Detectives who work under Maine’s Secretary of State have taken custody of the ballots that The Secretary of State had shipped to a random house via Amazon. I sure hope the DOJ gets involved.
I suspect this is but one cockroach that accidentally scurried into the light.
This is where you lose me with “genuine fascism”. Nobody actually wants fascism, but the entire Democratic Party has gone all-in on the absurd idea that American Republicans are fascist, when no academic literature documenting fascism or National Socialism supports this idea. It is a standard communist/Marxist/Democratic Socialist tactic dating back to at least the 1940’s, simply calling your political opponents “fascist”, no matter how fundamentally different the systems of government and tactics are.
I have read actual academic literature quite recently about National Socialism, and I’ve also read opinion pieces by academics making the case that Trump is fascistic. Like any system of government, you can compare them to each other and find common features.
Calling American Republicans fascist isn’t done because it is true, it is done because it fires people up and gives them permission to view themselves as righteous and their opponents as existential threats.
Here’s one of the better “Trump is a fascist” takes I’ve read from an actual history professor who claims this subject is “his lane”, although he’s an ancient military history professor, not a German history professor or a WWII history professor. Every point he brings up can be equally said for the Democrats, or any other modern political party. If he did one of these for Biden, I might take him more seriously, but he’s all wrapped up in the idea of his own righteousness, plus he’s financially dependent on government funding for his teaching position. His takes on BlueSky have been pretty far-out.
Typical of leftists these days, he shut off comments on this post, but if he had left them on I would have asked him if he’s read any of the following academic literature about National Socialism:
Hitler’s National Socialism by Zitelmann
Hitler’s Beneficiearies by Aly
The Vampire Economy by Gunther Reimann
Omnipotent Government by Mises
I don’t understand how someone can read those books, understand what the Nazis were actually saying and doing, then conclude that they bear any meaningful resemblance to modern American Republicans whose core ideas are completely incompatible with either Italian Fascism or German National Socialism. It’s a completely bunk argument made quite ironically by repeating a very big lie loudly and often.
I can’t speak for anyone else of course, but I think “anti-fascist” is really working as a stand-in for something more like “anti-authoritarianism” rather than actual “fascism”. At least as most people seem to use it, it seems to be more about what are seen as dictator-like behaviors and tactics: consolidation of power, aggressive enforcement (vs less aggressive enforcement, not lack of enforcement), silencing opposition, “disappearing” people. Whether or not those things are true, I don’t know, but those are what seems to actually be encapsulated by “fascism”, divorced from the actual meaning.
It’s much like how the northwest coast cities are called “communist/socialist/leftist”. When in reality they’re very capitalist, tons of thriving small local businesses, and a handful of fairly influential corporations. That said, there are also social programs, primarily funded by tax revenue from all the capitalism. About the only things that are remotely socialist are the utility companies.
The name-calling is weird and far divorced from what those words actually mean.
As far as “genuine fascism”, I made a mistake, and used that term much like the kids use “literally” these days, when I meant it more like the “authoritarian tactics” mentioned above.
And as far as genuine fascism (no quotes) or Hitler’s take on National Socialism, I’m not well read. Thank you for the references.
She is right to do this.
As a white male, I can understand that I have inherently bestowed privileges like a 2 parent household and a 3 digit credit score, and I should listen to the opinions of people who know more and are darker than me.
Yes.
I visited Seattle a few months back.
We ate at a diner. Inside the diner, there were multiple pieces of ‘art’ adamantly proclaiming black power.
There were 0 black customers.
There were 0 black workers.
As people of lighter skin tone, it is our duty to cuck ourselves to everyone with a darker skin tone. AKA “checking your priviledge”.
I don’t think it is nearly that benign. They want people to believe they are fighting a force just like Hitler, and after a decade of repeating it, many people do.
I don’t think that’s a good comparison, either. In Maine we have many prominent politicians who are either openly members of the Democratic Socialists of America or use the same vocabulary and symbolism that they do. You can also cross-reference the Maine Democratic Party platform with the DSA policy platform and find that they are entirely compatible with each other and similar in most major respects. Maine Democrats just use vague language compared to the more precise language of Democratic Socialists, but most of the major policies actually adopted in Maine over the last 6 years are either in complete alignment or moving into alignment with the DSA’s stated policies.
Kamala Harris literally campaigned on Equity, which is a concept that is not compatible with equal protection under the law. Plus an open Democratic Socialist looks likely to become mayor of the USA’s largest city, so there’s that.
Democratic Socialists and Democrats who espouse their rhetoric are also obvious social revolutionaries who seek to impose ideas incompatible with all of our established political norms. DEI isn’t just a slogan, it is actual race-based government policies.
