The Skinny: Building A Patchwork Enabling Act

 

Building A Patchwork Enabling Act: May 1st – 7th

 

Civil Rights But Just For Nazis

The more I watch them in action, the more it becomes clear to me that an intentional inversion of civil rights language and protections is a foundational aspect of the methodology the Trump regime is using to transform America into a fascist dictatorship with open Nazi characteristics. While I think this write up in The Guardian could use a bit more blunt honesty about the white nationalist nature of the Trump administration’s strategy here, it still does a reasonable job of looking at all the ways the regime is purposing one (itself white nationalist) SCOTUS ruling to turn sixty years of civil rights legislation into a weapon against the very marginalized people it was written to protect.

Trump administration exploits landmark civil rights act to fight schools’ diversity initiatives

“Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has described the investigation as part of the administration’s effort to “reorient civil rights enforcement to ensure all students are protected from illegal discrimination”. But civil rights advocates have denounced them as vague, likely unlawful and a betrayal of the spirit of the civil rights protections they purport to invoke.

“What we’re witnessing is an administration that is working very hard to turn civil rights laws against” the people trying to faithfully implement them, said Maya Wiley, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “It’s really an effort to say, ‘If you don’t do what we tell you, we will turn our considerable power against you’.”

I think the facts here pretty much speak for themselves; weaponizing Title VI and IX of the 1964 Civil Rights act to fight bogus “anti-white discrimination,” seize control over educational institutions to protect a US-backed genocide in Gaza, and persecute trans (primarily women) people is a gross, fascist perversion of the entire purpose of those laws, and I have no doubt that doing so actively delights the cracker nazis running the Trump administration. Forcing a white nationalist framework onto American life through the very same mechanisms that were installed to fight rampant white supremacy in our society is the ultimate fascist troll job, and the “how’s my ass taste” aspect of this initiative is probably just as important to the regime as its actual efforts to create a de facto white ethnostate through these methods.

Furthermore, I think it goes without saying that using one single SCOTUS decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, to argue that the government has a legal responsibility to enforce white nationalist policy over every aspect of American life and education, is a ridiculously broad, crassly dishonest interpretation of the law that should in no way be given credibility by anyone who isn’t a fascist. This isn’t Simon Says; the clearly stated purpose of the Civil Rights Act matters here too, and going full “the card says Moops” in response to this objectively disingenuous nazi bullshit is a cowardly failure of civic responsibility by the media, education institutes, and every part of the American establishment that isn’t directly fighting Trump’s perverse inversion of the Civil Rights Act.

Finally I’d like to point out that this is yet another example of the way Trump’s entire fascist agenda amounts of “governance by nazi conspiracy theory.” The entire basis of the administration’s argument that they can, and need to use Civil Rights law to protect white, straight, Christian men, is rooted in fascist conspiracy theories about “reverse racism,” “gender ideology,” and “white genocide” – none of which are real, or actually happening in our society. This is a consistent pattern now in how Trump rules; the regime states fascist conspiracy theories as fact, acts on those conspiracy theories as if they were actual crises-level emergencies, and then seeks reprisal against anyone who opposes their attempts to govern as if these fascist conspiracy theories are true.

 

Ideological Policing and Public Broadcasters

In a move previously signaled by a Marjorie Taylor Green fact-finding hearing that resembled nothing more than a HUAC trial from the darkest days of McCarthyism, the Klepto Kaiser finally snapped and is attempting to defund PBS and NPR for the high crime of broadcasting “woke ideology” – which at this point clearly means anything Trump and other rich white nazis don’t like. Acting once again outside the scope of executive function via executive order, Der Leader wants to slash funding to the public broadcasters “to the maximum extent allowed by law.”

Trump demands defunding of PBS and NPR over “woke propaganda”

“President Donald Trump escalated his attack on NPR and PBS on Thursday when he signed an executive order demanding the end of all federal funding supporting the news outlets.

In his order, Trump claimed that unlike in the 1960s, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was funded to ensure Americans had access to critical news, there are plenty of news options today. He has joined other Republicans accusing NPR and PBS of promoting a left-leaning bias. In a White House statement, he ordered any agency directly or indirectly funding the outlets’ allegedly “woke propaganda” to “end the madness” as soon as possible, cutting off current funding “to the maximum extent allowed by law” and declining “to provide future funding.”

