascists when they demand to be called “conservatives.”
In a total world crisis like the present one, mass psychology often depends on the public perception of which contending political force is the stronger. Letting fascists hide under the euphemism of “conservatives” communicates nothing but contemptible weakness and confusion. This is the inevitable subtext of the current misguided left of center stylebook.
A relevant factor here is that the United States has historically been most anti-fascist country in the world. The most distinguished anti-fascist of the 20th century and the leader of the anti-Hitler coalition was President Franklin D Roosevelt. Unlike Italy, Germany, Spain, Vichy France, and so many other nations, the United States never succumbed to a regime of domestic fascist dictatorship. The United States never became an active ally of the fascist powers, unlike the Soviet Union, which functioned as an indispensable ally for Hitler between August 1939 and June 1941 under the auspices of the Molotov-Ribbentrop or Hitler-Stalin pact. Unlike Britain under Sir Neville Chamberlain or France under Daladier at the September 1938 Munich conference, the United States never engaged in a systematic policy of appeasing fascism. This is the powerful historical tradition of opposition to fascism waiting to be mobilized in opposition to anti-constitutional political forces that have been convincingly identified as fascist.
Conservatism wants to preserve the status quo, since this is where the conservatives have become rich or at least affluent through inherited wealth or through speculative windfalls. In politics, it is often the party of organized money, opposed to radical reform. Conservatives are often anti-labor, pro-austerity, and opposed to the expansion of economic rights. Conservatism therefore values tradition, custom, precedent, norms, conventions, and protocols. It favors law and order under the U.S. Constitution because these policies are good for business and thus deliver impressive cash value. The current majority of the US Supreme Court routinely trample on precedents and traditions, and therefore CANNOT be conservative. There are no conservatives in the MAGA cabal, although they want very much to be called conservative for camouflage purposes, and the New York Times is happy to oblige. Intelligent persons of good will should not help MAGA hooligans and extremists masquerade as conservatives. Among the very few conservatives active today, we can cite Judge Luttig.
Once a stock market panic, economic depression, or today’s breakdown crisis of globalization has made the status quo intolerable for conservatives, many of them become reactionaries. The word originally referred to people in Europe who wanted to turn the clock back to before the French Revolution, meaning monarchy, feudal nobility and aristocratic rule. In the United States, reactionaries are often nostalgic for the way wealthy planters ruled the slave society of the American South before the Civil War. Reactionaries want to destroy labor unions, take away economic rights like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, minimum wage and child labor laws while degrading the status of women, limiting the right to vote, imposing brutal economic austerity, and discriminating against minorities. Reactionaries, however, generally pursue these goals within the framework of established governing institutions, preserving the illusion of formal democracy and representative government as long as representatives of the traditional ruling class can be kept in power.
Fascism can emerge when the economic breakdown crisis deepens, as after World War I. The ruling class and its supporters in the upper-middle-classes may turn to violence and systematic political terrorism, carried out through gangs of hooligans and strikebreakers they recruit to impede government functions or to smash opposition parties and labor organizations. Minorities are violently scapegoated as part of a divide and conquer strategy to keep opposition to the regime fragmented and impotent. Concentration camps and slave labor are increasingly instituted. This gives rise to fascist movements, meaning that fascism is not exclusively a top-down dictatorship, but has an indispensable bottom-up mass component which initially grows up from among guttersnipes, criminals, and other victims of a society ravaged by economic breakdown. The mass movement is what makes fascism fundamentally different from a traditional police state or other form of authoritarian dictatorship. Under fascism, working people are gaslighted and manipulated into attacking and oppressing themselves.
Although fascism in Italy and Germany between the world wars is most widely studied, there is also a strong argument that the original prototype for 20th century fascism on both sides of the Atlantic is the original Ku Klux Klan in the defeated Confederacy after 1865. The KKK can be seen as a political terrorist organization acting as the armed wing of political forces determined to subjugate the former slaves, preventing their political activism and enforcing brutal economic exploitation and subordination.
Violence and political terrorism on a large scale must be seen as the hallmarks of fascism. A good way to decide if a reactionary has been radicalized into a fascist is to check for acts of political terrorism or support for such violence. Without violence, you do not have fascism. Fascism must work towards mass stupefaction and dumbing down (Verblöding, rimbecillimento) of its dupes lest they act according to their own enlightened rational self-interest. Fascism must promote forms of raving anti-science irrationalism, obscurantism, and mysticism, as for example Hitler’s racist Aryan mythology or QAnon. Note that racism is not something different from fascism, since racist hatred, oppression, and especially genocide have often been subsumed as an integral part of fascism itself.
