The GOP's assault on education and history is a fascist attack based in Nazi ideology and is obsessed with power, control, and the protection of murderous white supremacy.
Yesterday, as a political measure, the state of Florida, pushed by the GOP, banned the teaching of "critical race theory," or the investigation of systems of power, racism, and oppression.
This isn't innocuous. It is a literal replaying of Nazi totalitarianism.
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Underneath all of it is the concept of "Cultural Marxism," or the idea that there is a secret conspiracy by communists, Jews, and liberal traitors, to destroy the culture of the country and unseat systems of power.
It is paranoid, fascist, and can be murderous.
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Hitler created his power base on this very conspiracy theory and presented it as an existential threat to Germans.
The "poison" of cultural Marxism, he claimed, was making people question the state and was priming them for a revolution. It required extreme measures.
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What we're not often taught is that Nazis controlled Germany not just through speeches, but a total domination of culture.
"Degenerate" art and culture was outlawed and determined as anything that made people question Germany's greatness or white supremacy.
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To solidify control, the Nazis banned degenerate art, claiming it was part of a conspiracy against the Germans, and instead replaced it with culture that reaffirmed their identity and purpose.
It was supposed to be patriotic. It was controlling, and radicalizing.
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What resulted was a cult of personality and a suicidal devotion to the state and Hitler.
All dissenting opinions were outlawed and cultured devoured itself, creating a madness that made fascism, warmongering, and genocide possible.
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A prime part of the Nazi totalitarian plan involved the takeover of education, claiming it was "indoctrinating" students, they took it over in totality and, predictably, made it an aggressive engine of actual indoctrination.
They captured generations of citizens.
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Actual information and history was taken from students and it was replaced with propaganda and religious worship of the state and Hitler.
This takeover was meticulous, aggressive, and one of the main reasons fascism was able to gain its foothold and power.
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But we don't need to start in Germany. In America, in response to the Russian Revolution, the original Red Scare created the same paranoia and made possible widespread violence and aggressive indoctrination, in media, in education, everywhere.
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Fear of "cultural Marxism" in America, the same conspiracy theory that made Nazism possible, spread through the United States, creating race massacres, lynchings, and a general oppression that hurt people of color, women, LGBTQ, as well as unions and leftists.
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The incident more people are familiar with is the second Red Scare, or McCarthyism, which was a proto-Qanon movement that took over the GOP and allowed the Right to destroy FDR's New Deal coalition via spreading conspiracy theories and paranoia.
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The second Red Scare was able to create a silent oppression with America where citizens were so afraid of being spotlit as a traitor or part of the communist conspiracy that they often had to hide who they were and what they believed.
It was soft totalitarianism.
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Of course, the Civil Rights Movement created a crisis in America that revealed what hid behind the soft totalitarianism.
Again, as white supremacy was challenged, the paranoia, violence, and oppression was forced to rear its head and expose the fascism underneath.
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The struggle for Civil Rights was turned into yet another communist conspiracy as the Right came to believe the marches and protests were secret communist operations that meant to destroy America.
It was, yet again, the same fascist conspiracy theory.
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Southern leaders and white supremacists were quite open during Civil Rights in their belief that Black Americans were being manipulated by Russia and that it was all a giant communist conspiracy.
Even question white supremacy was considered treason.
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The violence against Civil Rights protesters was considered self-defense, America defending itself against communist infiltration and an insidious plot, again by Jews, communists, leftist traitors, and people of color being manipulated into joining.
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If this sounds familiar, it should.
Black Lives Matter was treated as a conspiracy, a manufactured movement that was being directed by shadowy forces and ultimately focused on destroying America's foundations, creating distrust, and ultimately leading to the end of the US.
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What we're experiencing RIGHT NOW is the same Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory that animated the Nazis and fascists.
It's a different version, an update, but it is the animating force of the GOP and the Right.
It operates exactly the same way and demands action.
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The focus now is George Soros and other "Jewish puppetmasters."
This is ultimately what's at the heart of the anti-CRT, anti-"woke" movement.
It is a fascistic, antisemetic conspiracy theory meant to provoke violence and oppression.
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By capturing the education system, the Right intends to forcefully reassert white supremacy as benevolence, or the idea that white people have exploited and murdered people of color out of good intentions and in the pursuit of progress.
