The wealthy and powerful spent decades creating a hateful, paranoid environment where conspiracy theories enabled the dismantling of government as a public good, culminating in Trump and an outright fascist movement.
Now it’s time to pretend they’re horrified by their creation.
This crisis was facilitated by the wealthy elite who fought modest reform, regulation, and any attempt toward equality by disseminating white supremacist paranoia into the culture and undermining all efforts by linking them to fascist conspiracy theories of old.
The New World Order. Birtherism. The Deep State. QAnon. Just iterations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zions, the same story wielded as a weapon by the Right to demonize reform efforts by the Left in order to maintain power and profit and redirect resulting rage.
Fascism doesn’t just happen. It’s a process of exploitation and manipulation. The underlying factors are there, including white, misogynistic, evangelical forces, but these elements have to be mobilized and directed as a defense by the powerful as they pursue more profit.
The story of this moment and this crisis is so much more complicated than the Trump-centered focus that is dominant in our discourse, and until we start dealing with the true causes - white, misogynistic, evangelical supremacy and exploitation - it’s only going to get worse.
Any story about Trump, the GOP, and this fascistic, antidemocratic movement, is incomplete without a deep dive into how the wealthy and powerful used them and their vast alternate reality ecosystems to dismantle government, further profit, and redirect anger to vulnerable people.
The reason all this can seem so strange and inexplicable is because the actual nature of our politics and efforts to destroy government and halt reform has been largely lost in the shuffle. These conspiracy theories, this fascism, this moment is part of a larger effort.
If you’re looking for a primer on how we’ve arrived at this bizarre moment and how fascism took root with the help of the wealthy and powerful, or if you’d like to turn some people onto the truth, here’s a presentation I put together.
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The putsch at the Capitol wasn’t the end of something, but a beginning.
Whether this situation today is a false alarm or just a called-in, passing threat, we cannot live in denial any longer that we have a crisis on our hands and it demands addressing.
First things first, the Inauguration needs to be from a secure location. Stop playing around with this thing and take the attack on the transfer of power seriously. After that, we have to address the conditions and individuals that created this crisis.
If we get past January 20th without a massive tragedy we should consider ourselves incredibly lucky but also understand that this crisis doesn’t have an expiration date and that it is much larger, much more complicated, and much more threatening that most want to believe.
Even a CONVERSATION about paying a living wage is causing a lot of people to reveal how much they secretly love exploitation.
I’m all for this and this is why the political debate needs to include aspirational discourse. There are so many people who, like corporations, understand they have to pay lipservice to human dignity and progressive ideals in order to continue in power.
Let’s find out who’s who.
Let’s talk about living wages and universal healthcare and student debt forgiveness and free education.
Let’s see who believes in a better world and who has made it part of their personal brand to seem progressive while undermining reform at every turn.
Keep telling yourself the coup attempt was just a rural uprising of the uneducated and gullible and stupid all you want, but that narrative massively and intentionally obscures the reality, as well as the actions of the wealthy and the GOP to create this situation.
The people at the Capitol weren’t uniformly poor or rural. There were wealthy there, politicians, white terrorists, a total and comprehensive swathe of the American Right. This situation isn’t as simplistic as people are trying to sell you.
The Right is a teetering pyramid, a movement of the wealthy and powerful focused on exploitation and power that uses white supremacist paranoia to construct a base of the very people they exploit. Any narrative otherwise just obscures and empowers this.
The fascist movement in this country currently controls the White House and the Senate and believes the government is so far beyond its control only violence and the destruction of democracy will fix it.
They’re losing both very soon. The violence will only get worse.
A lot of what we’re dealing with is perceived persecution, angry people who believe society has been wrested from them by conspiracies and nefarious crimes. These movements, as the move with New World Order/Patriot Movement from Bush to Clinton, thrive with “opposition” in charge
One of the hardest tricks for fascists has been to have Trump as president and still sell the idea they were fighting the government. To square that circle the Deep State and QAnon twisted logic into incredible knots.
Now they have a “stolen election” and an “illegitimate” POTUS
The capital of the United States of America has been turned into a military zone and there’s a massive fascist movement threatening shared society because the wealthy and powerful created an alternate reality where they could maintain power and direct anger away from themselves.
Really let that sink in, because that’s the truth.
Trump, the Right, their poisonous media ecosystem, these grifters and bad faith politicians.
All of it part of a toxic stew of designed, tested, and weaponized conspiracy theories to hide boundless greed and inhuman cruelty.
We have to hold Trump accountable and change material conditions in this country, but nothing will change if we don’t investigate white supremacy, the paranoia that accompanies it, and that wealthy and powerful people have constructed an alternate reality to keep a grip on power.
People are going to try their damnedest to tell a story that Trump was the cause of this crisis and a total aberration.
The truth is that America’s history is lousy with fascism, that the Right and the wealthy created an environment of fascistic lies to expedite profit and power
This symbolic outrage from a party who has gleefully used Trump to dismantle government, fundraise, and stock the courts right up until the last week of his term will help build that narrative.
This lie will only grow the very real danger we’re in.
We’re facing fascism because of our weaponized mythologies of American exceptionalism that spurred on oppressive empire and hid white supremacy, we’re here because of planned economic inequality and because fascism is a means of suppression of reform.