There’s a lot to unpack here; while I may not always ideologically agree with the folks at Ars Technica, they do still produce deep longform investigative dives into the stories they cover, which is real a rarity in the modern media environment. First of all, no Trump probably can’t legally do this, and yes he’s just YOLO-ing it out into the world anyway; also, it’s a random Friday in May. As the article notes, it’s unclear how Trump can effectively order the CPB to cut already-approved funding for the next two years, and we haven’t even gotten into how the “whys” Trump wants to do this all violate free speech and freedom of the press rights. This is petulant manbaby dictator shit.

Additionally it’s not at all clear that Trump’s illegal tantrum is going to meaningfully affect his targets, NPR and PBS, anyway. Only 1% of NPR’s funding actually comes from the US government, and PBS only receives 15% of its funding from the CPB. Since Der Führer has not yet granted himself the authority to simply throw members of the media in jail for expressing opinions and criticisms he doesn’t like, the funding cut is as far as he can go for now. Unfortunately however, Trump’s tantrum will definitely have victims and impoverish an already appalling American media environment; particularly in rural communities where smaller stations can rely on the CPB for as much as 50% of their funding.

“Cutting off funding, Kreger said last month, would have a “devastating impact” on rural communities, especially in parts of the country where NPR and PBS still serve as “the only source of news and emergency broadcasts,” NPR reported.

For example, Ed Ulman, CEO of Alaska Public Media, testified to Congress last month that his stations “provide potentially life-saving warnings and alerts that are crucial for Alaskans who face threats ranging from extreme weather to earthquakes, landslides, and even volcanoes.” Some of the smallest rural stations sometimes rely on CPB for about 50 percent of their funding, NPR reported.”

All of which leaves us with the “whys” which really don’t require us to read many tea leaves before we find the fascist ideological policing and reactionary bullshit. Downmarket Mussolini more or less just said the quiet part out loud in the executive order and its announcement:

“While Trump opposes NPR and PBS for promoting content that he disagrees with—criticizing segments on white privilege, gender identity, reparations, “fat phobia,” and abortion—the networks have defended their programming as unbiased and falling in line with Federal Communications Commission guidelines.”

I confess that on some level it’s probably amusing to picture Trump sitting in front of a TV and getting big mad when it tells him Black and trans people exist, he shouldn’t bully overweight people, and the abortion bans he facilitated are hurting American women. The reality here however is that in signaling what the president doesn’t want to see in publicly-funded media, he’s effectively articulating a Christian Nationalist agenda. As we’ve discussed numerous times on this blog, the regime is not just fighting a material war to install a fascist dictatorship in our society; they’re also fighting an authoritarian cultural war on our discourse, our history, and who is allowed to matter in our media entertainment complex. The ideological headcage Trump is trying to use state power to enforce here, is just as important to the Trumpenrich project to create a white ethnostate dictatorship under the Kelpto Kaiser, as its material expansion of the American fascist police state is.

 

Erasing Climate Legislation By Fiat

Despite us being over three months into the second Trump era, I still periodically find it breathtaking how much unhinged cartoon villain bullshit this fascist regime can cram into any given exercise of power. This story for example touches on the way the Klepto Kaiser is using the Department of Justice as his personal legal team to further the objectives of his donors, Trump’s attempts to seize power for the presidency from other government bodies, and Downmarket Mussolini’s fake “national emergency” scheme to do blatantly illegal shit because Pam Bondi, a hack lawyer with literally zero commitment to legal ethics, thinks it walks under American Law.

This week the Department of Justice filed complaints or lawsuits against four states, New York, Vermont, Hawaii, and Michigan, to stop them from enforcing their own state climate laws and mechanisms to hold the fossil fuel companies killing us all, financially accountable for their crimes against humanity.

Trump’s ‘Phony Energy Emergency’ Used by DOJ to Target State Climate Laws

“On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed complaints against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws, which empower states to seek financial compensation from fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate mitigation. The burning of fossil fuels is the main driver of human-caused global heating.

