Rising fascism in the US

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Pretty peaceful.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ7uThFJ4vY[/youtube]
Yeah, insurrections happen all the time.

Yeah, insurrections happen all the time.

Currently, there are two factions considered 'the left' in the US. Neither of them are actually 'left' by the standards of the rest of the world.

You, if I'm correct, despise what you consider the policies of Democrats: identity politics, seeming promotion of multiple genders / gender-switching?.

I'm not sure what your other complaints are.

There's a distinctly different group who hates democrats as much as you do, calling themselves 'left,' who hate identity politics, who regularly call democrats on their neocon behavior, who are 100% anti-war in all situations but self-defense. We're agitating for transparency, free speech, and peace.

I actually think you'd find a great deal of agreement with democrats if you didn't focus on personalities.

I actually think you'd find a great deal of agreement with democrats if you didn't focus on personalities. They love war too. They love feeding the MIC. They love tax breaks for the rich. Those are your policies, right?

It's not easy to have a productive conversation with you about politics because when you refer to political parties, I don't know who you're talking about.

If you want to know why the next six days of American democracy matter so much, well…just look at Britain. Americans of a certain kind — educated, civilized, cultured — are used to thinking of Britain as a wiser, genteel older brother, more European, less brutish, cloddish, more sophisticated and thoughtful. But now? Three letters sum it up: “LOL.”

The midterms are coming up. And on one level, Americans have begun to understand — thankfully, despite huge resistance from the very institutions which should have warned of it, like the media, news, intellectuals — that what’s at stake really is fascism versus democracy. But that distinction goes much deeper still than even those Americans, rightly fired up, yet think. And what’s become of Britain — it’s stunning descent into global laughingstock, pariah, and failed state — is probably a very good analogue for what could become of America if Republicans take over.

Let me explain, but first you have to clear your head of the notion that Britain’s the land of 007 and Mary Poppins and Harry Potter. Britain does a sterling job of public relations, with such cultural fictions — but the dismal fact is that today’s Britain is a far-right wing failed state. I’ll come back to that. First let’s talk about fascism — which is what America faces.

What is fascism, really? Where does it come from? The sadistic wish to annihilate — where does it even come from? Normal people don’t have one after all — they don’t want to break anyone’s kneecaps and torture them — but fascists do.

Fascism is ultimately a way to ration economic decline. This is going to be important, and it matters that Americans understand it. When does fascism occur? When times are good? When economies are booming? Of course not — when economies stagnate and decline to a certain critical point: middle and working classes implode. When that line is crossed, expect fascism. It happened in Weimar Germany — and it happened in America, too, around 2010 or so, hence figures like me and Sarah Kendzior began to predict a wave of real-deal fascism.

You should know this by now, but let quickly recap it. As working and middle classes plunge into despair — which really happened, and is happening in America, not to mention Europe, Britain, and even places like South Korea — they look for someone to blame. And demagogues, seizing the moment, point the finger at scapegoats. On and on it goes. Now. What does this vicious cycle mean fascism is?

Fascism is a system that can’t solve the very problems which give rise to it. In other words, it’s a vicious spiral. I don’t know if Americans really get that yet. So let me make it crystal clear. Fascists come along when times are bad — during Great Depressions and historic Stagnations and so forth. They point the finger at already marginalized groups, and say, if we just hate them enough to annihilate them, cleanse our society of them, all our problems will be fixed.

Which problems? Problems like falling real incomes, like a lack of savings, like a loss of optimism in the future, collapsing trust in institutions to provide one, widespread poverty, downward mobility. Fascism’s central claim is that it can fix those problems. Through the mechanism of just hating enough — to the point of very real violence, like torturing hated figures, breaking their kneecaps.

The real problem, though, is, that none of this works. Just hating some poor marginalized group — what does it fix? Does it create jobs for anyone? Lift incomes? Produce upwards mobility? Does it repair decrepit infrastructure or build schools and universities and factories? Of course not.

So stagnation only deepens, and decline only accelerates.

This is one of the things about fascism that’s genuinely hard for normal people to understand. Most ideologies, most systems, at least make some effort to fix the problems they purport to solve. None are perfect, but few ideologies operate in total, absolute bad faith. As in, they don’t just make no attempt to solve the problems they claim to, but do the very opposite.

So what happens when a nation enters this vicious spiral? Well, scapegoating this group or that group isn’t solving any real problem. It’s not building, like I said, a factory to create jobs, or hospitals, to raise life expectancy, or schools, so that kids grow up and become more productive. It’s not lifting living standards — which is the crux of the matter — so that people feel secure and optimistic and confident again. It’s just…producing more stagnation and decline. It’s making people even poorer.

