When Fascism Comes To America

From Message 359"I AM THE ONLY ONE": TRUMPS MESSIANIC 2024 MESSAGEThis was from The New Yorker. (June 15th, 2023)Some bits that lept out:

The New Yorker:

---

The Republican political consultant Richard Berman ...devised an acronym to capture his firm’s aggressive approach to politics: FLAGS—fear, love, anger, greed, and sympathy. Of those, he believed, anger and fear were undoubtedly the most effective.

​

The 2024 G.O.P. primary is shaping up as a veritable stew of hatreds, with the candidates raising alarms about everyone from scary trans activists to marauding migrants and “woke” radical-left Communists. In 2016, during Trump’s campaign, he promoted a “Muslim ban” to protect L.G.B.T.Q.+ Americans from “a hateful foreign ideology”; this time, as the political writer Dave Weigel recently noted, Republicans are courting Muslim voters by promising to protect them against threatening L.G.B.T.Q.+ ideologues. The point is to have an enemy—or many enemies—whoever they are.

But there is, I’m afraid, an important reason to listen more attentively than ever to what Trump is saying. As he faces the very real threat of conviction and imprisonment in the criminal cases now pending against him, he has dramatically escalated the apocalypse quotient in his rhetoric. It’s no longer enough merely to bemoan “American carnage,” à la his 2017 Inaugural Address, or to portray himself as the savior who will do something about it. With his own survival on the line, Trump has now embraced a Presidential-campaign platform of do-or-die-ism. There is a chilling urgency to his words as he calls on his followers to show up for “the final battle,” a phrase I first noticed him using earlier this year. “We will get reëlected,” he said in his speech this week. “We have no choice.”

---

And then I remembered what Dwise1 said. (He is one of the members at EvC whom I respect)

Dwise1:

---

Message 48, Message 71, and "Conservative Christians et alia do not understand public education. Because they only use "education" for indoctrination, they project that onto the rest of us and wrongly assume that "all education is indoctrination". They don't know the difference. They cannot even begin to realize that there is any difference.".

---

Yes, I DO read what my critics say and I DO often think about it in context with what I read and hear about in the media.

What you quoted from the New Yorker sums it up pretty well. Trump is more extreme than the rest of the Republicans, but their strategy is at heart the same: scare people into believing the county is going to hell and that only they can save it.The guys in those precious metal YouTube videos you watch are using the exact same strategy, but in a financial context: scare people into believing the country is heading for a financial crash and that the only means of weathering the coming financial storm is to buy their precious metals.--Percy

I've mentioned this movie before: Er ist wieder da (2015 -- "He's Back Again", though the English language title was "Look Who's Back."). The premise is that Hitler suddenly and mysteriously reappears in modern Berlin (ie, 2014) completely healthy but unaware of the time that has passed nor how he had gotten there. The tourists in Pariser Platz (in front of the Brandenburg Gate) mistake him for a street performer. A filmmaker decides to make a film about him and they go on a tour of Germany in which, Borat-style, we see him interacting in character with real Germans and how they react to him (mainly positive with them complaining to him about immigrants and refugees, etc). He ends up on a TV show where his popularity increases. The film ends with real news footage of right-wing neo-fascist political demonstrations -- he's back.The film was on Netflix, but then rotated off that service. My Roku search feature cannot find streaming anywhere, but I just found it on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40zcGhvekhs&t=10s (it seems that YouTube is a good source for hard-to-find movies)The film was released in 2015 and I saw it on Netflix during the 2016 campaign. I was shocked to see how Trump's speeches and MAGA rhetoric mirrored those of Hitler in that movie, the same claims, the same fears being stoked, etc.Back to your "their strategy is at heart the same: scare people into believing the county is going to hell and that only they can save it.": Le plus ça change, le plus la même chose.