And, it is yet another front in the GOP's war to dismantle democratic institutions considering they are historically unpopular and that white supremacy and hypercapitalistic exploitation are in crisis and in danger of being unseated.
It's about walling off information, about instituting "patriotic," white supremacist education that ensures people don't understand systems of power and promoting militaristic self-destruction within the population.
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Things are...escalating.
We've been watching this for years and trying to warn people that fascism is growing and festering in the US.
It CAN and HAS happened here. This time it is an insidious new strain and it's only growing with every passing day.
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Again, I cannot stress this enough. This is an incredibly dangerous moment, and people need to recognize it immediately.
Denying it and pretending like this will solve itself only gives these people room to grow and spread.
This is a five-alarm fire. Raging.
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Just so everyone's clear, widespread corruption, abuse, and genocidal tactics, including spying on political enemies and withholding life-saving resources from states helmed by opposing political parties, has been completely and utterly normalized.
This is how it works.
There's hardly a crime, abuse, or murderous tactic that could come out now from the Trump Administration's time in power that would barely garner much attention.
It was so vast, so cruel, so everpresent, that it has just become something to expect and endure.
So many people are in such a rush to live in the delusion that Trump was an aberration and that we’re safe and beyond that stain of a moment that they’re actively stunting any engagement with or investigation of the abuses and cruelties that ensure more abuses and cruelties.
And this is not just limited to Republicans. Democrats and Republicans have enjoyed an economic, hypercapitalistic consensus for decades because certain Democrats believed markets would lead to more freedom and dignity.
We’re watching the collapse of that philosophy.
The belief remains, with certain political leaders, that this moment of crisis will solve itself. This is a delusional faith in this system, which is predicated and built explicitly on white supremacy and cruel exploitation. It was always heading here.
Some thoughts on the G7 news and the growing, desperate war between nations and corporations over which will come to be the defining body in human civilization.
It’s a major moment. The question is whether it’s too little, too late.
Decades of hypercapitalism, spurred by people like Reagan, has created a multinational corporation that feeds off nations, coopts their political and social structures, and drowns the people in inhuman labor, austerity, and exploitation.
Corporate dominance is one of the major reasons we’re in this crisis, why we’re suffering, why our democratic institutions are under dire threat. The redistribution of wealth from the bottom up pushed by Reagan has come to define this new second Gilded Age.
The Right isn’t outraged by any of this garbage. It’s testing narratives and attack lines, throwing things at the wall.
To understand any of this we have to recognize this is a movement without principle or purpose beyond pursuing power.
Every single day there’s a new thing the Right tried to put over as a scandal or evidence of cancel culture or whatever.
It isn’t real. It’s a scam, a strategy. Stop treating it like anything else. Their incoherence is testament to the artificiality of all of this.
If we’re even going to start untangling ourselves from this crisis it has to start by refusing to engage with or accept any of the Right’s manipulative/spectacle garbage and see it for the tactic that it is.
This is a fascist, antidemocratic movement. That’s the heart of it.
Life’s too short and the crisis is too severe to spend even a second listening to Republicans trying to preserve their reputations and pretend their poisonous ambitions didn’t lay the groundwork for decades for this principle-less, fascistic movement.
Reject this garbage that the GOP didn’t hand over every principle besides white supremacy and destructive greed when going after racists and the cruel in order to solidify prejudice systems and promote hypercapitalism.
People still want to get all misty-eyed about Ronald Reagan on a horse and pretend like he wasn’t Trump 1.0 or that the principles they assign him were even remotely real.
It’s always been about greed and profit and ambition and we’re only watching it evolve.
When a majority of your members and voters believe in wild, racist conspiracy theories that have been weaponized to dismantle democracy, you're not a political party.
There is no GOP. There is a white supremacist fascist movement.
People want to live in denial of what's actually happening, or continue profiting off of it, but the numbers we're seeing, the rhetoric that's being used, the violence and antidemocratic actions, the attempted coups, this isn't just a moment or a strategy.
It's fascism.
And none of this is going to get any better until people start calling it what it is and treating it like a fascist movement.
There's no "working with" these people. There's no magic word. No waiting on the next election cycle.