The Skinny: Pork Reich on Parade
Author’s note: in addition to my work here on NIDC, I also blog about fascism and current affairs on the Fediverse; click here to check it out. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today.
Update & A New Feature
This is awkward and annoying, so I’ll try to keep it brief. In the late fall of 2024, I had some health complications and family struggles that forced me to stop writing for a while. I’ll be honest, I don’t think you folks were missing much; I spent most of November and December of last year screaming “I told you so and now we’re all going to burn” at Democratic apparatchiks who punted a winnable election to a reality TV show fascist by courting white suburban voters who were always going to vote for Donald Trump, adopting their own fascist policies, and refusing to give up a genocide to win “the most important election in American history.” Good times, they were not.
By January of 2025 however I started feeling better, and the ominous ascension of the fascist Trump regime to power in America made it hard to stay silent. I was in no shape to write essays here on NIDC, but I did go back to blogging on the Fediverse; you can find my Treehouse account here: @AnarchoNinaAnalyzes. It took me quite a while to knock off all the rust, but by March I was cooking again as an analyst. Although my experience on Treehouse has been excellent, more than a decade of publishing online has taught me that none of my writing is permanent unless I keep it on my website; which is why you’re reading this post.
I need to transfer a bunch of (semi) recent analysis from my blogging account to NIDC; and then going forward I can share new blog posts once or twice a week, as necessary. I’ll backdate any archival posts to make it easy to distinguish from current content, but I don’t expect it to take me very long to finish this project. The front page of each post will feature links to my original posts on the Fediverse; but if you just want to read slightly cleaned-up versions of the posts in order, you can find them on page two with the buttons at the bottom of the article. Archival backdated posts will go up very early Sunday mornings until I’m caught up: to make them easier to ignore in your inbox if you so desire.
Please let me apologize in advance for the inconvenience, but I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t making life hard on myself by treating social media like a writing desk.
April 13th – 15th
Bombs Not Food in the Trump Era
“I found it pretty laughable when motivated observers, including a few in “independent” media claiming to be progressives, defended the rise of Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative by suggesting the Trump regime would find and end “fraud, waste, and abuse” in the Pentagon budget. In so much as I bothered to engage with these arguments, I predicted that neither Trump nor Musk would touch the military budget, or any other part of the US government that’s about committing violence against their perceived enemies, including domestically; with the possible exception of an FBI Trump still hates because they investigated him for crimes he absolutely committed. As such, I can’t say I was surprised to learn that during a sit-down meeting with noted genocidal fascist warmonger and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump bragged about his intentions to *increase* U.S. military spending to literally a trillion dollars.”
Fascist Broligarchs and the New (Old) Company Towns
“Despite their rhetoric about “the future” and their love of technology, the truth is the ideas and plans folks like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen are proposing to accomplish their goals, are old, decrepit, and often utterly disproven. As a species, we have already learned the horrible outcomes of adopting repugnant ideas like eugenics, feudalism, and fascism as enforced policy; and yet here today these ideas are being repackaged and renamed as the only hope for our future, by a billionaire nazi ruling class determined to rewind our society into the darkest days of our collective past. Down that road leads subjugation, violence, and death; which is probably why it appeals to rich nazis who value “artificial minds” over human beings, and are preparing for a world where billions of people are “surplus” to their requirements as techno-feudalist overlords.”
Crackdowns on Protest Go National
“So what now folks? If you’re gonna be called a domestic terrorist and do twenty years in prison for peacefully disrupting the oil and gas industry or opposing a US-backed genocide conducted by its client state Israel regardless, why remain peaceful? Given that Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is openly talking about twenty year prison terms for vandalizing a Tesla dealership, it seems pretty clear that the penalties are the same whether you march peacefully waving your little signs, or actually shut the fuck barrel down and hurt these folks where it counts – their wallets.”
Brendan Carr’s FCC as Trump’s Instrument of Revenge
“By employing this policy to justify government harassment and targeting of Trump’s critics, Carr is making himself and the regime, the finally arbiter of what does and doesn’t constitute a “news distortion” in a way this rule was never intended to be used. If they get away with this, or even if they can just successfully use it to justify applying government pressure against an extremely large, well-funded news organization, there’s no limit to how far these nazis will take this. This is how a fascist regime transforms the entire media environment into pro-Trump, state news outlets and it won’t just stop with the Fox-ification of media orgs either.”
Baby Steps to a White Ethnostate
“Looking at who they’re targeting with orders like this, specifically nonwhite folks who are for all intents and purposes refugees, exposes their fascist intentions to establish America as a white ethnostate in a way that should be being reported in corporate media, but simply isn’t for reasons that range from cowardice, to capitalist greed, and even shared racist sympathies among the ruling class (and their minions) in our society. Quite frankly, the fact that for-profit media outlets are no longer telling Americans that mass deportations are recognized as crimes against humanity by international law, speaks volumes as to why they aren’t talking about what the Trump regime’s activities clearly represent when taken as a whole; the demographic bleaching of America by force, to create a while ethno-state.”
The Trump Regime Goes Full Andrew Jackson
“Folks, we are through the looking glass now and if you can’t see that it’s one and truly fascism, that’s because you don’t know what the word means. Apologists will claim that we are still not yet in a “constitutional crisis” because of the regime’s paper thin excuse that they’re interpreting the SCOTUS ruling to mean all they had to do is remove “domestic” barriers to Garcia’s return, while claiming they have no authority to effect the return of a man they’re literally paying the government of El Salvador to house in a prison famous for torture and forced labor. This is at best, wish-casting and codswallop of course, because the regime is openly broadcasting its intention to flout the Supreme Court’s ruling *while* Trump meets with Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador at the White House; these fascist mutherfuckers just said “let them enforce it” while trolling the shit out of every judge in America.”
The America Gestapo Snatches Another Palestinian Anti-Genocide Protester
“Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian who has legally been studying in the United States for the past ten years, was arrested by ICE as he arrived for a citizenship test; now the regime seems intent on deporting him under the familiar Calvinball argument that Marco Rubio can deport anyone he deems “detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests” on a whim – a tactic the administration has used to justify prior attempts to deport political prisoners Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, among others.”
Facades of Strength in Fascist America
“Just because Trump says its a dictatorship now, doesn’t make it true; especially if the populace at large will not comply. There’s a limit to how much any of us can put into writing, particularly in a fascist police state, but the examples of what fighting back, refusing to obey, and shutting it down looks like are all around you in the world and its recent history. We need to put enough bodies in the streets that fascism cannot be conducted, profit cannot be made, and it’s impossible to shoot us all – and the clock is ticking. But if we can do that, the American people can absolutely take advantage of the fact that Trump has showed his cards too soon.”
The All-American Business of Caging Brown People
“Look, as an abolitionist it’s not lost on me that all prisons are bad no matter who is running them. But the reality here is that most Americans don’t really understand what the migrant carceral complex actually is, and without that realization it’s easier for them to fall into the trap of casually believing this monstrous bullshit serves the public interest somehow. The migrant carceral complex is at the end of the day a business, in which billions of dollars in public funds are distributed to rich people for the privilege of having them cage and torture brown people as part of a shockingly bipartisan, nativist agenda. You don’t get healthcare, your kids don’t get lunch at school, and your grandma is eating cat food because the wise people running our society would rather make blood ticks running prison companies fat and happy, to appease racists in the body politic.”
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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