Separately, the DOJ also sued Hawaii and Michigan “to prevent each state from suing fossil fuel companies in state court to seek damages for alleged climate change harms.”

As the article mentions, Bondi’s maneuvers here stem from Trump’s April 8th sweeping executive order in which the president claims the authority to erase any law at any level of government that might impede the fossil fuel companies that put Trump into power; and this is somehow legal because he also declared a fake national energy emergency. Like most of Der Leader’s executive orders, the dictate is vague and broad enough to essentially empower Trump to bulldoze anyone or anything he doesn’t agree with, which is pretty much all climate or fossil fuel extraction legislation or regulations. The order is also almost certainly illegal; whatever that actually means in a burgeoning fascist dictatorship where the regime is openly ignoring a number of court orders as we speak.

It’s hard to really drill down here and find the biggest problem with all of this because virtually everything about this executive order is itself an existential crisis. The planet is literally on fire, climate crisis is real, and billions of (mostly poor) people’s lives hang in the balance; the last thing anyone needs is for Trump to empower extractivist mass murder companies to rip more fossil fuels we shouldn’t even be burning out of the ground because they’re greedy, and Trump wants to pretend he can drive gas prices down and create an American economic utopia by drilling more oil as the world turns to ash. Secondly, to our great shame Trump was elected President of the United States, but he was not made King of the realm and he does not have the power to override the authority of every State government in America on a whim; nor should any president have that authority, as winger fascist “states rights” debate bros have been reminding us all for six decades. If Trump wants to dismantle state climate laws and regulations, his Big Oil donors are going to have to take it through the courts just like everyone else; and yet here’s Trump trying to bully their way across the finish line on the cusp of being sued by Hawaii, with one signature.

In my mind however the most shameful and egregious part of all this is the way Trump is weaponizing the Department of Justice to fight the legal battles of extractivist corporations and donors who helped him become president. Not only does it make obvious the reality that Trump perceives the Justice Department as the president’s own private cadre of lawyers who exist to prosecute his grievances and manipulate the law to further his fascist objectives, but it’s also a pretty clear example of quid pro quo and bribery. The message here is if you donate enough money to Trump, you get Trump’s lawyers to work for you and those lawyers happen to be the literal Department of Justice; and there’s not a lotta wiggle room to argue otherwise, quite frankly. Obviously none of this is how either the Justice Department or presidential power is supposed to work, but as usual the Klepto Kaiser and his bootlicking Attorney General, Pam Bondi, don’t seem to care.

 

Harvard, Yarvin, and War on the Cathedral

I haven’t written about Trump’s fascist attempts to exert control over Harvard University recently, by choice. It was a decision I made primarily because after making a great fanfare of announcing they intended to fight back against the regime’s ideological policing, the university quietly walked back their resistance posture, repurposed their diversity, equity, and inclusion office, and shockingly agreed to share information on foreign students with DHS. For all intents and purposes, Harvard’s actions represented a complete capitulation to the fascist regime’s agenda, with some posturing thrown in that allowed Harvard to save face in a way for example, Columbia had not. As we’ve noted many times in this thread however, appeasing fascists doesn’t work and once you agree to obey Trump’s authoritarian edicts, you’re essentially property of the regime going forward.

Harvard is now learning this lesson the hard way because despite all their cowardly bootlicking, Trump is still openly announcing the regime’s intention to revoke Harvard’s tax except status; something he has literally no legal authority to do according to most experts.

Trump Seeks to Revoke Harvard’s Tax Status Despite Numerous Concessions

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

In response, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) and three other Democratic senators have demanded that the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) internal watchdog investigate whether the Trump administration is unlawfully pressuring the agency to target Harvard.

Just weeks ago, Harvard was celebrated for resisting the Trump administration’s threats to withhold $2.2 billion in federal funding, positioning itself as a defender of academic freedom by filing a lawsuit challenging the funding freeze. But recently, the university has quietly reversed course, rebranding and altering the mission of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) office, announcing that it will no longer fund affinity group celebrations during commencement, and sharing international student information with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“You mean to tell me banning affinity group graduations, handing over school records to the DHS gestapo, cracking down on protests, and dismantling DEI didn’t appease this fascist dictator?! I’m shocked I tell you,” Harvard Law School instructor Alejandra Caraballo said on Bluesky.”