And that just makes them even more vulnerable, susceptible, to tomorrow’s round of scapegoating and finger pointing.

See the real problem? Fascism is a self-sustaining, self-accelerating vicious cycle of ruin. Once you enter it, it’s really, really hard to break free, short of total ruin. Weimar Germany learned this the hard way. Russia’s learning it, too. America’s about to choose — and to really see where it leads, like I said, just look at Britain.

Now, Britain’s not a “fascist country” — but it has fallen into a period of ultra-hardcore nationalism, which, sad to say, is the precursor. What has all that done to Britain? Has it solved any of Britain’s problems?

Let’s go through what happened to poor, stupid Britain so that Americans really understand it. After the financial crisis of ‘08, British living standards began to fall, because bad bank debts were absorbed by the nation, which meant less investment and economic activity. Foolishly, Brits voted for conservatives to solve this problem — who began to blame scapegoats.

The first scapegoat to be found? In America, it was Mexicans. In Britain, it was Europeans. “Real” Brits were taught to hate Europeans the same way that “real” Americans were taught to hate Mexicans and Latinos — they were the cause of all the problems. “Build the wall!” They took the jobs and places in school, they lived on welfare, the dirty, rotten scrounges, they were lazy and indolent, they were criminals, they weren’t “like us,” the pure and true.

And so all Brits had to do was to get rid of them. Brits, astonishingly, fell for this Big Lies. Astonishingly to the kind of American who thinks of Brits as gentle, wiser, sophisticated cousins. Were they? Brits fell for this Big Lie so hard that they suddenly left the European Union — which meant, among other things, that Brits gave up their rights to live and work in Europe. How foolish is that?

Now. What happened next? Did any of this solve Britain’s problems? Any of them? Nope. It just made them worse. The real problems began to accelerate out of control. Now, without the army of Europeans who’d formerly worked in the NHS, Brits themselves were unable to get medical care. Labour shortages began to cripple the economy, from fruit-pickers to doctors and nurses to drivers. The economy began to crater, and British living standards fell faster and faster.

A lot of Americans probably think that Brits live better lives than them. That used to be true, not so long ago — but now? The situation has changed head-spinningly fast, in shocking ways. Americans have an average of $4.5K in their bank accounts — that’s not a lot, but Brits have an average of £500 in theirs. That’s an order of magnitude difference. Imagine having just $500 in your bank account. In America, healthcare costs a packet, true — yet if you’re insured, by and large, you can get it. In Britain? Good luck getting any anymore — you can’t see a doctor in person, and waiting lists are years long. I could go on with the mega-failure, but those two facts alone point to a dismal conclusion: Brits are way worse off than Americans at this juncture — though not so long ago, they were far better off. They enjoyed some of the world’s best healthcare, food, rights, living standards.

How did Britain collapse to this point? Because it entered the vicious cycle of ultra-nationalism. You see, the scapegoating that began with Europeans never stopped. It just keeps going on and on. And in Britain, there seems to be no future but this vicious cycle. Here, let me give you an example of the last few days.

Britain’s latest government — its fifth one in six years — cooked up a fake “refugee crisis.” It said that refugees were launching an “invasion.” Those are serious words for a government to use, and words have meanings — “invasion” usually means “army with guns and tanks,” not desperately poor people who own nothing in the entire world arriving half-drowned with nothing more than the shirts on their backs. Stoking the flames of violence?

Sorry, this came a day or two after a right-wing fanatic bombed a refugee center. Think about that for a second. Just after a fascist lunatic bomber tried to blow up a refugee center…the government called it an “invasion.” By the refugees. What’s happening in Ukraine is an invasion. This…isn’t one.

To its credit, the BBC tried to debunk all this. It pointed out that Britain has one of Europe’s lowest rates of asylum applications and refugee landings and so forth. But it didn’t matter. By now, the country was whipped up. All over again. Into a xenophobic frenzy. There’s an invasion. Quick, Nigel — to the gunboats!! Someone, resurrect Lord Trafalgar!! The Spanish are coming!!

Now. What does all this mean? Well, Britain has real problems. Huge ones, and a lot of them. Just last week, a baby died because you can’t get an ambulance anymore. That’s about as hardcore an indicator of social collapse as there could be. Meanwhile, Brits have just £500 in their bank accounts, a meagre amount that’s not going to pay the bills, which are rising swiftly, for much longer. From money to healthcare, from education to finance, Britain is in a complete state of failure, aka, it’s a failing state, a nation unable to deliver basic levels of public service provision anymore. Hence, Britain’s living standards cratered in about a decade or so, from being way better than America’s, to being below even those.

