The Coup's BFFs
On Monday, March 6, Tucker Carlson aired a piece on FOX News about “peaceful” protesters wondering around the Capitol on January 6, who really weren’t doing anything wrong. Apparently, the January 6 US House Select Committee failed to show “alternative facts” during the hearings. Tucker went right at it and wasted no time. He was, I’m sure, counting on the short-term collective memory of Americans in order to rewrite history and for alt-right purposes. The rewrite was based on 40,000 hours of security footage turned over to Tucker by house majority leader Kevin McCarthy, footage that would exonerate the peaceful protesters
Their claim was that the House Select Committee “cherry picked” violent selections to support their thesis of a free speech and assembly turned into a violent outbreak to storm the capitol, decertify Biden’s election, all led by then President Donald Trump. With Tucker’s new video selections of peaceful citizens exercising their right to tour the Capitol, the true account would now be known. Most of the people in the Capitol were peaceful and were even being escorted around the building by the Capitol cops. There it is. Tucker proved it with the new footage that it wasn’t so bad. The Select Committee had it in for the “tourists”.
Now let me provide a critique of Tucker’s alt-right revision.
People walking inside the Capitol were not exempt from criminality and clearly the cops were overmatched by the crowd. They did the right thing by not antagonizing or intensifying the situation in the Capitol by making arrests, cuffing lunatics, Mirandizing, etc. If this happened the situation might have spun out of control more than what was taking place …
But historical revision aside, the coup will be coming our way again soon if the alt-right propaganda keeps asserting, in terms of gas lighting, that violent uprising wasn’t violent. The country was lied to, voting machines were manipulated, the election stolen, and communists and Marxists were to blame, e.g., Nancy Pelosi and friends.
This is how they are grooming the public for another try …
The insurrection is now a little over two years old. I suspect many in the Republican Party, the House and Senate, knew of or played a part in, what the nationalist insurrectionists describe as, “taking back their country”. Liz Cheney, though helpful with her leadership in the hearings on the coup, doesn’t get a pass. She was the third most powerful Republican in the House and she had no knowledge of the planned coup? Did she know of any rumors? She has always been noncommittal on this point. What about elements of the military. Executive officers? Generals, both active and retired? General Michael Flynn was unabashed in asserting the virtue of coups throughout the history of the United States. What about the Generals and Admirals that signed a petition claiming President Biden to be unfit as President? Was a high-ranking civilian in the Trump Administration waiting for a signal from Trump to declare martial law and send in troops to take over. Marjorie Taylor Greene urged Trump in a text message to go for it. There are others.
Any millionaires and billionaires involved?
There was no call for peace and cessation to the violence by Trump, not right away. But none of this should be a surprise since Trump never promised, when pressured by the media, to agree to a peaceful transition if he lost the 2020 election.
The entire event was a plan to upend democracy and replace it with an authoritarian state. Republicans have been preparing for this over the past several years. They have argued that the United States is not a democracy, but rather a “republic”. The Founding Fathers did not intend an all-inclusive pluralistic democracy based on self-rule, but instead a republic in which elites were elected to carry out their own political agenda. The role of the masses is to comply with elite rule.
For the past two years republicans have been tilling the soil in this regard in order to undermine self-rule democracy, by and for the people.
But there is more to the “America is a republic not democracy” republicans. The likes of Mike Lee, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Green, Loren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks, Scott Perry, and many other republicans actually believe this. The tactic not only serves to undermine democratic self-rule, it is designed to make government the illegitimate “other” which symbolizes anything neurotic within the psyche of the America First. The result is a fascist white nationalist United States, militarized and violent. (See Sue Halpern, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-republicans-keep-saying-that-the-united-states-isnt-a-democracy; Bernard Dobski, “America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy” https://digitalcommons.assumption.edu/political-science-faculty/87/ and Malcolm Nance and the Alt-Right, The Plot to Destroy Democracy, 2018 and the Plot to Betray America, 2019.)