Both Mussolini and Hitler were adamant that fascism is a religion. In more modern terms, we might describe it as a cult, where members cease to be individuals in the full sense.
Fascism typically develops as a personality cult around the Duce, Führer, Caudillo, Maréchal, Căpitanul, or Vozhd. Omnipotence, omniscience, infallibility, invincibility, and magical powers are ascribed to the fetishized leader as a matter of fascist party discipline. The followers are often purblind to failures, crimes, and insanity until a breaking point was reached or the dictator was no longer on the scene. Many of these patterns are sadly familiar to the Americans of our time.
By these criteria, MAGA has transitioned into fascism as of no later than January 6, 2021. This includes MAGA supporters in the states, the Congress, the federal judiciary, the Supreme Court, quite possibly the military. (Both Mussolini and Hitler were veterans of World War I, and veterans were a source of large numbers of their recruits.) MAGA has declared in public that it has long since left the terrain of the United States Constitution behind, and is busily abolishing long-standing rights on the way to totalitarian dictatorship.
The charge that Harris is a Marxist is absolutely absurd. Has she read and endorsed all three volumes of Das Kapital? What does she think about the falling rate of profit? How about the dictatorship of the proletariat or the withering away of the state? Does she talk of the need to expropriate the imperialist finance bourgeoisie? Some reporter from the controlled corporate media should ask Trump what he knows about Marxism, since he obviously knows nothing.
Attempting to brand Harris as a communist or socialist is also absurd. In the USSR and the Eastern European satellites, the collapse of communist regimes around 1990 led (with the assistance of foreign shock therapy advisors like Jeffrey Sachs) to nomenklatura privatizations and the rule of the billionaire oligarchs. In China, greed transformed the Communist Party into an outright plutocracy of princelings. Post-communist societies that have remained dictatorships are ruled by figures like Putin, Xi, and Orban, and these post-communists are firm supporters of MAGA, not of the Democrats.
Communists and fascists are sometimes thought to be irreconcilable opposites, but this is disproved by the active cooperation of Hitler’s Nazi regime with Stalin’s Soviet communist dictatorship, a combination which dominated Europe between August 1939 in June 1941. This cooperation led to the coining of the term “Nazi-communist” inside the US government during those years.
Hitler’s Nazi regime was itself a more extreme or radical form of fascism. Italian fascists and German Nazis were closely allied in the 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis and between 1943 in 1945 in a civil war in northern Italy waged by Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic and German occupiers against an anti-fascist partisan resistance.
The inescapable conclusion is that Trump and Vance are using these historical-political terms as crude insults against the Democratic ticket as a demagogic strategy for churning up hatred and fear among their own base of support. Observers of these MAGA bigwigs are also familiar with their typical abreaction of projecting their own crimes and pathologies on their rivals.
Some prestigious publications and prominent commentators object to the term fascism as applied to MAGA, claiming that it is overly polemical or a gratuitous insult with little meaning. But it turns out that fascism is the only scientifically rigorous and accurate description of the phenomenon we are dealing with. It represents the truth of the matter.
After two years of Putin’s brutal aggression against Ukraine, and a week after his savage murder of opposition leader Navalny, Congress must reconvene at once to vote $60 billion for Kiev while Biden transfers $350 billion in sequestered assets to defense of Kiev!
