Will America elect a fascist president?
That is the only question on the Presidential ballot today, and on November 3.
Down ballot, will America elect Senators and House members who will support a fascist President, if elected, or fascist policies if he is not?
That is the only question on the ballot in the elections for the Senate and the House.
At the state level, will America elect representatives and governors who will support a fascist President, if elected, or fascist policies if he is not?
That is the only question on the ballot in state races.
America has a problem: 45% of the electorate support a fascist President running for re-election.
After the votes are counted, and the new President is inaugurated, America will still have an enormous problem: almost half of the electorate voted for fascist candidates.
The fascist President, Donald Trump, has supported and encouraged mob violence, from Charlottesville where he described neo-Nazis as “very good people”, to the Proud Boys who he asked to “stand back and stand by”, to the accused who planned to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, in an attempt to overthrow the government.
There can be little doubt that Trump supports violent actions carried out by his supporters–armed street toughs like the Brown Shirts in Hitler’s Germany.
He has cheered on and applauded the assassination of fugitive Michael Reinoehl on September 3, 2020, outside Seattle. Reinoehl, suspected of killing a pro-Trump demonstrator in Portland, Oregon on August 28, under circumstances which might or might not have sustained a self-defense argument, or a defense-of-others argument, was labeled by the President as a murderer (so much for the presumption of innocence) in a Trump tweet urging a federal task force to take immediate action, less than an hour and a half before e Reinoehl was assassinated.
Trump’s fascist propaganda machine would make the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, green with envy. Goebbels and Hitler did not have Twitter, or Facebook.
How do we restore respect for Truth, Honesty, Science, Law, Integrity, and fact-based news reporting?
How do we restore respect for Truth, Honesty, Science, Law, Integrity, and fact-based news reporting to their rightful places in the minds of Trump cultists and other Trump supporters?
We need to stop making excuses for the fascist voters who vote for a fascist Presidential candidate and a fascist regime.
The media’s and our own reluctance to label these people as fascists, long after their characteristics became widely known, have enabled them to elect Trump and his collaborators and to be, in 2020, on the cusp of returning a fascist President to the White House.
In 2016, voters could claim that Trump would change and grow into his job as President of the United States. Today, in 2020, they and we all know that this is not going to happen, and is not even remotely possible.
All of the non-fascists in America need to fight, now and in the coming years, to shut down the American fascists, to put the specter of fascist-authoritarian rule back in the box, as it were.
Then we will have to figure out how to dismantle their fascist propaganda machine.
If we fail, with Trump possessing all of the power and tools of the U.S. government, in a “surveillance state” where all of the tools of technology may be turned to dictatorial purposes, America is likely to become a fascist country.
Let us have no illusions about what is at stake on November 3, 2020.
The Trenchant Observer
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Trump’s incitement to violence
Aaron Blake, “On election eve, Trump dances around a powder keg with a lit match,” Washington Post, November 2, 2020 (11:13 a.m. EST).
Speaking to supporters in Opa-locka, Fla., on Sunday night into Monday, the president, who faces potential defeat this week, began sizing up his opponent Joe Biden’s physical attributes and describing how he might beat him up.
“So those legs — those legs, they’ve gotten very thin,” Trump said. “Not a lot of base.”
He continued, drawing his words out carefully and slowly. “You wouldn’t have to close,” he said, holding up a clenched fist and then releasing it, “you wouldn’t have to close the fi-.”
…
In a similar riff the day before, Trump’s sentiment was even clearer, though he again suggestively trailed off at the end: “A slight slap. You don’t have to close — even close your fist.”
…
Trump has also for weeks used a potentially suggestive word to describe Biden’s mental state, repeatedly referring to the idea that he’s “shot” — which critics suggest is a deliberate double entendre. At one point last week, he referred to the idea of Kamala D. Harris taking over, saying, “Three weeks in, Joe’s shot. Let’s go, Kamala, you ready?”