The Republicans, one hundred forty-seven voted on the record to decertify Biden’s election, and immediately after the insurgents tried to kill them. How would the republicans have voted if some of them were actually killed? And killed brutally. Think about it, beat and kicked to death, bludgeoned, stabbed brutally, strangled, assassin style gunshots to head? Yes, some were carrying hand guns.
MAGA God-Emperor of the United States of Kekistan
Liberalism is the enemy, its policies, and the threat to the militia vision of the “real” America. They decry the acceptance and implementation of leftist, socialist and anti-capitalist movements. Critical Race Theory taught in schools, leftist indoctrination allegations, lawless rioting of Black Lives Matter (angry black folks), black athletes “taking a knee” during the national anthem, and righteous leftist black preachers pushing back on racist America by calling for the removal of confederate statues. Recent case in point, the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue at West Point.
Their world is coming apart and their American identity as “exceptional” has been scuttled. Even Western Civilization is doomed as they see it … because of liberalism and its leftists. Hitler and Goebbels argued the same thing in the attempt to “save” Germany.
The republican insurgency in the United States is to “unite the right”. The shock troops are none other than, Nazis, KKK, militia units and related right wingers. None of this was denounced by Trump, Liz Cheney or most republicans. This hardly excuses the reactionary violence of self-identified BLM, Antifascists, and ad hoc protest groups, to which democrats gave tepid denunciation. But the difference is a violent reaction to the inordinate number of black men and women being killed by police versus the violent-killer overthrow of a “constitutional democracy” led by himself, the divine lord of “Kekistan”, Donald Trump. (See https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/05/08/what-kek-explaining-alt-right-deity-behind-their-meme-magic; Andrew Marantz, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-alt-right-hails-its-victorious-god-emperor; Alex Krasodomski-Jones, https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/opinions/what-next-alt-right-krasodomski-jones-opinion/index.html).
The unrest in America, whether populist conservative or liberal, is the result of the culture war, a socioeconomic decline, collapse of the economy 2009, the concomitant uprising and occupation of Wall Street, lack of healthcare, living wage jobs and everything Bernie Sanders campaigned on. The plutocrats and oligarchs are frightened. My take is that mass politics has now led to class struggle. It is in open view. But make no mistake about it, this unrest has led to class warfare. And from a materialist perspective, Marx is spot on.
The key here is to work toward the goal of peace and justice, not class antagonisms.
Boogaloo Bois Guard Duty
Society’s morphing into an authoritarian state has been described accurately by Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951. She argues that fascism in Germany was based on an attraction to a mesmerizing leader, Adolf Hitler, who convinced his followers that civil liberties and human rights have become excessive, undermining the social cohesion needed for the well-being and survival of the state. Liberal democracy, union organizing as the cause of class struggle, undermines the common good. Criticism of authoritarianism itself (critical theory), led by Jewish intellectuals from the Frankfurt School, one of whom was closely associated, Albert Einstein, rained down invectives form Hitler and Goebbels, describing the subversives as “cultural Marxists”. At the same time other “deviants” such as the mentally ill, unemployed, homeless, gypsies, crippled, were vilified as stain on the “great Aryan stallion”. But none were more vilified than the Jews.
This is the result of liberal democracy and thus the enemy of the state. Arendt concludes that there is no guarantee that democracies can uphold human rights and civil liberties and that vigilance to these threats must be a permanent feature of any democratic government. Tragically, Germany’s Weimar Republic, 1918 – 1933, failed to maintain this vigilance. This cleared the way for Germany’s Nazi fascist takeover.