But you wouldn’t know it. Because what Britain’s power figures have become expert at isn’t solving its real problems. Any of them. What they’re really good at? The only thing they’re really good at? Stoking xenophobic frenzies. That’s it. And I’m not kidding, so let me continue my story.

The scapegoating began with Europeans, and that accelerated Britain’s shocking decline. Hating Europeans, it turned out, even cleansing society of them — it didn’t solve a single problem. Instead, now, Brits couldn’t get things like healthcare, because, well, the doctors and nurses were gone. That’s how living standards began to plummet below even America’s dismal levels.

But the scapegoating never ended. It went from Europeans to all immigrants. From all immigrants to everyone who wasn’t “really” British. Which is how you end with a government stoking a xenophobic frenzy after a far right wing suicide bomber just tried to blow up a refugee center. Not the opposite — which is what we expect from modern democracies — not disavowing the violence and hate, but stoking it.

While all this was going on, who was solving any real problem? Nobody. So Brits just kept on…not begin able to get doctors, and now the waiting lists are years. Who was making a plan for the future — like Biden’s, which is about America becoming a world leader in supplying things the worlds desperately needs, like microchips and clean energy — a real national strategy to revive a moribund economy? Nobody. Who wanted to invest in a nation without a strategy for the future? As it turned out, not too many people — so the pound began a long, slow-motion crash, the nations’ fiscal balances blew apart, and good jobs were few and far between, all of which meant British living standards went into free-fall.

Now. Americans see a certain view of fascism, which goes like this. The bad guys tried to burn down democracy on January 6th, and we’ve got to stop them. They’re religious fanatics and gun nuts and believers in Big Lies. They’re radicalized lunatics. We can’t turn over the levers of power to them, because who knows what they’ll do. All that’s true, but there’s an deeper, and simpler truth, at work here.

If you want to see where it all ends, just look at Britain. If the GOP takes control, something very much like modern day Britain is on the cards. Huge, pulsating waves of hate will sweep the country, and obsess people with the sense of persecution and existential danger — there’s an “invasion”!! My God!! In the end, Americans will come to believe what Brits did — a thing that never quite fully happened during the Trump years — that society has to be cleansed of all foreign bodies to be “pure” again, and that will become the only project in society, just as it’s the only thing modern Britain’s capable of now — not providing healthcare, jobs, money, public services, building schools, hospitals, roads, factories, having a plan for the future — just finding someone even more powerless to demonize for the woes of the pure and true.

And that, in turn, solves nothing. Which is why Brits went in a decade and a half or so from enjoying living standards far superior to Americans, to suffering ones even below those. Americans think things can’t get worse. They’re wrong — they very much can. Americans have $5K in their bank accounts, not a lot, but try living British style, with just £500 — $577. America’s gone through some rough times, but even during Trumpism it wasn’t foolish enough to break up with its biggest trading partners and oldest friends like Britain did. Americans pay dearly for basics like healthcare, true — but at least they can get them, whereas in Britain, the social contract’s failed so spectacularly you can’t. In America, conservatives believe the Big Lies that the election was stolen — in Britain, they don’t have to, because they’ve been in power three times as long as the Trump years, thanks to a far more vicious, obsessive, and obsessive brand of xenophobia and hatred still. There is a long way down yet for Americans — and the parlous, shocking state of Britain exemplifies it best.

The midterms are about all that. They’re not just about moral objections to fascism — ideal-state of democracy stuff, or even January 6th-was-a-coup. All true, and that all matters intensely. They’re also about, though, the central truth fascism confronts us with. It’s a vicious cycle that does something paradoxical, strange, weird — it at once accelerates itself, sustains itself, by never solving the problems it purports to solve. It claims to end economic stagnation and decline — but all it really does is accelerate them. And by doing so, its fire keeps raging hotter and hotter. Britain exemplifies all that perfectly, and it’s not even fascist — just ultra nationalist. Where it ends up though, is anybody’s guess. America shouldn’t want to find out. It should learn the lesson of Britain in time for the midterms — and run away screaming from becoming a failed state like that, one that puts xenophobically finding someone new to hate every month, day, hour, a little more obsessively, over actually being a functioning modern society.

Nobody should make that mistake — and yet even a nation as once-wise as Britain can. And that should teach us just how seductive the power of hate, of xenophobia, of ignorance, really is. So much easier to believe the fools’ fairy tale that you can hate, demonize, and rage your way to a better future — instead of doing the hard work of building one, by linking hands together.

hightor wrote:

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That sounds like bullshit.