Biden orders sanctions on 500 Russian targets after meeting with Navalny’s widow; Ukraine needs ATACMs ballistic missiles to destroy Kerch Strait bridge, F-16s and Patriot missiles for air defense, Abrams tanks, and limitless 155mm shells; Ukraine still winning on sea and in air;
Trump’s GOP emerges as abject annex of Kremlin, sabotaging NATO defense and peddling the lies of Alexander Smirnov, the accused Russian double agent who peddled lie that Joe Biden and son were bribed by Ukrainian company; MAGA Quisling candidate serves Putin by calling on Russia to attack NATO members who don’t spend 2% for defense;
Trump raves that NATO nations must pay their debts, but will the orange windbag pay his own? Trump must pay New York County $454 million plus $119,000 per day within 30 days or face the seizure of his Manhattan trophy properties, starting with 40 Broadway and Trump Tower; Deranged outbursts by Don are widely expected when expropriation is carried out;
Trump’s finances are already desperate as his campaign loses over 200,000 small-dollar donors; he has half the cash on hand held by Biden; Trump’s fines and fees to lawyers are draining GOP downballot, making momentum towards party extinction overwhelming;
NRA boss LaPierre found guilty of filching cash for personal luxury; Southern Baptists including MAGA Mike still plagued by scandal; Trump eyes takeover of Republican National Committee to drain cash for fines and attorneys at expense of downballot races;
Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, and Jon Stewart are Nervous Nellies who still fetishize polling, even after colossal failure of Wall Street’s ”Red Tsunami” brainwashing and gaslighting campaign of 2022; By contrast, Dem performance in actual elections grows more and more formidable;
Situation in Gaza is catastrophic but could still be much worse with nuclear weapons, mass expulsions into Transjordan and Sinai deserts, war with Hezbollah, and Gallant’s demand for Gaza to be hermetically sealed with no aid trucks whatsoever; Trump is merciless who could strip US Arabs of citizenship as in UK case of Shamima Begum and feed them into his planned apparatus of Gestapo raids, huge concentration camps, and largest mass deportations in world history; Tlaib’s self-destructive bid to abandon Biden in next week’s Michigan primary is cutting off your nose to spite your face for Michigan Arabs and should be scorned by all sane voters; Defeat of Biden would be greatest imaginable horror for all humanity!
Time to fire Zients, Garland, Wray, Hur, Weiss, and provide the security to keep Smirnov alive to testify!
Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution provides that the President “may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them….” Time to seize the initiative from the flailing and chaotic subversive MAGA Mike, who is determined to serve Putin and Trump;
The example of Harry Truman, who won re-election in 1948 despite dismal polls, a hostile press corps, and a lack of money: at the Democratic convention, Truman called the Republican-controlled Congress back into session to approve Fair Deal legislation to fight inflation, solve the housing crisis, protect civil rights, and implement points of agreement in the both party platforms; After the GOP refused to pass any of these bills, Truman went on a 22,000 mile whistlestop campaign tour of US, coast to coast and border to border, denouncing the “Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress”; Truman became “Give ’em hell Harry,” taking 28 states to win re-election with 303 electoral votes and a plurality of 49.5% to GOP candidate Dewey’s 45.1% in the most stunning political upset in American history and a “major miracle” (Newsweek);
Biden stresses that Navalny assassination shows true nature of the bloody dictatorship run by Trump-MAGA heartthrob Putin; Navalny’s widow indicts Kremlin tyrant for murder in dramatic intervention at Munich Wehrkunde Security Conference; Benedict Donald is silent; West must transfer $350 billion in Russian assets to Ukraine for defense; If all else fails, Biden should declare national emergency to transfer military supplies to Kiev by Executive Order;
Judge Engoron slams Benedict Donald with $364 million in fines on top of $88.3 million already imposed by New York federal court; Don banned from New York real estate for 3 years; Total fines now exceed $464 million plus interest, suggesting Trump may exhaust GOP cash reserves to pay lawyers in at least 9 separate losing legal battles; Survival of Trump’s fortune now in serious doubt; Sons Don Jr. and Eric also face fines and business bans;
Fani Willis offers profile in courage, defying grotesque Georgia inquisition demanded by lawyers for Trump and RICO co-defendants; Smirnov arrest shows linchpin of Comer’s impeachment case against Biden is a criminal lie; Shellenberger-Taibbi-Gutentag launch absurd rewrite of Russiagate history; Probe of Trump’s Russian links was triggered by warnings from nine US allies;
Suozzi wins NY-3 seat in Nassau and Queens, once again exposing bankruptcy of gaslighting polls run by malefactors of great wealth; Long Island Democrat pushes aside ultra-left border orthodoxy to wage devastating attack on MAGA demagogy while stressing path to citizenship, democracy and return to Roe; Rep. Grace Meng of neighboring NY-6 gave vital help with Asian voters, showing superlative mastery of united front team play; She continues spirit of tolerance exemplified by Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, the first call for freedom of religion in North America;
Zients and Garland should quit now to permit Biden administration to definitively seize initiative in sweeping away wreckage of moribund Republican Party;
New York State expropriating much of Trump’s fortune may be seen by history as marking the end globalization era
