What percentage of the American Nazi party do you suppose supports Trump?
Are you saying that you can’t be a fascist if you keep your goals secret? That seems … strange.
Trump is currently on right-wing media declaring how if he’s elected, he will set out to prosecute all hisopponents, that he intends to modify the court system. MAGA Republicans are busy sewing doubt about the election process, while actively undermining fair voting.
Atlanta just had 3 Republican voting officials vote against certifying the recent election. The outlying suburbs want to seperate their voting from the county over the use of voting machines.
Don’t forget, Trump already had planned to use the military to prevent his ouster from the White House.
2020 worked out because most of the voting officials had integrity. Last time Trump didn’t know anything about the system and took recommendations on who to hire. By the end of his admin, he had replaced most of the competent officials with cronies, and was operating with interim Cabinet members rather than comply with the law to get appointees confirmed by the Senate.
What more are you looking for to declare totalitarianism?
ISTM at this point it has devolved into more of an argument as to whether the term “fascism” means any non-marxist illiberal-authoritarian vision or style of rule, as opposed to a specific state-corporatist ideology.
Well yes, sort of. The PVV did win most seats in a highly divided parliament, which was a shocker. But due to proportional representation, the PVV has 37 seats out of 150. There are 15 different parties who won at least 1 seat. PPV will have to create a coalition to get at least 76 seats.
If we look at the more right wing parties, the PVV would need to get the following on board:
CDA 37 seats
VVD 24 seats
BBB 7 seats
CDA 7 seats
FVD 3 seats
The loss of confidence from any one of these parties would sink the coalition.
Nitpick
Properly, they’re sowing doubt, like seeds. Unless they’re expressing their doubt in needlepoint.
AFAICT, the terms fascism and fascist in right-wing political speak mean “something bad”. That is, a label to hit your opponents over the head with. Same with commie/communist, antifa, socialist, and perhaps some other terms I’m not thinking of off-hand. The users don’t seem to care what the words actually mean, considering how they mix them up in contradictory ways.
Let’s hope so.
And in left wing. If you dont like their politics, they are fascists. This is over using and weakening the term, so now ''fascist" means “politics you don’t like.”
No. Ronald Reagan was a conservative dunce. Richard Nixon was a devious paranoid. George W. Bush was an amiable simpleton.
Trump is a fascist.
Running openly on exacting revenge on his enemies (over half of American citizens), going after the media (erasing 1st amendment), rounding people up into camps and banning/deporting entire ethnic groups from the country is not just “politics we don’t like”. It’s an open, public threat to do what Hitler did.
This. And a huge swath of the public approves.
Oh, no question the left has been abusing the term fascist for far longer than the right.
Pretty much true, but they were all called “fascists” by many people who didn’t like their politics.
Also true, but he uses it as a term of abuse for people who he doesn’t like. Along with calling them “communists”, “socialists”, “antifa”, and “racist”, often with two or three of those terms in a sequence. I haven’t seen him use “fascist” and “antifa” in the same sequence (which would be a direct contradiction, since “antifa” is short for “anti-fascist”), but I only see a small fraction of his Twuths. No doubt someone could search those Twuths and find one.
Trump is a fascist wannabe. He is a conman.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
And “fake news”. A small number of people used it to describe biased right wing organizations that they didn’t like, such as Fox News, but it was dwarfed by how often non-right-wing media that people didn’t like was described as “fake news” by the right.
The term had an informative meaning: namely, stories made up out of whole cloth, not merely loads of spin. Which isn’t to say Fox News never engages in that*, but their percentage was much smaller than dedicated fake news websites.
*When they do, it’s one level removed: Fox talking head speculates something insane, then other Fox commentators wonder if it’s true since “everyone’s talking about it.”
Free pony huh? Hmmmm…
I’ve always disliked/disapproved of republican politics/policies etc. I have never, ever called them fascists because they were not. Robber barons, fat cats, bought and paid for? Yeah all the time. However, trump is a fascist, so I disagree that calling him one is wrong.
His politics such as they are are based on what’s good for him and his cronies, and punishing people he hates. He wants ultimate power to choose everyone’s fate; he wants money, and he wants absolute worship. He will use whatever means he can to get these things. He is demonstrably using all the language and tools of a fascist. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck … it’s a duck.
Yes, the term “fake news” did have a real meaning, but the current trend of usage was coined by KellyAnne Conway in response to criticism of Trump. She used it in an absurd way that became Trump’s and the rest of the Rightwing’s default way to deride any negative story about Trump.
Whereas Fox actually has engaged in deliberately spreading falsehoods. The emails exposed by the huge defamation and sexual harassment lawsuits demonstrated Tucker Carlson and others including Rupert Murdoch exchanging internal communication that they knew what they were saying was false, that Trump is a nut, etc, but continued to pump out ProTrump propaganda as news.
Journalists have a duty to accurately represent the stories they cover. That includes telling their viewers when information is unsubstantiated, not spreading propaganda because it sells.
That’s just as fake and far more detrimental than anything put out by the “Weekly World News”.
I dunno’ trump Bat Boy? I don’t think it’s even a close choice. Bat Boy all the way.