I think the facts of this story paint a fairly obvious picture here; Trump’s war on higher education to enforce a white nationalist ideological framework on American life is clearly fascist, Harvard put on a brave face but ultimately chose craven collaboration with the regime’s fascist agenda, and surprise, surprise, Trump has continued to threaten the University and demand further concessions. Trump is a fascist bully hellbent on controlling every aspect of our society through the exercise of state power and you don’t ever stop a bully by appeasing them.

There is however a deeper layer of fascist fuckery going on here, because Trump’s war on higher education also aligns perfectly with noted fascist theorist Curtis Yarvin’s proposed “Butterfly Revolution” to transform America into a fascist dictatorship under Trump; part of which revolves around destroying or taking control of “the Cathedral” which Yavrin defines as the mainstream media, prestigious American universities, and important cultural institutions. I doubt Trump has ever read The Butterfly Revolution, but his Vice President JD Vance certainly has. He’s a devote follower of Yarvin’s expressly “neo-fascist” teachings, as are key billionaire TechBro Trump donors and supporters like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Now whether or not Trump understands that all of this is part of a plan by his nazi billionaire buddies to shatter the American nation state and create techno-feudalist “Patchwork” or “Network State” city-state dictatorships out of the smoldering ashes is more debatable; but either way, all of these guys are clearly working on the installation of a fascist political, social, and ideological framework on our society that will last decades beyond Trump’s own miserable existence.

 

The Term “Billionaire Nazi Cultists” Is Literal

Because my understanding of the billionaire nazi plot to install fascism in the Pig Empire originated through my studies of climate crisis, money in politics, and the funding behind fascist movements in the Pig Empire, my focus in writing about the fascist broligarch global takeover is on the material actions these rich freaks take to bring about the future they desire; more or less against the collective will of the human species. As I began to dig deeper into the subject and reading the work of analysts like Émile P. Torres, Timnit Gebru, Gil Duran, and Douglas Rushkoff however, I came to realize that many rich fascists, particularly at the center of the broligarch counterrevolutionary alliance in Silicon Valley, were also essentially in an emerging anti-human death cult. I know a lot of scholars (myself included) will metaphorically compare all fascist movements, which are dependent on an ever-shrinking circle of “us,” and and ever widening circle of “them” to function, to a death cult due to the corrosive, ouroboros-like effect this has on fascist societies and the body counts they produce over time, but that description is still ultimately a metaphor. When I say Silicon Valley billionaire nazis who have bought our political systems are in an apocalyptic, anti-human death cult I’m speaking quite literally here; the billionaires trying to push this quasi-religious ideology used to promote it as “effective altruism” and “longtermism,” some folks call it “The Mindset,” Torres and Gebru describe is as TESCREALism, but regardless of what you call it, its sure looks like a fascist cult for billionaire edgelord nazis to me.

Is it important to understand what fascist broligarchs like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and the rest of the Yarvinate tech-fascist billionaires believe? In my opinion, not really; why they do the fascist shit they do to achieve their long term objectives isn’t as important to understand as what those objectives are and by what methodology they’re trying to achieve them. Unfortunately however the activities of a billionaire ruling class dominated by tech fascists who intend to run the human species off the ecological cliff to preserve their wealth and power on a boiling planet, are often so horrible that many people need to understand the belief structure that allows this genocidal behavior, in order to simply rationalize and accept what is happening around us. For whatever reason, it is not enough for them to hear “well they’re nazis, and this is what nazis do” or “either capitalism goes or a planet that can support 8 billion people does; the billionaires are picking capitalism,” and so for those folks I’d like to share this Torres piece that examines the belief structure of this anti-humanist death cult, through the lens of Rushkoff’s analysis of “The Mindset.”

The Endgame of Edgelord Eschatology

“The central claim of my argument so far is that Silicon Valley is gripped by a descriptive eschatology: the belief that our future will be digital rather than biological, and that this is inevitable in the coming decades — whether we like it or not. Just about everyone in the Valley believes this because, it seems, nearly everyone accepts by default a “techno-deterministic” view according to which scientific and technological “progress” is a juggernaut that simply cannot be stopped. As one of the leading prophets of The Mindset, Nick Bostrom, writes: “If scientific and technological development efforts do not effectively cease, then all important basic capabilities that could be obtained through some possible technology will be obtained.” He calls this the “Technological Completion Conjecture.”