Even three Democratic justices capitulate to MAGA program; Court is vitiated by ideological poison of Legal Positivism, now available as originalism (fake history or Geschichtsklatscherei) or textualism (stupid nominalism in tradition of William of Ockham); Remedy is jurisprudence of Natural Law, meaning justice, morality, awareness of social consequences, and fulfilling tasks of government as expounded by Preamble to US Constitution;
Time to fire DoJ MAGA hack Robert Hur, the special counsel probing Biden for mishandling classified documents; Hur is the new Comey, having violated DoJ rules for special counsel by producing a 388 page screed defaming President and portraying him as senile; Hur’s obiter dicta could also open him to a lawsuit for defamation;
With AG Barr’s distortion of March 2019 Mueller Report, misleading intro hid Trump’s real Russiagate misdeeds; Now Hur’s lying introduction alleges crimes which are explicitly denied in main body of report;
Hur report is a blatant hatchet job to help Trump while bidding for post of Attorney General in a second Trump regime; Hur report was screened by AG Merrick Garland, who has failed to redact gratuitous and slanderous material that violates DoJ regulations mandating that prosecutors put up an indictment or shut up about derogatory material they have found; Garland is worst cabinet secretary, and must resign or be fired;
Garland failed for almost two years to name a special counsel, making Trump’s current delaying strategy possible; He has not moved against Congressional MAGAts implicated in January 6 coup, and has ignored rampant Supreme Court corruption;
Press riot at White House Thursday evening when Biden refutes Hur report as crazed journalistic hooligans scream their scurrilous objections on orders from their super-rich, Biden-hating owners; Failed White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients permitted this disservice to the President and should go back to his true calling in private equity;
MAGA Quislings tank border security bill to enable Trump’s demagogy, but mainly to block funding for Ukraine defense as loyal toadies of Putin; MAGA Mike bungles impeachment of Mayorkas, highest ranking Hispanic in Biden administration;
Trump must present immunity appeal to rotten Suprem by Monday; Engoron moving toward imposing NY corporate death sentence after reports of Weisselberg perjury surface; Pro-Trump Mar a Lago judge stalls, wants to reveal witnesses to MAGA goons;
Behind the worldwide chaos: death agony of economic and globalization is marked by decline of all-powerful plutocratic finance oligarchs, who are now fighting for survival: Central engagement will be contest between arch-plutocrat Trump and Biden’s return to the FDR New Deal.
If Democrats want to defend the Constitution from Trump, here is where they must start; Trump got all the due process he was entitled to when XIV Amendment was ratified in 1868; Beware the perils of hyper-democracy, a key factor in the 1933 destruction of Germany’s Weimar Republic constitution;
Friends of the court brief from 25 historians makes plain that Insurrection Clause was intended to apply to presidents, and therefore to Trump, as officers of US federal government; Ban on insurrectionists in public office was intended to be permanent, with an emphatic view to excluding future offenders; this provision is self-executing and does not require further legislation by Congress or court convictions; the key roles of Reps. Thaddeus Stevens, Jonathan Bingham, and Benjamin Butler;
Confederate ex-President and arch-traitor Jefferson Davis might have sought White House in 1870s, but XIV Amendment barred him and he acknowledged it; Originalists and textualists cannot today deny the force of this clause;
Judge Luttig’s brief represents that rarity, the views of an actual conservative concerned with tradition, precedent, custom, norms, protocols, conventions, and stare decisis — in contrast to MAGA demagogues who proclaim they want to tear up the Constitution;
Reports of long-overdue indictments for Congressmen and Senators implicated in January 6 putsch attempt; these are also the main saboteurs of foreign military aid; Trump hypes US-Mexico border situation as apocalyptic emergency for demagogic purposes, but then demands solutions wait at least a year for his supposed regime;
Biden should ready emergency powers to make sure military aid to Ukraine arrives in time to defeat Russian aggressors; European Union rebuffs sinister bid by Russian satellite Orban of Hungary to deliver Kiev into hands of Kremlin; 50 billion euros now headed for Ukraine;
Realism at last: Biden leads Trump 50-44 overall in latest Quinnipiac poll, with epic 58-36 Dem lead among women voters; Bidenomics created a stunning 353,000 jobs in January; Trump faces cash crunch after spending $55 million on lawyers in 2023; RNC hack Ronna McDaniel’s tenure under heavy attack; GOP state organizations impoverished and/or bitterly factionalized in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota; MAGA personalities are not selling well, so they try to use Taylor Swift as a wedge issue;
Biden State Department joins with British Foreign Office to study diplomatic recognition of Palestinian Authority as sovereign state without reference to Israel; Biden has thus revived two-state solution after decades of frustration; US readies sanctions against leaders of armed fascist settlers in West Bank, perhaps including Smotrich and Ben Gvir of Netanyahu cabinet; Why Dearborn attacks on Biden are tragically misguided; Remembering Bourguiba’s 1965 realistic advice to Nasser that could have prevented 6-day war;
Breaking: Biden orders air strikes on 85 pro-Iranian militia targets in Syria and Iraq to deter repeats of last week’s rocket hit that killed 3 US soldiers at Tower 22 in Jordan.
