How is Donald Trump a fascist?

Let us count the ways.

A thread: 🧵 1/17 Defining fascism is not easy. Its constituent parts change over time, especially in the process of shifting from nascent to mature fascism. Various scholars have tried different approaches, as I explained long ago in this assemblage of definitions. 2/17

dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/01/append…

So Marjorie Taylor Greene, quite unsurprisingly, is claiming that evil government conspirators are sending hurricanes into rural red states like Georgia. She’s not the first to make such claims, nor will she be the last. Thread: 1/20

https://x.com/mtgreenee/status/1842039774359462324

Weather-manipulation conspiracy theories have long been around, though they were mostly vague accusations with nothing to explain it. In the 1990s, they latched onto a scapegoat: the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, based in Alaska. 2/20

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-freq…

Was rooting around in my archives when I came across this. It's an instructive artifact of just how long the Christian nationalist/evangelical campaign has been demonizing and scapegoating the LGBTQ community.

It was a mailing from Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in 1981. 1/4 I liked to keep an eye on what Falwell was doing back then and signed up for his mailings. This one arrived in a plain brown envelope (of course) with a warning that it was for adult eyes only. 2/4

Idaho’s far-right extremists—first claiming that the hate-crime attack on the University of Utah women’s basketball team in Coeur d’Alene two weeks ago was a “hoax,” now saying it’s not a real crime—seem confused. So let me explain how the law got passed in Idaho in 1983. 1/49



This a tale of the wages of hate, by which I mean vicious, unrepentant bigotry intended to harm: How it terrorizes and toxifies whole communities, and how its practitioners behave stupidly, even when they think themselves to be smart. In the end, hate is stupid, but it hurts. 2/

Certainly it would be a way for Heather to avoid discussing all the far-right extremists she has aided and abetted. Like the “Patriots” who turned up in Coeur d’Alene in June 2021 to threaten and harass LGBTQ people.

https://twitter.com/heatherscottid/status/1742982084208287976

The ugly scene at the lakeside park was directly due to Heather’s original work organizing it.

dailykos.com/stories/2022/5…

I'm thrilled tonight because I finally managed to snag a recording of transient orcas for my collection of whale sounds, via the Whale Museum livestream at Lime Kiln Lighthouse. They're wildly different than resident orcas! Unfortunately, they don't appear on camera. According to observers at the scene, these were probably the T49A pod, including the prodigious young male T49A1. More on them here from Maya's Legacy and @orcawild.
sanjuanislandwhalewatch.com/orcas-t49as/

This is unbelievably good news. Decades of work to return Toki to her home waters are finally reaching fruition.
local10.com/news/local/202… Incidentally, I refuse to call her "Lolita," which was a stage name with lascivious connotations given to her by the Seaquarium's owners. She was only a calf when captured and was placed with a large male orca ("Hugo") who later killed himself. It was hoped they would mate.

Thanks to @nberlat for reviewing ‘The Nazi Conscience,’ which is now on my must-read list. Note how it obliterates the ‘sparkling fascism’ arguments of people like @shadihamid, who join the long tradition of telling people like me we’re overreacting.

noahberlatsky.substack.com/p/yes-the-repu… Claudia Koonz’s thesis recalls that of Milton Mayer, whose ‘They Thought They Were Free’ remains an essential text for understanding fascism then and now. Some notable excerpts:

I finally got around to watching my new Criterion edition of the great antiwar film 'Come and See' recently. I hate spoilers, but the climactic scene is important because of the mirror it casts on current events in the same region. A thread. 1/ 'Come and See' is a 1985 Soviet film set in Belarus during the invasion by German forces in 1941. It focuses on a 14-year-old boy who tries to join the partisan resistance. It's simultaneously surreal and all too real, and a great piece of cinema.
imdb.com/title/tt009125…

#TodaysBeauty is the two humpbacks who came cruising past Lime Kiln Lighthouse today. Also, the sunset was beautiful again on Dec. 14. 2024 marks ten years after Sandy Hook. I pushed the listening-station button in honor of Jessica Rekos and her classmates again.