What’s even more frightening is that many people in Silicon Valley accept the additional normative claim that we should try to bring about a new world of digital beings to supplant this current one. It’s not just Page who says this would be desirable. The “revolt against humanity,” to quote the literary critic Adam Kirsch, is rapidly growing within the tech world.”

Yeah, I wasn’t ready to process the idea that some of the richest, most powerful nazis in the world literally believe AI will create god, and humanity has no value except in however the species can assist in creating that god, the first time I read it either. The amazing part is this AI as god delusion is only one aspect of the TESCREAL rabbit hole; rich fascists plugged in to what many observers have described as “the dominant ideology in the US Big Tech sector” believe a whole bunch of other weird supervillain shit too.

Do all the reactionary billionaires believe this anti-human, quasi-religious nonsense? Probably not; but many of the richest most politically-active among them at least appear to. Ultimately I think the difference between belief and motivation for Silicon Valley nazis is so fine as to not really exist; belief and purpose all meld into a type of homicidal ambition and greed. Untangling that ball of repugnant selfishness ultimately isn’t worth our time; whether they believe these things to justify their actions, or act according to these beliefs is unknowable, and largely irrelevant as far as I can tell. The point here is they’re preparing for the apocalypse they themselves are creating, and they regard the rest of humanity as surplus to their requirements.

 

A Fake Democratic One Party State

Ultimately I think Trump and his fascist regime’s plan is to transform the United States into a version of what is sometimes called a “parliamentary dictatorship.” What that means in this context is that the regime will allow elections, but fully intends to permanently rig those contests for the fascist Republican Party through a variety of means. Of course, rigging elections is difficult, and in the near term the political opposition that’s already in office will remain a thorn in the side of even the most prepared dictator; which Trump certainly is not. What a good reactionary autocracy needs is to normalize the removal of political figures who oppose the regime from government entirely; which is probably why Trump took to Truth Social a few days ago to propose the Republican Party literally remove Democrats trying to impeach him from Congress.

Trump Suggests Republicans Start Expelling Dems From Congress

“President Donald Trump suggested that congressional Republicans should expel Democratic lawmakers from Congress in response to a so-far small impeachment push that has not been endorsed by party leadership.

In a lengthy Truth Social post published late Thursday night, the president wrote: “The Democrats are really out of control. They have lost everything, especially their minds! These Radical Left Lunatics are into the ‘Impeachment thing’ again. They have already got two ‘No Name,’ little respected Congressmen, total Whackjobs both, throwing the ‘Impeachment’ of DONALD J. TRUMP around.

“The Republicans should start to think about expelling them from Congress for all of the crimes that they have committed, especially around Election time(s),” Trump continued, calling Democrats “very dishonest people that won’t let our Country heal” and “total LOWLIFES, who hate our Country, and everything it stands for.”

“Perhaps we should start playing this game on them, and expel Democrats for the many crimes that they have committed,” the president wrote.”

One of the things I wasn’t entirely prepared for about the slide into fascist dictatorship under the second coming of Trump, was the juxtaposition of the gravely serious threat the Keltpo Kaiser’s activities represent to American society, and the utterly asinine ways Trumpworld and even the larger media industry that covers US politics will talk about and analyze those threats; this is one of those stories. In this Rolling Stone piece for example, the focus is on pointing out that Trump is overreacting to a couple of lone wolf impeachment attempts because the Democratic Party does not in fact support impeaching Downmarket Mussolini on the leadership level. So Trump is lying when he accuses Democrat leadership of having a spine? Uh, sure; cool story bro.

