“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” – Donald Trump, Feb 15 2025
During the Trump campaign, people got mad at me when I used the word Fascist to describe the Republicans. They said using that word would weaken its power. Like some geopolitical version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, they argue that if you call your political opponents Nazis now, we won’t be ready to heed the alarm when the real fascists show up. The folks I usually have this conversation with never let me argue beyond that point. If they did let me continue, however, I would say that they are misunderstanding fundamental aspects of Fascism that makes it so dangerous in the first place.
It’s this: Fascists try to look as “normal” as possible on the come up so that they can do all the evil shit once they secure power. Hitler was a published, outspoken jew hater and democracy-critic at least as early as 1925, but he wasn’t campaigning on genocide. He wasn’t loudly calling for the suspension of the free press. That came after. If you look like a radical freak on your come up, people might not democratically hand you the keys to power. Basically, the Nazis lied until they didn’t need to anymore, and then they went for the throat. Free speech is suspended the second it is not longer needed to access the levers of power.
So, if lying and obscuring the truth are central strategies to enacting a fascist regime, then politicians that espouse fascist ideas should not be taken at their word! And they need to be identified and combated BEFORE their rise to power, because once they have power it is too late. Once the Nazis started actually killing jews, gays, and catholics in the millions, it was far too late to solve the problem democratically. We needed to go over across the Atlantic and kill people to get them to stop.
Americans were in deep denial about the objectives of the Republican party during the 2024 campaign, and it isn’t hard to blame them– Trump was lying. Donald was happy to misdirect anytime an opportunity to do so arose!
On Ukraine, Trump was extremely vague. He said the war wouldn’t have happened if he were in office, and that he would end the war upon his return. Pressed for how, he said he’d make a deal with Russia and if Russia refused he’d give Ukraine “more than they ever got.” Now we see that the Republicans never had any intention of backing Ukraine. Ukraine will be receiving no more support from the USA. Ukraine will not be receiving security guarantees that could prevent a third Russian invasion in the future. Hell, they won’t even be part of the negotiations. Trump and Putin are going to work out a deal themselves, and Ukraine will either have to accept or be slowly annihilated. Putin and Trump, unified, have called for new elections in Ukraine so that a leader open to accepting Putin’s terms can be elected.
It doesn’t matter to Trump that Ukraine is an independent state with a Democratic system similar to our own against Putin’s autocracy. Or that invasion and murder are evil and against the law. Or that Europe is facing down its first land war since World War II with the possibility of much more conflict in the future when an emboldened Putin decides that he wants even more. Trump’s objective in Ukraine is now blatantly to end the war on Putin’s terms. Obviously he couldn’t say that during the 2024 campaign because that would have sounded really awful and possibly cost him the election.
On Israel, Trump zipped his lips. He said the war never would have happened if he were in office, and that he was the most pro-Israel president in history. Now that his Republicans are in control, we see what he meant by this: the USA will annex Gaza! We will relocate its millions of residents to some other place and begin a project of transforming the destroyed city into a lucrative real estate project. This idea is so outlandishly evil that even Trump himself seemed a bit embarrassed to say it out loud as he read the script.
(Aside: This isn’t the first time the Trumps have used violence as a real estate opportunity. At this very moment, Jared Kushner is developing a project on the site of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense building that was bombed to smithereens by NATO in 1999. The project is funded by Saudi Arabia, of course.)
Trump never let his intentions for Gaza go to light during the campaign of course. Saying so would have galvanized an incredible coalition against him and he would have lost the election. But we all knew Trump didn’t give a shit about the Palestinians. But we all knew Trump backed the Israeli right to conquer the West Bank and subjugate its inhabitants. Now that Trump is in power, his cabinet has declared that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank and has removed all sanctions from settlers accused to violently stealing land. We all knew this was coming, but we pacified ourselves. We deluded ourselves into believing that Trump wasn’t going to do the fascist thing, that maybe he would bring peace to the world. Well, now we have a fascist in office.
Trump didn’t talk about South Africa particularly loudly during his campaign (if at all), yet suddenly South Africa has lost all US funding and the white Afrikaners that make up just 7% of the population while owning 80% of the farmland are considered persecuted refugees. Suddenly we notice that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Trump’s key donors and advisors, are white South Africans that made their riches off apartheid. All US funding to the impoverished parts of the world (impoverished in no small part because of their subservient position to the USA) have been suspended by the Trump administration for reasons that have not been communicated to the public beyond vague calls of fighting corruption.
What we see from the Trump administration is a desire to conquer and expand. The acquisition of material wealth through extraction is emerging as his chief geopolitical aim. Conflict is his primary policy. He wants Panama. He wants Greenland. He feels Ukraine owes us half of all its rare minerals. All the old trappings of the campaign are gone. Fighting inflation is off the table–it doesn’t matter anymore. We’ll have to deal with “some pain” while Trump wages his new trade war with all our allies. It is the same language the FED uses to justify the interest rates that have stifled a new generation of would-be home-buyers for the past three years.
We weren’t told any of this was going to happen because Trump was being sneaky about it. Even when it was pointed out in 2024 that Project 2025 laid out some very concerning plans to gut the Federal government and use the judiciary to establish an unbreakable Republican hold on all US policy, Trump claimed he never heard of it. That was a bold lie– the project is being enacted right now. Donny is the biggest liar in politics since Bush and his Weapons of Mass Destruction (another Republican out for blood and conquest).
Fascism derives it power from lies. That is why fascists destroy the free press the second they have the opportunity to do so. It’s why you aren’t allowed to criticize Putin in Russia without being jailed or killed outright. It is why you will be jailed and censored in Israel right now for even suggesting that the Palestinians deserve to be left alone. Interestingly, the Nazis called themselves National Socialists despite opposing socialism intrinsically. Putin and Xi claim to be the heads of Democracies, and become enraged if you call them dictators to their face. Biden did exactly that, but Trump never will.
Fascism derives its power from lies. And now the fascist snake is at arm’s length set to begin coiling around our throats. JD Vance went to Europe just last week to implore the Neo-Nazi AfD party to come to power. Elon Musk was there a few weeks earlier rallying them to denounce multiculturalism and embrace German Heritage….
Gentleman, it can’t be more obvious. If you are afraid to call them fascists now, then there will not be a proper time to do so ever. We will soon reach a tipping point where the response to such accusations will simply be a smile. “We know. :)”