Since @elonmusk and his redoubtable hired hands seem determined to obscure what happened on Jan. 6 and why Twitter executives were scrambling on Jan. 7, it seems essential to point out that Twitter in fact played a central role in Trump’s coup attempt: specifically, this tweet. That tweet has played a central role in the federal prosecutions that have followed.

dailykos.com/stories/2022/3…

One of the strange aspects of the whole Twitter Files pseudo-drama is that it really demonstrates something that's just established reality for longtime newsroom people: Namely, opinion writers/editorialists/columnists are NOT reporters, who have much tougher standards to meet. Columnists/editorialists can be ex-reporters, but many if not most are not. Reporters, as a matter of passing fact-checking/copy-editing muster, must not only have confirmation of their facts in hand, but have to consider counter-evidence as well.

This bears watching.

"I look in the backyard and that man is walking away from my husband, and my husband is on the ground,” the woman says “He has come over like four times confronting my husband because he thought he was a Democrat."
journal-news.com/crime/court-do… This case concerns me because I monitor developing trends in domestic terrorism. I have been particularly concerned about the rise in rhetoric in extremist circles about unleashing lethal violence on their neighbors.
revealnews.org/article/domest…

The most popular right-wing talk host is ginning up his audience of millions to react violently to any Democratic victories Tuesday. Especially in Pennsylvania. A key part of this involves fomenting conspiracism. It’s a classic authoritarian blueprint.

dailykos.com/story/2022/11/… Watch this video. My jaw dropped. I don’t think I have ever seen such a clear example of authoritarian gaslighting.

Tucker and his cohorts, including his sidekick Glenn Greenwald, sneer at anyone who reads certified election results as legitimate or thinks denunciations of stochastic terrorism or hate speech are anything other than liberal “censorship.”

dailykos.com/stories/2022/1… Here’s the video.

For historical comparison, here's Kim Guilfoyle in 2011 on Bill O'Reilly's show. The changes are noticeable.

https://twitter.com/jasonselvig/status/1582759283355451393

What she was doing in this segment, incidentally, was baldly lying about a family whose home was invaded by Minuteman Project figure Shawna Forde and her gang. All 3 were shot; the father and a 9-year-old daughter died.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

LOL. Wait till someone hands them the HAARP material.

https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1575874385948598272

This began in the ‘90s when John Trochmann of the Militia of Montana began promoting the claim that a radar station in Alaska actually was a secret device capable of manipulating the weather anywhere in the world. Alex Jones keeps trotting it out.

dneiwert.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-we…

#TodaysBeauty is a double tweet with some of the images I took at Lime Kiln Lighthouse on Friday when J and L pods came by and hung out for awhile in the heavy flood-tide current. Plus a bonus sound track. Tweet No. 2.

This man, William J. Olson, was for years the counsel for Gun Owners of America, possibly the most far-right of all pro-gun groups, run by Larry Pratt, who was a major figure in the founding of the “militia movement” of the 1990s.

nytimes.com/2022/07/16/us/… Pratt was one of the "Christian men" who gathered at the Estes Park, Colo., Christian Identity church of Pastor Pete Peters in 1992 that is credited with giving birth to the militias.
splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

FWIW, Jason Van Tatenhove mentioned two other Oath Keepers attempts to generate an armed standoff after Bundy Ranch. I covered both of them for the SPLC. The Sugar Pine Mine scene came first, in April 2015.
splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015… The most striking aspect of the three-week occupation was that locals organized against them and were treated to what became a predictable pattern of threats and intimidation.
splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015…

An unremarked aspect of this fascinating thread is that the non-appearance of antifascists on the scene Jan. 6, played a critical role in the failure of Trump's coup attempt. 1/

https://twitter.com/matt_cam/status/1534926532342427648

Trump had been building the "Antifa/BLM/Violent Left" narrative all year, but he focused on Antifa particularly after he lost the election, and stepped up the vitriol. 2/