The fact is the Democratic Party should be dead serious about impeaching Trump because he’s literally a lawless fascist who is governing by nazi conspiracy theories, and has set the country on the path towards a Christian Nationalist dictatorship in direct violation of so many laws and constitutional amendments I don’t have time to list them all here. If ever the concept of impeachment had a purpose in American government, it would be to remove a president like Trump here in his second term; so whether or not the Klepto Kaiser is lying about the Democratic Party being united in removing him is really not the fucking point here. Furthermore asking the fascist GOP to use its power to illegally expel opposition party members from Congress because they’re using the completely legitimate authority granted to them to bring forth articles of impeachment against a president who is openly violating his oaths and American law, is textbook one-party state fascist regime bullshit. As such Trump musing about it on his private social media site is a major threat to American democratic society no matter how right, or wrong he is, about how much the Democrats oppose him; which is literally their job in the American system of government, even if you and I can both probably acknowledge that they suck at that job.

Of course the article does point out that Trump’s inference that Democrats have committed “many crimes” in relation to attempts to remove him from office or prosecute him for completely legitimate crimes he actually committed, is absolute nonsense as far as we know. The truth however is that I don’t really think Trump’s tirade has anything to do with what the Democratic Party is, or isn’t doing to impeach him at all. I think Trump, a man disturbingly obsessed with his own publicity, has clearly seen recent polling showing a slim majority of Americans as a whole favor impeaching him for the crimes and violations he’s already committed in his second term. Yes the Klepto Kaiser is trying to criminalize his opposition, yes he’s trying to make America a functional one party state; but I think Trump is also sending the message that if he’s willing to go after Democrats in Congress for talking about impeaching him, anyone else bringing up the subject might be next.

 

Cruelty, SCOTUS, and the Anti-trans Pogrom

In a ruling that simultaneously demonstrates that “the cruelty is the point” and “the American legal process is designed to work for the oppressor,” the Supreme Court has granted the Trump administration an emergency stay of lower court orders blocking their unconstitutional and frankly eliminationist trans military ban; allowing the government to immediately begin discharging trans service members while lawsuits against the edict make their way through the courts.

Supreme Court allows Trump administration to enforce transgender military ban

“LGBTQ+ advocates condemned the ruling. In a joint statement, Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which represent plaintiffs in the case, called the decision “a devastating blow to transgender servicemembers who have demonstrated their capabilities and commitment to our nation’s defense.” The groups argued the policy “has nothing to do with military readiness and everything to do with prejudice,” adding that the ban “violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection and will ultimately be struck down.”

The administration had sought an emergency stay from the Supreme Court after the Ninth Circuit denied a similar request on April 18. In their response brief last week, attorneys for the plaintiffs said the government’s request was based on a “shocking proposition that transgender people do not exist,” and argued the policy “fails under any level of review.” The brief emphasized that the active-duty plaintiffs have over 115 years of combined military service and over 70 commendations.”

Alright, let me state up front that I remain a committed anti-imperialist, peace advocate, and anarcho-syndicalist. I am not for war, militarism, or gunning down brown kids in far away lands on behalf of American oil companies and calling yourself a hero afterwards. If I had my way, there would be no military for trans service members to be banned from. But this ruling isn’t about banning military service for everyone, it’s about banning military service for trans people specifically because the government has legally declared that trans people don’t exist, while simultaneously implying that being trans is a type of mental illness that makes folks unsuitable for employment by the Department of Defense. In that regard then, this ruling is a part of the Trump regime’s ongoing anti-trans pogrom and the larger fascist right’s open attempts to drive trans people out of American public life. There are real people at the center of this abhorrent and nonsensical ruling, who even if I strongly disagree with their career choices are being harmed for nothing more than their gender identity; the fact that this is happening in the US military with the support of a Christian Nationalist-friendly SCOTUS doesn’t make it any different than if McDonald’s were firing trans people because “they’re too unstable to operate a fry cooker.” This similarity is of course intentional, because anti-trans fascists don’t want to just remove trans people from the military, they want everyone to stop employing trans people entirely; that’s how a pogrom works.

All of which of course leaves us with the harms themselves, and the lawless, vindictive nature of the Trump regime’s war on trans existence. The fact is it remains highly unlikely that the Trump trans military ban is going to ultimately survive the numerous legal challenges against it; and the six fascist or fascist-friendly judges sitting on SCOTUS know that. Unless they’re prepared to effectively invent new law, the ban will ultimately be struck down; which begs the question of why they would allow the Trump regime to start enacting the ban in the meantime while the suits against it make their way through the courts? Particularly given that discharge will irreparably harm the careers of trans service members who are likely to successfully sue the government for doing so once the ban is ultimately overturned. The answer of course is that doing so will allow the regime to harm, purge, and demonize some trans people in the interim, and since all these folks would be for simply locking up or eliminating trans people if the law would allow it, they’re happy to err on the side of destroying trans lives and careers to feed raw meat to the Christian Nationalist base this movement relies on for support.

