Fascism Watch for February 26, 2024: we’ve got to break through the wall
It’s amazing how quickly paranoid delusions can go from being paranoid delusions to being the black-letter reality on the ground, isn’t it?
I mean, I was mad about the Bush II administration making the Edgy Left actually correct in ways they’d never actually been correct before, via his torture regime, via adopting hideous domestic policies including mass surveillance (with Democratic complicity), and via the horror show of their war in Iraq. Unfortunately, they actually did.
But even then, there were limits. I was assuring my nervous friends that Bush II, despite all this, was functionally an old New England Republican when it came to matters of having a Republic, and that he would leave office on time and in an orderly fashion – as he did – just as I assured Republicans that Obama would do the same.
Now, obviously, all of that is out the window.
So I want to present a list of items which are very well documented facts, but would’ve been absolutely, patently insane 10 years ago. I mean, the kind of rantings that got you thrown out of every conversation and mocked for years afterwards – and which are all now verified as true. It’s mostly not a list of their social agenda, thought there’s a bit of that at the end; it’s mostly a list of their authoritarian agenda, and the lengths to which they are going in their attempt to claim absolute power forever.
I want to present them this way so that they are all in a single place, easily accessed, and from a wide variety of sources.
And I want you to convince your friends that all this absolute paranoid conspiracy-theory lunacy is no longer any of those things, but is instead actually absolutely real.
For most people, the Republican Party has become so authoritarian, so treasonous, and so despicable so quickly that the mere act of reporting their own words gets you classified as a conspiracy-theory-swallowing lunatic. This must end.
I have no doubt in my mind that many people most of you know absolutely refuse to believe that any of this is happening despite the fact that it’s all horribly real.
What I’ve been doing for years is trying to break through that wall of disbelief, and what everyone needs to do now is exactly the same thing. You get it; that’s great. But you’ve got to break through the wall of denial still held up by so many, many, many others.
You have to convince them that it’s real, and you have to convince them that it affects them, personally, because frankly, most people will vote for the Leopards Eating Faces Party if they think they’ll get something out of it and the leopards will only eat other peoples’ faces.
And it’s never just other peoples’ faces.
That reality will not be denied forever, but it can – and if the Republicans have their way, absolutely will – be denied until it’s too late.
Today's Fascism Watch starts with a bit of good news about Wisconsin, and then goes into some of the more popular and enduring disinformation of the last month, the methods, the reasons, and pointers to the actual realities involved.
I'm also starting to talk a little more again about Russian domestic propaganda, partly because it's extremely attractive in many ways to the American fundamentalists which form the core of the Republican party, and if you don't know how spicy it's become, you really don't know how spicy it's become and I include a real doozy of an example.
Fascism Update for January 5, 2024: Republicans vs. LGBTQ children
Republicans are lining up in opposition to a proposed Biden administration rule aimed at protecting LGBTQ foster children from abuse. Yes, you’re reading that right. The specifics are that they don’t want a rule requiring that LGBTQ kids be put in supportive households, vs. ones that will abuse them, because of “religious liberty,” as […]
Fascism Watch One-Shot: I think this speaks for itself.
Well, you can’t say he didn’t warn you.
Note that if you combine “dictator” and “dictatorship” they would be as large as “power,” making the biggest words “revenge,” “power,” and “dictator(ship)” in roughly that order.
Ask your red-state relatives if this really who they want ruling the United States.
The shit that's going down on #Substack is EXACTLY what I said would happen if enough people didn't leave #Twitter over Elon Musk's now-successful conversion of it into a fascist propaganda and disinformation fountain.
I said this is literally why Elon's experiment has to fail. Because others will do it too.
Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson thinks he's modern-day Moses, specifically nominated by God to lead America to the fundamentalist promised land, and the thing is: it's not an analogy. He believes it.
The latest influx of white nationalists into northern Idaho and surroundings
A dive into what a Florida Republican's bill declaring support for LGBT people a "political viewpoint" means; it's more than just banning rainbow flags
The latest set of fundamentalist-aligned groups whipping out fake ("cardboard") science to be used by Republican legislators and anti-LGBT groups
Fascism Watch for 19 December 2023: A blended pot-pourri of anti-LGBT activity and Christian Nationalism
So let’s talk about anti-LGBT activism and Christian Nationalism, and how they intertwine, via a set of connections relevant this month. The two go together like steak and potatoes, like apple pie and ice cream, like Spiderman and animation. But while both are super important to talk about, it can be a bit of a melange, with the themes not always clear […]
Fascism Watch for 18 December 2023: Dictator Day One
Let’s talk about Dictator Day One Trump.
Let’s talk about an easy rhetorical slide. That doesn’t sound like it should be the first thing we talk about, but bear with me a second, I’ll get there.