I've seen it before, though, most recently during the Reagan era. Periodically the political left which allies with the Democratic Party gets tied up in the contradiction between praxis and idealism. When this compromise is seen as unacceptable capitulation some leftists will eschew organized politics and find other cultural vehicles to carry the cause. And the religious left is one option.

What is very strange to me is that a lot of the religious left has aligned with the non believing orange baboon (?)!

Totally different venues. Rioting by marginalized members of a minority facing discrimination by society and victimization by cops in city neighborhoods versus middle-class Trump supporters, provoked by media lies and right-wing demagogues, attacking the seat of the federal government. It's a very different scenario, and it is much easier to clean the protestors out of a secured building than it is to round up loosely organized citizens running through the streets. Lindsay Graham warned about the violence which would follow an indictment of Trump. I imagine that any such violence would more closely resemble the George Floyd riots, only with MAGAtards committing the property crimes and skirmishing with the cops.

I think those Trump supporters were also marginalized—and definitely not middle class.

Trumpism is not, and maybe never was, a revolt of the economically anxious or impoverished. A new study of the people charged in the Jan. 6 riot should, hopefully, once and for all end this myth.

The detailed look conducted by researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats found a majority of suspects were not distressed farmers from mortgaged lands or laid-off workers from idled factories, but white-collar professionals and business owners. Their ranks included CEOs, a cardiovascular specialist, lawyers, a design engineer, accountants and the founder and president of a firm that tests satellites. In fact, the percentage of business owners among the people charged — 26 percent — was more than twice their percentage in the U.S. population as a whole.

Their ranks included CEOs, a cardiovascular specialist, lawyers, a design engineer, accountants and the founder and president of a firm that tests satellites.

Although many of them lost their jobs after being arrested, it seems job insecurity was not the reason most, if not all, stormed the Capitol. Only 7 percent were unemployed at the time, according to the Chicago Project’s director, Robert Pape. Pape has been hired by the Pentagon to better understand the emerging threat of American political violence.

But the reality is former President Donald Trump’s movement was always a movement of the relatively rich. This makes sense, since his policies also were mostly crafted to benefit the rich, designed in large part by a small group of New York billionaires and enabled by other wealthy donors.

Yet, the myth of Trump’s poor rabble persisted for years. The day after Trump’s election, The New York Times ran a front-page article crediting his victory to “a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters.” That belief sent countless reporters on trips into opioid-ravaged, boarded-up towns of rural America to listen to “overlooked” poor whites.

But the data is much more complicated than those first assessments. Trump did not, in fact, attract more working-class whites than his Republican predecessors. As early as the Republican primaries, in March 2016, a survey found that Trump’s support was about evenly distributed between people who earned more than $100,000 per year and those making less than $50,000. “Trump gets just as much of his support from the richest Americans as he does from the poorest,” MSNBC explained.

In May 2016, FiveThirtyEight argued Trump’s supporters were considerably better off than the average American, making a median of $72,000 a year at that point. The analysis found Trump did best among very wealthy voters without college degrees, such as small-business owners.

In June 2017, The Washington Post published an analysis titled “It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class.”

Yet, the perception persisted: nope — not like us!

In fact, they are us.

The analysis found Trump did best among very wealthy voters without college degrees, such as small-business owners.

(...) the religious right backs the abortioning, porn-wifing, multimarried, cheating, pussy-grabbing Trump.

The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol.

The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine’s president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda.

The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence.

The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future.

It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, though more narrowly targeted, Russian effort ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.

“It’s clear they are trying to get them to cut off aid and money to Ukraine,” said Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations official now with Providence Consulting Group, a business technology company.

The campaign — using accounts that pose as enraged Americans like Nora Berka — have added fuel to the most divisive political and cultural issues in the country today.

It has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most contested races, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could help the Russian war effort.

The campaigns show not only how vulnerable the American political system remains to foreign manipulation but also how purveyors of disinformation have evolved and adapted to efforts by the major social media platforms to remove or play down false or deceptive content.

Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert warning of the threat of disinformation spread by “dark web media channels, online journals, messaging applications, spoofed websites, emails, text messages and fake online personas.” The disinformation could include claims that voting data or results had been hacked or compromised.

The agencies urged people not to like, discuss or share posts online from unknown or distrustful sources. They did not identify specific efforts, but social media platforms and researchers who track disinformation have recently uncovered a variety of campaigns by Russia, China and Iran.

Recorded Future and two other social media research companies, Graphika and Mandiant, found a number of Russian campaigns that have turned to Gab, Parler, Getter and other newer platforms that pride themselves on creating unmoderated spaces in the name of free speech.