I don’t use the term “communist” unless I’m jokingly calling Maine Democrats Gay Race Communists, but they are most definitely capital-S Socialist revolutionaries in the same way that Nazis were also capital-S Socialist revolutionaries. Neither advocate for the abolition of private property or “seizing the means of production” across-the-board, but they do both advocate for a very important core idea - race-based social justice.
Democrats also share the core idea of internationalism with actual communists, meaning they don’t believe in the concept of US Citizenship as the basis for civil rights and especially voting rights. That’s an objectively revolutionary idea in the USA, and it is evident in the rhetoric and actions of Maine Democrats who have an entire machine set up to enable anyone occupying the geography to vote in a Maine election with a near-zero chance of being caught.
They’ve subverted a capitalist power structure, in other words.
Democrats more broadly have also demonstrated far more of the characteristics you mentioned, specifically by silencing the opposition. Matt Taibbi’s documentation of the Twitter Files is a good accounting of the Biden administration’s open collusion with social media to censor political opponents.
I mean, they banned Trump from twitter and my own Democratic Socialist Secretary of State removed him from our ballot by declaring him an “insurrectionist”.
Fascism is socialism with nationalism, not internationalism as the key difference. The level of government control over all of business and society was, in practice, just as strong as in Soviet Russia when they “abolished private property”, even though nominal property rights were retained in both Italy and Germany. One of the greatest propaganda victories of the last century has been conflating American Republicans with National Socialists by calling them both “right wing”.
Institutional capture by modern Democrats is also remarkably similar to what the Nazis did. You’re old enough to remember when DEI and transgenderism weren’t even a thing, then all of a sudden the ideas take over businesses, universities, the media, public schools, and even civic clubs and organizations (i.e. The Boy Scouts, sports, etc). That’s exactly what the Nazis succeeded in doing in Germany with their ideas. They even injected their ideas into the canary breeding club.
If I’m to compare Trump to any historical figure, Abraham Lincoln seems most appropriate. He was EXCEEDINGLY authoritarian because it needed to be done to save The Republic. I believe Trump’s actions are similarly justified, and that’s why so much of the rhetoric used against Trump is extremely similar to Lincoln’s detractors at the time.
Both took decisive action to break up a massive grift, but there are WAY, WAY more beneficiaries of easy public tax dollars today than there were of slavery in the 1860’s. That’s what I think a lot of this boils down to, and why he’s being compared to Hitler in a desperate attempt to convince people to let the most sophisticated grift machine in history continue to operate under the banner of “Our Democracy”.
For a really quick primer on Hitler’s National Socialism, here’s the author himself Ranier Zitelmann explaining it.
Condensed version:
Full 86 minute version is here. I haven’t watched this one but I’ve read the book.
The author is also a successful competitive bodybuilder, further bolstering his credibility with me.
I honestly don’t know enough, or thought about these enough, to really participate in this discussion, besides some very surface-level comments.
Regarding removing Trump from the ballot, that seems wrong. Letting non-citizen residents vote also seems wrong.
Regarding silencing him on Twitter, I think this is much like the public vs private property thing, and Twitter isn’t a public venue. But I would have much preferred fact checking annotations, with evidence, than silence. Even a simple “this may not be factual” would have been better. But, again, it’s a private business.
I’d never thought about it before, but it seems like there should be some public government-owned digital venue – something open to all members of the government, and preferably with archives. Currently all of the digital properties seem to be privately held.
However, not putting him on the ballot because he is an “insurrectionist” is nothing like Twitter no longer hosting him. One of those seems wrong (at least without additional context).
As far as DEI or Equity, I’d actually never come across the terms until I heard it from my last employer ~2021. I never encountered it since, or outside of there. I never really made sense of what it involved, and it wasn’t a required training. I do know that I wasn’t eligible to apply to many college scholarships due to race and gender; this seems to be in the same class of policies, and seemed illegal or at least highly unethical at the time. After years of hearing about racial exclusion policies and how we moved on from them, it was strange to see racial exclusion policies. It didn’t make sense that those were allowed, but a “white male only” scholarship wasn’t.
For some of the other things, I don’t really understand the outcry, but I’m also, I guess, socially-libertarian for lack of the correct term. As long as you’re not actually infringing on my ability to get through life you can be whoever you want to be. But if you’re doing things to try and get me to engage with something, that’s not ok. E.g., having purple hair, piercings and moonlighting as a furry doesn’t affect your ability to make my coffee. Trying to get me to engage or “accept” that, beyond literally just coexisting in the same space, that’s a problem. But I’ve personally never encountered it. I’ve personally had worse encounters with certain vocal and pushy Christian groups, which left a bad taste.
