Trump and Musk are openly, completely, totally fascist.
Is that news to anyone?
What should be news here, I think, is that the reason they’re being openly fascist is that it turns out to be an attractive message and a winning campaign strategy for millions and millions of people.
That’s the jaw-dropper, in my view.
Nope.
Trumpistas are facist. Always have been. They are not shy about that. They think antifa is a slur.
Of course they are and always have been. I’m not arguing that. I’d go further, in fact, that the US Right, in general, has had a long term objective of sabotaging democracy and installing themselves as a permanent ruling minority. They just pursued that goal quietly, with dog whistles and innuendo.
What’s different now is that Trump, Musk, et al. are so freely open about it, and the reason they can be is that there are millions and millions of people who approve of it and nakedly want it. The goal used to be hinted at with winks and nudges because proto-fascist leaders didn’t feel safe saying certain things out loud, lest they suffer blowback. Now, though? There’s predictable blowback from the left, but wild enthusiasm from endless mobs of terrible, terrible people, activated by dreams of a strongman, which swamps the Left’s resistance.
Without those people, the hints and coded messages would still be necessary. It’s the shocking scale of the authoritarian cult which makes the openness possible, and which is plunging daggers into the heart of American democracy. Trump and Musk and the other loyalists are holding the blades, but it’s the screaming rabble that gives them strength.
What is really shocking is the number of people on this very board who insist that the MAGAs are somehow, deep down, good people.
The ones that are still “good” are outright delusional. They’ve been genuinely brainwashed into believing that Trump was a good president who cares about America, and that the Democrats are evil villains wanting to destroy it. They don’t have to justify the bad stuff to themselves because their level of denial is so strong they don’t think it’s happening.
I mean, the number of times I’ve interacted with Trump supporters insisting that he didn’t say or do something he literally said or did on camera is considerable.
I think we now are at the point where with the remarks of Kelly in hand you can call bullshit on those people.
I’m related to some of them. They are full-on cultists now.
This is a very personal issue for me, because my parents are Trump voters.
They are the dictionary definition of Uninformed. They live in their cabin in the woods and neither watch nor read anything on the news. (They’re so remote, no newspaper would deliver anyway.) All they know about Trump is that he has an R by his name and he seems to make liberals upset. That is quite literally the sum total of their political information and awareness. They draw that boundary because, beyond that, they think all politicians are self-serving liars, so no attempt to show them what Trump et al. are saying and doing has any effect. They handwave everything with “politics is just noise, all politicians are bad.” They concede Trump is bad, but only in the context of their belief that everyone is equally bad. So they vote for the guy they think will keep their taxes low, full stop.
They flatly dismiss all other information as either inflated or false, or otherwise meaningless. It’s total, absolute, brick-wall denial. As long as they get to hide in their forest retreat, chopping firewood and hunting game with nobody bothering them, they’ll keep their eyes closed and vote straight R. Just an impregnable refusal to engage with the world.
It’s wildly frustrating. And I’m forced to distance myself because it’s an awful source of conflict. I don’t think they’re bad in the sense of being hateful, racist, violent, whatever. But they are utterly, absolutely pig-ignorant, and that’s bad enough.
The man is clearly in a continuous state of delirium from overuse of stimulants, which helps hide his low energy, but deprives him of the sleep needed for normal cognitive function. And he was already a brick short of a full load to start with.
One political prediction from Jan 2024 that turned out well is the idea that the Trump campaign would begin to implode in the last stretch of the campaign, because he’s at a deep fundraising disadvantage while having driving off most of the competent political hands. With Trump himself mentally checked out, and no experts at the helm, the campaign is reaching for wonder-weapons, everyone’s running off vibes, nobody exists to discipline the message or rein in the worst impulses.
This is one big difference from Hitler to Trump is that Hitler at least seemed to have competent lieutenants and a self-sustaining momentum for a while. Trump on the other hand, is captain of a pirate ship full of grifters that’s stealing everything not nailed down while they’re fighting over lifeboats. He’s chasing eyeballs because that’s the only skill he’s ever had. There is no Plan B.
Right. I don’t know why some here insist on this being black and white. Two things can be true at the same time:
Yes, the people wearing red caps and hooting and hollering are generally awful people and represent an ugliness in American culture that has always been there and has just been allowed to surface now under MAGA. They *are* the deplorables and they mostly *don’t* have legitimate arguments that we should listen to and find common ground.
But it’s also true that a lot of Trump voters just don’t follow the news much and have reasons like “bread used to cost X, now it costs 1.2X” and have insufficient awareness of what MAGA is, and to be honest not enough knowledge of things like economics or geopolitics to understand why their single reason for voting GOP doesn’t actually make sense.
(This is not to insult your parents @Cervaise, I’m of course making a broader point here and nothing you mentioned implies any misconceptions 
)
My wife’s cousin is a Trumper. And not just a Trumper, but he fell for (and as far as I know still believes in) actual Qanon conspiracy theories and antivax stuff, as well as other kooky things along those lines.
The thing is, he’s not a bad kid. He has struggled with drug addiction for years now. He really works hard at getting his life fixed around and doesn’t have a nasty bone in his body. But he’s very gullible and falls for bad ideas easily (which is probably what got him into drugs as well, he’s easily influenced).
I think there are more than a few folks who are not only Trump voters, but full-on MAGA who are like this. They aren’t cartoon villains. A number of them are victims. Not totally blameless of course, and my wife’s cousin is certainly not blameless (he is stubborn in not listening to his relatives who are concerned about him) but many of them aren’t evil, and some are even good people who make bad decisions and have fallen for the lies.
Yes, this. People like my wife’s cousin can’t be reasoned with. My parents are also Trump voters, though neither of them are full-on MAGA cultists or anything. I just can’t really talk politics with them.
If I may…
It is possible that a lot of the people in this photo just wanted cheaper gas prices and were not full on Nazis and didn’t really want to gas Jews, and start WWII, but neverthess that’s what they got. No one in that photo is blameless.
We need to stop equivocating, or we could end up like that.
I’m not equivocating. I’m just pointing out that there are those on the right actively driven by malign motives, and others who are just gullible, insecure know-nothings gaslit into full-blown cultism.
One of those groups is outright evil, but both groups together will make evil happen.
The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing
Attributed to Edmund Burke
Philadelphia is suing Elmo over his lottery.
Some much needed comic relief:
How are we to be sure which things are attributed to Edmund Burke? Is there a list?
There is no practical difference looking through the fence.
The only thing that defines evil is results.