Still Educating Sam Hasler: Politics: Fascism Need Not Win, Indiana GOP Goes Nuts

This post is a medley of things read this past weekend that I stored on Google Keep. Fascism cannot win so long as people have the backbone to govern themselves.

JAMES LEE BURKE ON HEMINGWAY, ORWELL, AND A NEW CHAPTER IN THE AMERICAN BATTLE AGAINST FASCISM

Hoosier GOP insiders spurn party establishment, nominate Beckwith for LG

Schmuhl criticized Beckwith’s library activism and a video he made the day after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in which he said the assault was divinely inspired.
“… People are disgusted by what they saw, and a lot of people are freaking out over what they saw, and I can totally understand that,” Beckwith says in the video. “But I was in prayer this morning … and you know what the Lord told me?”
“He said, ‘Micah,’ he said, ‘I sent those riots to Washington.’ He said, ‘What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.'”
Braun, however, dismissed his new partner’s antics in comments to reporters.

Which bit of news I think fits quite well with These Three Politicians Once Looked Like the Future of the GOP. 72 Hours Later the Dream Was Dead.

In Finland, the Left Alliance Just Trounced the Far Right:

CHRIS DITE
The vote for the Finnish far right collapsed in these elections. Are voters punishing the Finns Party for their austerity measures while in power?
LI ANDERSSON
Far-right parties are currently in power in Finland and Sweden, working with the traditional right and influencing politics. Voters have actually seen what they do when they win power. In Finland, they have betrayed almost all of the electoral promises they campaigned on. The economic policies they implement are exactly the same as, or even worse than, the traditional right-wing parties. We have seen historic cuts in income and social security for many low-income earners, and historic attacks against trade unions and workers’ rights.
Throughout our campaign, our message to voters was that we needed to make sure this same type of political shift doesn’t happen on the European level. And so, because voters know what it means when the far right and the traditional right work together, they abandoned the far right. The Finns Party had a very bad election, and the Sweden Democrats also lost big.
CHRIS DITE
Some of the parties you’ll be interacting with in the European Parliament have barely hidden their neo-Nazi connections. Has your experience dealing with the Finns Party prepared you for this? What is the best way to counter the appeal of the far right?
LI ANDERSSON
These parties may call themselves “nationalist,” but the Finnish experience shows that the far right gaining power has terrible consequences for ordinary people. The Finns Party sold out all the ordinary people that voted for them, on every issue related to their rights and everyday lives. In government, the only issue the Finns Party cared about when they were negotiating with their coalition partners was migration. They wanted Finland’s already very restrictive migration policy to become even more restrictive. And they were willing to sell out on everything else: workers, low-income earners, people who need social and health care services. An important part of the strategy to counter the far right involves raising this Finnish experience.
The far right gains a lot from cynicism about the future. They drag the political atmosphere in a direction where it’s so terrible that a lot of people don’t want to go into politics anymore. It has a negative, real effect on democracy, especially for people from minority groups. And so, my other takeaway from the election results in the Nordic countries is that to counter the far right, we need a red-green politics that creates hope. We need to show people that we are able to respond to the big ecological crisis that affects all our futures, that we haven’t lost this race, that there is a possibility to change the situation.
The other crucial thing is the “red” part. On the European and the national levels, we can drain fuel from the far-right parties by taking social issues seriously and adopting a progressive agenda to address the cost of living, housing, workers’ rights, social and health care services. We need to show that when the Left is in power, we can make changes that impact the everyday lives of ordinary people.

Is it that the world is in a position where fascists are attractive, or is it that fascists are creating a situation favoring them. Reading The resistible rise of Marine Le Pen, what seems so French has happened here:

Though it sets out to cover the the Front National like any other party, Le Monde does maintain a rule that is particular to the FN. It remains the paper’s policy – like that of various other publications – to refuse to publish op-eds written by FN officials. “The problem we have, honestly, is that if we open the door to taking her op-eds, then we’re helping her put the finishing touches to her banalisation,” Monnot said, “and we don’t want to be in that position.” To refuse on principle is also an imperfect solution, however, accrediting as it does the party’s claim to ostracism and victimhood at the hands of an unaccountable elite – themes that remain the central feature of the party’s politics.
“There’s a pretty perverse and complicated game you have to play with them,” Monnot said. “They’re constantly trying to drag us into this system versus anti-system confrontation. Which we have to constantly avoid getting trapped in.” She offered a metaphor for Le Pen. “There’s a theatre play, and she absolutely wants us to act in this play with her,” she said. “And how do you go about not acting in it?” Once the media have been pulled on stage, whatever they do is part of the show, whether they like it or not.
***
Marine L Pen’s autobiography, titled À contre flots (Against the Torrents), is a standard political memoir insofar as it aims to explain its author’s political views as the inevitable consequence of an exceptional life; it departs from the norms of the genre in its embrace of extravagant victimhood. It is a litany of grievances: the media are prominent villains, accused of ginning up “delirious lies”, launching “great campaigns” against the Front National, and caricaturing her father as “a racist, an antisemite, a fascist”. And this alleged misrepresentation, this diabolisation, is doubtless the root of the many other injuries of her life: if only her father and his party had been presented for what they truly were, she would not have been made to suffer.

I have to give to the GOP for screwing up and no one paying attention: Top GOPer Accidentally Wrecks Trump’s Biggest Lie About Jack Smith