The original strategy of the Nazi party was to eliminate trade unionists, communists, Marxists, socialists, etc. Hitler and Goebbels believed unions in Germany were packed with such Bolsheviks who would collectively undermine the objectives of National Socialism. The Nazis feared union solidarity, which would have challenged the Third Reich through strike action, boycotts, and solidarity with organized labor in other European countries. Hitler and Goebbels sought to crush unions by categorizing them as communists and a danger to Germany. Add to this the wounded collective psyche of Germans, who after World War I were devastated by the vindictive surrender policies of the Treaty of Versailles, and the result is a very disturbed body politic. By reviving a once proud Teutonic exaltation of “Blood and Soil”, Germany sought to regain its dominance in the world order.
Blood and soil is a Nazi slogan used by the MAGA and White Nationalists which has never condemned by the republicans.
What turned the German population away from union solidarity was Nazi economic success under Hitler. It was “national socialism,” which funded hundreds of failing businesses in Germany with generous government economic support. It was a financial investment by government into German failed markets in order to expand capitalist ventures in local and international settings. In order to gain popular support for this plan, Hitler and Goebbels successfully obtain loans form friendly fascist American bankers and financiers who saw a financially lucrative investment in Nazi Germany. Most notably William Randolf Hearst and Henry Ford who admired the governing style of Adolf Hitler. (See https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/william-randolph-hearst-gave-america-first-its-nationalist-edge/481497/, Karola Fings, Reinhold Billstein, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War, New York: Berghan Books, 2000). The top ten American companies that help finance and invest in Nazi Germany are as follows: Coca Cola, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, Brown Brothers Harriman (Financiers Fritz Thyssan and Prescott Bush), Woolworth, Alcoa, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and International Business Machines.
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, 2018, and Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017 argue that these events have, in effect, transformed the United States into a quasi-fascist state, trending ever rightward. They cite policies and law such as the Patriot Act, 2001 and the National Defense Authorization Act, 2012 - in which federal government agencies can spy and detain indefinitely suspects without signed judicial warrants – as laying the foundation for a fascist government. All of this rationalized as a result of the 9-11 event. But with the recent unrest in America, right militia insurgency, etc., Stanley and Snyder argue that the fascist intensification is growing.
Snyder and Stanley describe fascist movements, and society’s attraction to them, based on the following: economic fears, dogmatic beliefs in free market capitalism, immigrant xenophobia, authoritarian social stability, elite hierarchical rule, Christian-Nationalist identity, and the primacy of white Western European hegemony. Diversity, multiculturalism, pluralism, interracial marriages, collectivist economic arrangements, and democratic rule, are to be rejected as divisive and destructive of authoritarian rule. Thus, the fascist remedy for liberal democracy is the absolute nature of the state, a militarist charismatic leader, a monoculture of white Christians, and hegemonic dominance of Western European values. To be clear, the lure of a powerful dictatorial leader, whose followers are drawn toward to his/her authoritarianism, hatred and dehumanization of the “other”, and the inevitable use of violence to achieve a fascist state, is the heart and soul of fascism itself. And this is fully present in the Republican Party.
The four images above are, from left to right: 1) Pepe the frog, a character originally conceived by comic artist Matt Furie who now represents according to the militia the ruler of Kekistan, the future name of the new white America; 2) the head of the Egyptian frog-god Kek superimposed over an image of his counterpart, the Egyptian snake god Kauket, in a seal inscribed with the Latin phrase “satis mentibus obvia,” or, "resist closed minds”; 3) an image of Christ, linking Christianity to the cause; and finally, 4) a sculpture of Kek in his frog form.
The Great Replacement
In his biography, Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler develops the "Jewish Doctrine of Marxism” or as Goebbels described “Cultural Marxism”. Hitler argued that the survival of Germany was threatened by Marxist intellectuals who were predominantly Jewish, as mentioned earlier in this essay. This, along with anti-Semitism already grounded in European countries, then became the propaganda tool Hitler and Goebbels needed for further promoting the cause of Nazism. He then delivered a speech, February 1926, titled "Lenin or Hitler?" in which he asserted that communism or Marxism could not save the German people and would only usher in Bolshevik tyranny such as that of Russia. In 1926, Goebbels published a pamphlet titled "Nazi-Sozi" which attempted to explain how National Socialism differed from Marxist socialism and economic collectivism.