 

Lake Begins Building Trump State Media With OAN

I’m just going to be honest with you; if Very Serious People TM are going to insist on telling me not to compare the Trump regime to the literal Nazis, someone is going to have to ask this government to stop doing the exact same things the Nazis did. In what must be understood as a propaganda program designed to normalize not only fascist ideology, but also specifically pro-Trump regime and cult of personality messaging, noted liar. conspiracy theorist and failed Senatorial candidate Kari Lake has now announced Voice of America will be carrying the One America News feed.

Embattled Voice of America to use newsfeed from hard-right network

“Kari Lake, a special adviser to the body that oversees the government-funded VoA, announced on X that One America News (OAN), which was sued by voting machine companies for promoting claims of election fraud, will provide “newsfeed and video service”.

“Every day I look for ways to save American taxpayers money. Bringing in OAN as a video/news source does both,” Lake said. “OAN is one of the few family-owned American media networks left in the United States. We are grateful for their generosity.”

The news that OAN, which many see as a pro-Trump propaganda outfit, will provide content for VoA, which has traditionally been a more politically neutral news source, is a move that will spur further fears about Donald Trump’s crackdown on the press.

OAN, which spread conspiracy theories about the coronavirus epidemic, almost exclusively interviews Republican politicians and rightwing voices, including this week the founder of an organization that denies the existence of the climate crisis.”

For those of you blessedly unfamiliar with OAN, calling it a “hard right” news organization is absolutely The Guardian being coy. These folks are malevolent fascists, and they produce content which satisfies a rabidly pro-Trump, white nationalist audience that thinks Fox News isn’t nazi enough for their tastes. This is, for all intents and purposes, like turning a state-controlled media news feed over to Bannon-era Breitbart News or Candice Owens. In other words the content OAN creates isn’t news, it’s fascist propaganda, riddled with lies, nazi conspiracy theories, and cult of personality adulation for Downmarket Mussolini; if you’re not seeing the parallels between what the Trump regime is trying to do here, and the adoring state-controlled media that fueled Hitler’s cult of personality in Nazi Germany, it’s because you’re either being dishonest, or you’re simply ignorant of interwar history.

Of course no knowledgeable person on the left is going to cry for the demise of Voice of America, and to a significant degree VOA has always been state news in so much as it existed to project a pro-American image into “enemy territory” during the Cold War and the War on Terror. The difference here is that now, VOA isn’t merely pro-American or even pro-imperialist propaganda; it’s pro-Trump’s cult of personality propaganda. Furthermore the exact same global reach that made VOA a problem in the hands of US imperialist governments, now means that OAN, the Cult of Trump, and American fascism will be on display globally for all the world to observe and use a defining prism through which to see American life, news, and politics. Finally, while it may be hard to imagine now, if we project Trump’s media suppression policies and actives out a couple of years, it’s not hard to see how Voice of America could easily become much more popular domestically as Trump delegitimizes, censors, and revokes the broadcast licenses for news organizations that won’t promote his deceptions, regime, or cult positively. In other words, this is the kind of small move that’s easy to ignore, but remains part of a much larger plan to control the American media environment and use that control to prop up the Trump regime and its fascist agenda.

As a closing aside, I would encourage readers to please take note of the crass dishonesty and manipulative propaganda employed by Lake to justify this two stage transformation at VOA. First, she explained the clearly political and retaliatory decision to cancel VOA’s sharing of news feeds from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse by pointing out that VOA had an almost billion-dollar budget and could produce its own news feeds. Now, she’s justifying the installation of a pro-Trump cult fascist propaganda network to provide that very same news feed, under the auspices of saving money for the government and the American taxpayer. This woman is a shameless liar who thinks you’re a fucking rube, and absolutely none of this has anything to do with government spending on Voice of America.

