Fighting The Fascist Clampdown

 What I do not get is all the critters skittering out of under rocks and not being sent back to where they came from. We've got the radical left pointing at them and say these fascists are the real Americans. No, I will not buy that. Yes, they are part of our history - like head lice, they never seem to go away completely.

Reading a book review in The Guardian, The Age of Insurrection review: how the far right rose – and found Trump gives me some ideas of what happened while I was gone:

But as the investigative reporter David Neiwert argues in his terrifying new book, there is one terrible difference: the relentless mainstreaming of such disgusting ideas. The white nationalist ideology which inspired Payton Gendron to travel 200 miles to massacre 10 people in a Black Buffalo neighborhood is becoming as American as cherry pie.

Neiwert shows such extremism has been “widely adopted” from “the highest reaches of the Republican party” to broadcasts by Tucker Carlson, “the most popular cable talk show host” until Fox News fired him.

The surge in rightwing extremism inspired by the election of the US’s first Black president was reflected in an explosion in militia groups during Barack Obama’s first year in office. Then came Donald Trump, the first modern president to celebrate white supremacists. He praised “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Virginia, where in August 2017 neo-Nazis clashed with counter-protesters, and he embraced the Proud Boys in 2020, telling them to “stand back and stand by”.

The collaboration between such a president and the high-speed locomotive of social media has had disastrous consequences. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have brought American wackos together faster than any previous medium.

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No one has been more important to the mainstreaming of extreme rightwing views than Trump. Neiwert says the 45th president has “perfected a three-step tango with the radical right – a dance in which he’d pull them close in an embrace, spin away while staying connected, and then pull them back to close quarters. Acknowledge, deny, validate. Lather, rinse, repeat.”

What will they give you? More freedom? A safer life? Sucker. You get the freedom they will give you. They will give you the safety that works best for them.

 I find it hard to believe that Barack Obama scared white people so badly. Perhaps it is time to stop putting any faith in whites and our culture?

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