Tangentially, I also think the whole gendered bathroom thing was weird. If you have stalls for everyone and shared sinks, it’s not even an issue. I’ve seen that approach in a number of places and it works well. I don’t know why that can’t just be the norm, and there’s nothing left to complain about.
I’m somewhat just rambling at this point.
I’ll take a listen to those videos when I have a chance. Thanks for finding and sharing.
This is where the Biden Administration operated quite similarly to National Socialists while telling us all that Trump was the fascist. Matt Taibbi’s reporting on The Twitter Files is quite extensive (and easily searchable), making it abundantly clear that Democrats were using the power of government to censor their opposition, doing it as discreetly as possible, all while the public was being subjected to an unprecedented, state-coordinated propaganda campaign we all lived through. Taibbi is basically Gen-X maxing and has been for my whole adult life, even back when he was progressive royalty, wrote for Rolling Stone, and was ruthlessly critical of neocon swamp creatures like Bush, Cheney, et al.
That’s fair. The broad idea that “equity” could be achieved along racial lines by electing Democrats has been a recurring theme since Democrats lost the Civil Rights battle decades before I was born, but I’d probably peg it around Obama’s second term where we began re-incorporating race-based public policy after so many people worked so hard to attain equal protection under the law. It’s tough to pin down exactly when it happened, but that was the point. We’ve been having a slow socialist revolutionary playbook played on us, and it almost worked. As far as my definition of DEI, I just use what they say about themselves. There was nothing like it in the 1990’s unless you were on a college campus or some other gathering of people receptive to socialist revolutionary rhetoric, like a Grateful Dead show.
My bet is at least 60 percent of MAGA would agree with you.
We opened Pandora’s Box all the way in Maine on this when it comes to actual government policy. It’s a state religion built around the idea that I can somehow transcend my body to become a legally-recognized woman in the State of Maine at any time I wish. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I could go join our new Planet Fitness tomorrow, or any gym in Maine, decide I’m a woman at that moment, and then go get naked in the women’s locker room. That’s real. That behavior is now considered to be a human right in Maine. That’s one of the most radical social ideas in all of history to be legally incorporated by any level of government in the USA.
So am I, but I’m always happy to ramble with you, even though I no longer ramble about getting strong as fuck, bouncing, or learning how to choke fools and break bones. I’ve already said what I have to say on those matters, and I’m way more interested in what’s going on right now in the USA, Maine and right here in Lewiston. Obviously.
“Woke” is sort of like “Porn” in that you know it when you see it, even if it can sometimes be difficult to explain when ideas become woke and art becomes porn.
Here’s a perfect example of what DEI actually was, which was nothing like what anyone was saying when I was a child and a young man. You can’t necessarily pin down the exact moment that these ideas were incorporated into our public institutions, but if you’re around my age of 45 you can definitely recall a time where nobody in the military was saying anything like this.
Now, you need to post our Secretary of War’s speech, to wipe the taint (pun definitely intended) off my screen.
Best I can do is the opening speech from Patton.
My daughter is 8. If she had something like this I’d throw a fit.
Repeal the 17th
My hero Elon clipped the important part:
Pretty much. I’ve rambled enough about political definitions and how they’re blurred constantly. Sometimes it happens on purpose, sometimes organically.
I think most of us are anti-fascists by definition (though I’ve learned not to assume anything).
There are actual fascists who completely embrace third positionism and even the more religious aspects of actual idealism, along with actual National Socialists, but they are a small minority with no meaningful influence on politics or discourse in the American Republican Party.
The whole game has been to connect flimsy threads from Republicans to National Socialists while minimizing the commonalities between Democrats and National Socialists.
That’s why we still use an 18th century French seating chart to frame modern political discussions.
Yeah. I don’t see fascist themes as mainstream in US politics. Neither do I see the left-right division as strongly as some here.
Conservative vs liberal maybe, but even that can be debated. Since maga is not inherently conservative, since it does not aim to preserve US culture and society, but rather tries to renew/remodel it.
Most self-identified Nazis in the USA are nothing like National Socialists. They are almost exclusively white supremacists who would not have qualified for service in The Wehrmacht until very late in the war. I’ve never actually encountered a German supremacist “Nazi” in the USA, and I’ve only ever seen a couple white supremacist “Nazis” in my life.
Illinois Nazis were an actual thing and they were spoofed in the outstanding 1980’s comedy The Blues Brothers.
The only fascists I know of exist in fringe online communities. They sound like religious nuts, just like Mussolini and especially like Giovanni Gentile.
The ACLU actually sided with the Illinois Nazis back when they actually worked to uphold American civil liberties and weren’t a partisan activist group working to advance decarceration and transgenderism as a state religion.