 

Trumpism Searches for Its Horst Wessel

Has anyone considered the possibility that life was better before American presidents communicated via “tweet?” I must confess that I do not like a modern political media environment where every deranged thing Trump posts on Truth Social has to be considered relevant news, but when Downmarket Mussolini uses openly fascist propaganda to push his 2020 Election conspiracy, aka “The Big Lie,’ while simultaneously demanding the Department of Justice free a convicted co-conspirator in the pro-Trump far right’s plot to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election, you kind of have to pay attention to that one.

Trump Demands Release Of Election Denier ‘Hostage’ Convicted By Colorado Jury

“In a Truth Social post Monday night, Trump referred to Peters’ prosecution as “a Communist persecution by the Radical Left Democrats to cover up their Election crimes and misdeeds in 2020.” He attacked Colorado’s Democratic attorney general, Phil Weiser, and demanded the Justice Department “take all necessary action to help secure the release of this ‘hostage’ being held in a Colorado prison by the Democrats, for political reasons.”

Trump said Peters, who he called an “innocent Political Prisoner,” had “worked to expose and document Democrat Election Fraud” — repeating his yearslong lie that he didn’t actually lose the 2020 election but, rather, was the victim of an impossibly complex, nationwide fraud scheme.

What Peters actually did — while working as the elected county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado — was allow a computer analyst associated with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell into a secure in-person software update for the county’s election machines, in yet another unsuccessful effort to sow doubt about Joe Biden’s 2020 win.

The analyst, former pro surfer and RVCA founder Conan Hayes, attended the software update, using the name and recently issued office badge of a Mesa County local. Images of the update process, known as a trusted build, were later shared online and at a 2021 “symposium” on the 2020 election results hosted by Lindell — around the same time state officials arrived at the Mesa County clerk’s office to investigate.”

I don’t want to rehash the Trump cult’s 2020 election denial schemes, but Tina Peters is the former clerk in Mesa County, Colorado who engineered an elaborate plot to let some yahoo connected to billionaire Trump-humping conspiracy crank Mike Lindell have access to voting machines during a software update meeting; she wasn’t charged for her political beliefs, or even her election denial rhetoric, she’s literally in jail for helping some fashy rando access voting machines illegally by impersonating an employee with clearance to access the machines, and lying about it to get him inside. Naturally, the Trump regime fucking loves this lady and I’m assuming the only reason she wasn’t already pardoned by Trump is that she was convicted under Colorado state law and thus a federal pardon does her no good. As the article notes, the Department of Justice has however gone as far as inserting itself in a highly political and partisan way in Peters’ ongoing appeals process.

What’s more interesting to me here however, is examining Trump’s Truth Social post in the proper context; specifically as a piece of fascist propaganda that is disturbingly reminiscent of narratives manufactured by the German Nazi Party during Hitler’s rise to power.

The depiction of Peters as a courageous political prisoner unjustly being punished for merely stating her belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, which is in and of itself a piece of false fascist propaganda often referred to in the media as “the big lie” in a nod to statements by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, is extremely reminiscent of interwar period Nazi propaganda about the purported persecution of violent Nazi street activists convicted of breaking German laws to further Hitler’s cause. The portrayal of Peters’ prosecution as a vast political conspiracy, and the conflation of Trump’s milquetoast center-right opposition with a “radical” (and presumably dangerous) left is also pretty much exactly how the Nazis portrayed opposition efforts to hold them accountable on their way to absolute power. Finally, while I’m sure the inclusion of “Communist” will be shrugged off by most observers as Trump doing drunk grandpa Bircher things, I think it’s much more likely given the context of the rest of the message, that this is a fascist dog-whistle to the nazi conspiracy theory known as “cultural marxism” – in which pretty much everyone opposed to them from equality activists, to “liberal” capitalist political figures, are all part of a gigantic Marxist (read: Jewish) plot to undermine America, capitalism, and “the white race.”

Look, I get that Trump is absolutely not a student of Joey Goebbels and Nazi propaganda techniques; it’s obvious that someone in the regime is feeding him these ideas. And since these ideas are objectively Nazi shit, I’m going to assume that someone is none other than Der Leader’s unofficial minister of white nationalist shit, Stephen Miller.

 

 

• Nina Illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

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