You may and may not recall Trump saying he wanted to be a dictator on Day One when interviewed last week, or doubling down on the […]
This morning's Fascism Watch is short, starting with Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) fully functioning as a fascist propaganda fountain, with floods of paid "verified" users posting AI-generated anti-Semitic memes and videos.
Also, Russian propagandists are praising Elon Musk, and his defence of Putin, Elon declaring him not a "bad guy" despite taking dictatorial control, making LGBT people illegal, legalising domestic violence, assassinating most of his political opponents and imprisoning the rest, and so on. Elon thinks he's just doing what's right for his country.
This is Elon's idea of what's right for a country. Take notes.
“No one can go as low as [President Trump],” Kushner said. “You shouldn’t even try.” Quote from a set of The Atlantic articles about how Trump II would play out. He meant it as a compliment;
New Hampshire Republicans propose complete ban on abortion;
Putin's police raid, round up LGBT people, like the American fundamentalist evangelicals want to do here;
Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson: "We live in a depraved culture," part of that, naturally, being LGBT people not being illegal (like in Russia);
Texas GOP executive committee reject ban on associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.
In today’s Fascism Watch, let’s talk about Speaker Mike Johnson, one particular interview, and what some of the things he said to sound reassuring to outsiders actually mean in American fundamentalist evangelical language.
Work has been A Thing Again, so once again, I’m way behind. I’m doing little themed updates as I can to catch up.
This one's on Musk Twitter. I know, I come back to Twitter a lot, don’t I? Well, it is the single largest bullhorn for fascist disinformation and propaganda outside Fox News, so you can see why I think it’s relevant.
LITERALLY AS I TYPED THIS I got an update. See reply!
On a related note, my blog isn't federating correctly right now, and hasn't been since Wordpress released ActivityPub 1.0.
This means that if you follow my blog here, you aren't seeing anything I post and your Follow is now showing as "Pending approval" instead of "Following." I didn't do that. They broke it.
They're aware and hopefully working on it.
This is also why there haven't been any Fascism Watch updates in several days. I was hoping they'd fix it before the backlog got too bad, but they haven't. I'll be catching up again this weekend regardless.
OKAY! If you have been following my blog directly (@solarbird) , look at my profile and see whether you see "Following" or literally anything else.
If you don't see "Following" - if you see "Cancel follow" or "Pending approval" or something like that - click on that button and follow again. When I did that, it changed to "Following" and this time it seems to have stuck. And I saw a new post federate!
So I think we're good.
If it ALREADY says "Following," you should see a new post today. If you don't, try the above.
A quick Fascism Watch mini-update, about the Canadian Tories and their hard turn towards anti-LGBTQ culture wars.
This post outlines what Poilievre is doing when he declares that a general condemnation of anti-LGBT hatred is an attack on "concerned parents," and where that's - quite intentionally - leading.
Canada's Tories (#CPC) are going culture warrior, adopting bathroom bans, trans health care bans, and vaccine denialism;
Viv3k Ramasw4my, ignoring the plain text and intent of the 14th Amendment, declares he'd expel millions of US children;
M4tt W4lsh sics his misogynist army on a woman for posting about her Saturday; she gets death threats;
#Project2025 includes a plan to rapidly criminalise all #LGBTQ people; I walk you through the steps;
The #GOP know their abortion laws are hated but they won't change, so they want to rebrand. Watch for new terminology and know what it means! (They're testing "pro-baby")
DeSantis appoints moms4liberty cult co-founder to state employee conduct board; her co-founder defended using Hitler quotes on the front of their newsletter
Catholic clinic refuses to treat a 14-year-old trans girl... for her ADHD. Or anything.
The Atlantic is covering one family who fled Texas for California. These stories are important; we need more of them.
Elon's ever-louder anti-Semitism
Elon Musk personally sabotaged a Ukrainian military operation against the Russian Navy. He's for Russia and authoritarianism, guys. Just is. He's a fucking nazi.
All that and more in the "it never fucking ends" edition...
NBC finally notices one of the original KOSA co-sponsors saying it's intended to be a method of censoring LGBT content. Lots of Democrats are in on this bill, so CONTACT YOUR SENATORS NOW.
Media are mostly talking about Musk's suit against the ADL and ignoring his other #antiSemitic activity; that's a failure of media.
Jack Dorsey has put incredible amounts of work into making sure #nazis can be on #bluesky. That matters.
CISHETS: When you were three, four years old, did you know whether you were a boy or a girl? Fox News has decided that's monstrous if that kid is trans.
The hardest part of all this fascism watch updating is that particularly where one topic in particular is concerned, the careen towards overt nazism is so fast that the updates need updates, which then also need updates, in one case four times.
So far.
And since so much of it happened over Labour Day, it all has to be recapped for everybody. And even the recap is a big enough firehose that a lot of people will bounce off.