Are we a fascist country?
Not yet, but we have a fascist wannabe administration
Are we now a fascist country?
That’s probably what you don’t want to think about on a Saturday morning, but unfortunately, we must. In the first days of this year, the Trump administration has kidnapped the leader of Venezuela and taken over that country.
His immigration goon squad, ICE, short for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, murdered a 37-year-old woman, a mother of three, in cold blood in Minneapolis, apparently, merely for not letting them drag her out of her car.
And yesterday, the front page of the New York Times featured a huge picture of Donald Trump’s ugly, sinister, and possibly a bit demented face, and a quote.
When the newspaper asked if there were any limits on his power, Trump said “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That is pure and unadorned fascism, as naked a proclamation as anything Adolf Hitler ever said. He intends to be a totalitarian dictator, and is already acting like one. But WE are not a fascist nation - not yet. If we were, the courageous mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, could not have gone on television, denounced the murder and told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
If we were fully fascist, people, like the elderly lady pictured above, couldn’t march and demonstrate freely without being beaten up or arrested (though some of that has gone on) and I and many people more important than I, like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman, couldn’t write and publish what we do every day.
But I assure you, Trump and his coterie of thugs, like Kristi Noem, would very much like to silence us, and will if we let them.
Traditional Democratic Party leaders have mainly been contemptibly muted about what’s been happening in and to our country and the world, with the exception of a few heroes like Jasmine Crockett, Pete Buttigieg, and AOC — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
So we have to do it — resist these evil bastards by any means necessary, do all we can to oppose and thwart them, and above all, make sure our elections, especially the national midterms on November 3, are free and fair.
Oppose them at every turn, and have nothing to do with anyone who supports them. Communist leaders used to falsely claim that anyone who opposed them were “enemies of the people.” Well, guess what: Trump and JD Vance and Noem and the pathetic Robert Kennedy Jr. ARE enemies of we, the people, and want to make all of our lives worse. So we must not let them.
Stopping them is Job One. Everything else, everything, is secondary.
It’s so hard to comment about your columns because I almost always agree with them, as I do today. Please keep it up.
I’d love for you to analyze why Democratic Party leaders have had such a tepid response to Trump’s fascism. Slotkin, Peter and Stevens have been infuriatingly milquetoasty .
Yes. We are in a fascist National. We have all the ingredients for it to get worse. We have a Gestapo like force monitoring our streets, the horrible shooting of citizens, we have an “other” towards which the government directs its hate, we have concentration camps, we have lies by media and government communications.
But we also have a growing opposition, a strengthening and bolder resistance, the breakdown of maga, more Republicans starting to vote with Democrats and a solid backstop court system in which 🍊 has lost over 75% of his cases. So when he says only his mind and morality will stop him, he has neither. The drum beat of citizen opposition is growing louder every day. But we need much stronger action and resistance by the Dems in Congress.