In Portland, the Baby Fascists Have Shown Their Face

[Nevilledog]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/23/portland-fascism-trump-election/

Fascism can happen in America. Some of it has already happened, and more will happen as Trump fights to stay in power.

Fascism was never about actual people and their predicaments but about a glorious imaginary collective that had died but would be reborn. In the 1920s and 1930s, the idea was everywhere the same: At some point in the past, the nation or the race had been greater, purer, more beautiful. That ancient perfection could be seen in ruins, poems, monuments. Then, so the story went, another group, some inferior race, some cabal had come along and inexplicably ruined the people’s destiny. If only that group could be removed, then the race could be restored, made great again.

In U.S. President Donald Trump’s adoration of Confederate statues and in his mobilization of state power to protect monuments, it is easy to see a similar style. The specifics of the present, the plights of individual Americans, are irrelevant, beside the point. The death of George Floyd matters only insofar as it can trigger a desire to dominate. It is a prompt to a certain narrative in which, in the end, white Americans are the true victims and the U.S. president is the greatest victim of all. The deaths of tens of thousands of Americans from the coronavirus is neither here nor there. Here too the president is victim-in-chief, with a mandate to lead the people into myth. What matters is Americans’ ability, through the medium of metal and concrete, to see their way back to a past when they were great.

Consider what would have happened had the president expressed as much concern for people in February and March as for statues in June and July. There was no call earlier this year for haste, for sudden action, for interagency cooperation, for an expansion of the role of the federal government to defeat a pandemic. On the contrary: The states were told to deal with the coronavirus themselves, and individuals were left to sort through the confusion and contradictions of statements from the White House. But when statues are threatened, then, it seems, exceptional action is called for. What if all the men (and, yes, they are nearly always men) swinging batons now had been passing out masks a few months ago?

*snip*

[Grasswire2]

1. kick

I am bearing witness every night watching the live feeds.

I encourage others to do the same.

[Thomas Hurt]

2. We have been heading down the path toward christofascism since the Reagan admin.

From far right stealth candidates, the rise of evangelical institutions like Focus on the Family, Koch brothers, militias, increase in right wing terrorism, largely ignored by the fed gov't.

All leading to the Pig and his openly fascist agenda.