These are much smaller campaigns than those in the 2016 election, where inauthentic accounts reached millions of voters across the political spectrum on Facebook and other major platforms. The efforts are no less pernicious, though, in reaching impressionable users who can help accomplish Russian objectives, researchers said.

“The audiences are much, much smaller than on your other traditional social media networks,” said Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future who identified the Nora Berka account. “But you can engage the audiences in much more targeted influence ops because those who are on these platforms are generally U.S. conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims.”

Many of the accounts the researchers identified were previously used by a news outlet calling itself the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has previously linked the news outlet to the Russian information campaigns centered around the Internet Research Agency.

The network appears to have since disbanded, and many of the social media accounts associated with it went dormant after being publicly identified around the 2020 election. The accounts started becoming active again in August and September, called to action like sleeper cells.


Republican gains in Congress would pressure Biden on Ukraine.
A Ukrainian brigade in Bakhmut tries to hold out against Russia’s offensive.
Russian forces intensify their fight for the eastern city of Bakhmut, amid setbacks elsewhere.

Nora Berka’s account on Gab has many of the characteristics of an inauthentic user, Mr. Liston said. There is no profile picture or identifying biographical details. No one responded to a message sent to the account through Gab.

The account, with more than 8,000 followers, posts exclusively on political issues — not in just one state but across the country — and often spreads false or misleading posts. Most have little engagement but a recent post about the F.B.I. received 43 responses and 11 replies, and was reposted 64 times.

Since September the account has repeatedly shared links to a previously unknown website — electiontruth.net — that Recorded Future said was almost certainly linked to the Russian campaign.

Electiontruth.net’s earliest posts date only from Sept. 5; since then, it has posted articles almost daily ridiculing President Biden and prominent Democratic candidates, while criticizing policies regarding race, crime and gender that it said were destroying the United States. “America under Communism” was one typical headline.

The articles all have pseudonyms as bylines, like Andrew J, Truth4Ever and Laura. According to Mr. Liston, the website domain was registered using Bitcoin accounts.

Electiontruth.net lists a cafe in Cotter, Ark., as its contact. The cafe has closed, replaced by the Cotter Bridge Market. The market’s owners said they knew nothing about the website.

For its contact information, electiontruth.net lists a cafe inside a converted gas station in Cotter, Ark., a town of 900 people on a bend in the White River. The cafe has closed, however, and been replaced by Cotter Bridge Market, a produce shop and deli whose owners said they knew nothing about the website. No one at Election Truth responded to a request for comment submitted through the site.

Mr. Liston said that links to electiontruth.net appeared to be closely coordinated with the accounts on Gab linked to the Russians.

In another campaign, Graphika identified a recent series of cartoons that appeared on Gab, Gettr, Parler and the discussion forum patriots.win. The cartoons, by an artist named “Schmitz,” disparaged Democrats in the tightest Senate and governor races.

One targeting Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is Black, employed racist motifs. Another falsely claimed that Representative Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, would release “all Fentanyl distributors and drug traffickers” from prison.

The cartoons received little engagement and did not spread virally to other platforms, according to Graphika.

A recurring theme of the new Russian efforts is an argument that the United States under President Biden is wasting money by supporting Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion that began in February.

Nora Berka, for example, posted a doctored photograph in September that showed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as a bikini-wearing pole dancer being showered with dollar bills by Mr. Biden.

“As working class Americans struggle to afford food, gas, and find baby formula, Joe Biden wants to spend $13.7 billion more in aid to Ukraine,” the account posted. Not incidentally, that post echoed a theme that has gained some traction among Republican lawmakers and voters who have questioned the delivery of weapons and other military assistance.

“It’s no secret that Republicans — that a large portion of Republicans — have questioned whether we should be supporting what has been referred to as foreign adventures or somebody else’s conflict,” said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Digital Forensics Lab at the Atlantic Council, which has also been tracking foreign influence operations.

The F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency did not respond to requests for comment about the Russian efforts. Mr. Brookie called the revived accounts “recidivist behavior.” Gab did not respond to a request for comment.

As before, it may be hard to measure the exact impact of these accounts on voters come Tuesday. At a minimum, they contribute to what Edward P. Perez, a board member with the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan election security organization, called “manufactured chaos” in the country’s body politic.

While Russians in the past sought to build large followings for their inauthentic accounts on the major platforms, today’s campaigns could be smaller and yet still achieve a desired effect — in part because the divisions in American society are already such fertile soil for disinformation, he said.

“Since 2016, it appears that foreign states can afford to take some of the foot off the gas,” Mr. Perez, who previously worked at Twitter, said, “because they have already created such sufficient division that there are many domestic actors to carry the water of disinformation for them.”