UAW endorses Biden for second term as union chief Fain condemns Trump as a “scab” billionaire who serves super-rich and opposes everything UAW stands for;
Worse than empty seats at a small venue rally: Trump’s crippling weakness with voters on display in Iowa and New Hampshire results; Grievous damage likely if he is convicted; Federal abortion ban widely rejected; Traditional Trump base turnout strategy cannot succeed;
Despite being a write-in candidate with few ads and minimal spending, Biden gets 67% of Dem votes-the level expected for an incumbent; Spoilers Philips and Williamson amount to nothing, sounding ominous note for RFK Jr., Cornel West, and No Labels saboteurs;
Pathetic disarray of RNC boss Ronna McDaniel’s abortive attempt to declare Trump the winner after just two states; Two GOP state chairs gone in one week, with Michigan colleague soon to follow;
Counting on help from MAGA Quisling caucus, Putin starts preparing a claim on Alaska; Belarus dictator says he has Russian nuclear missiles ready to hit Poland; Putin claims no need for another troop callup now, meaning he will delay announcement until after mid-March election;
Trump orders MAGA Mike to torpedo Senate border/Ukraine compromise because he wants total immigrant crisis to enhance his campaign demagogy, but effect is also to deprive Ukraine of urgent funds, raising specter of deliberate betrayal of beleaguered ally, giving Putin the upper hand;
International Court of Justice finds charge of genocide against Israel plausible; Netanyahu regime ordered to prevent genocidal actions and stop incitement to genocide, setting up clash with Gallant, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and assorted messianic fanatics; Humanitarian supplies must be augmented; Report to Court on anti-genocide measures required within 30 days; Opinion also condemns and binds Hamas; Biden warns Bibi that US will not tolerate a long war, central to his plans to stay in office and out of jail;
Manhattan jury finds Trump liable to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 for defamation in verdict full of ominous portent for imminent federal and state criminal prosecutions; MAGA fascist mob was implicitly held liable for threats and harassment; Judge Engoron’s New York civil fraud finding likely next week with hundreds of millions more in liability expected; These payments may well cripple financing for Trump’s presidential campaign; Expropriation and incarceration loom.
Kremlin said to plan callup of 200,000 more troops for spring offensive against Ukraine, cyber attacks to stir up unrest among ethnic Russians in near abroad, accusations of plots to topple Putin, and attempt to cut transportation links from Poland to Lithuania via Suwalki Gap; Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave are hinges of land grab;
Ongoing sabotage of Ukraine defense by MAGA Quisling Caucus and expected strategic confusion in wake of potential Trump win fit perfectly into Kremlin war plans;
Strategic crisis emerges as Iran attacks targets in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan with ballistic missiles; Hamas-Houthi-Hezbollah proxies of Tehran already in action; Pakistan retaliates in first air attack on Iran since early 1980s;
Top NATO officials at defense chiefs meeting warn of need to prepare defenses for clash with Russia at any time during coming years; Swedish civil defense minister suggests 210 years of peace may be ending for country;
Putin threatens Ukraine with irreparable damage to national sovereignty if resistance against occupiers continues;
North Korean dictator Kim demonstratively turns towards war, abandons rhetoric of unification with South Korea;
Biden defeats Xi in Taiwan’s presidential election as voters defy Xi’s threats; Winner is William Lai of DPP;
In another insult to US, Netanyahu rejects demand for two-state solution; White House and State Department contradict him; First Biden-Bibi phone call in 26 days; Likud sources see end of Bibi era; Eisenkot and Gantz of war cabinet signal waning trust in premier; Labor Party seeks no confidence vote vs government in Knesset;
Fake populism exposed: In Switzerland, finance oligarchs of the Davoisie expect Trump will win presidency, and are happy about it!
Breaking: Germany debates banning anti-constitutional Alternatives for Germany party
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TARPLEY.net – World Crisis Radio