National Socialism (government funded support for capitalist development) would rejuvenate the German economy, not Marxist socialism which happen to be a popular alternative to the horrendous effects of the German depression. The Marxists scholars in Germany, intellectually attacked by the Nazis, were known as the Frankfurt School. They argued that Hitler and Goebbels were making a false comparison between their policy recommendation for a democratic economy, not a Bolshevik collectivist model implemented by the Soviet Union. In fact, the Frankfurt School rejected both Stalinism and Fascism. One of their major foci was on the inequitable distribution of power in society and the and the anti-democratic forces moving society. Their analytic tolls were based on Marxist analysis and Freudian theories of the subconscious acting out in authoritarian behavior.
In order to convince Germans of their superior status as a race, Goebbels insisted that Hitler promote himself as an “ubermench” or superman in the 1935 propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. Goebbels argued that Hitler must promote his own cause as the Fuhrerprinzip or Fuhrer (prince leader) and demonstrate the “evils” of the liberal democratic Weimar Republic. The film denounced the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic, called for a resurgence of the German will to power, ignited passions of German patriotism and thus set the stage for a Nazi coup d’etat. The timing for the “prince leader” was perfect; the ratings went meteoric.
With the death of President Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler took over as Chancellor and unilaterally abolished the Office of the President. He then declared himself “Fuhrer” for life. Hitler’s call to National Socialism was contrasted with the “subhuman” Bolsheviks of Stalinist collectivism. Competing collectivist economic arrangements, urged by labor unionists, socialists, anarchists and Marxists would be dismissed in comical and patronizing theatrics in the media.
The Nazi white nationalists asserted that white people are a unique race, and as such, seek to maintain its white identity or “white pride” and “white power” within a majoritarian white nation such as the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and other white dominated countries. They believed, and still do, that they are being targeted and persecuted. Their status as a minority threatens their very existence. The agenda, specifically in the United States, is to support the dominance of white culture and ensure the rights of besieged white people. The assimilation of minorities into white society is perceived to be a threat to the survival of the white race, its cultural heritage and hegemonic dominance.
Resistance to the inclusion of minorities through miscegenation, multiculturalism and immigration is to be prioritized, even with force if necessary. Most concerning to them is the illegal entries to the United States at the Southwest border, described as an invasion. While the facts of illegal immigration reveal that the majority of illegal entries to the United States are visa overstays, the MAGA (Make America Great Again) insist that the “brown” invasion from the South is the danger to the country, representing a “reconquista” (reconquering) of the Southwest and a America itself. This threatens white hegemony and their dominance as a culture.
Postmodern Ubermensch
In compounding the issue, Donald Trump endorsed white nationalists when he stated (August 15, 2017) that white nationalist demonstrators and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, North Carolina, have “very fine people on both sides.” And with Trump’s refusal to denounce David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Ku Lux Klan, Trump’s political sentiments have surfaced. The MAGA slogan, nonetheless, identifies the white nationalist vision. All of this plays a significant role in reinforcing the Great Replacement theory and the tiki torch evening march where chanted “Jews will not replace us”, like the Brownshirts of the Reich.
The MAGA identity is rooted in the early twentieth century Ku Klux Klan moto of Make America Great Again. In turn Hitler and Goebbels used this same moto and translated in Make Germany Great Again (MGGA). So, the MAGA devotees of today, knowingly or unknowingly, employ a catchall phrase for a loose group of extreme right-wing individuals and organizations who promote the fascist values of white nationalism. Apparently the MAGA and alt-right extremists tend to exhibit the following five characteristics: exaggerated nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democratic governance, white cultural dominance and American historical mythology. These same elements fit precisely the fascist doctrines of nineteenth century Germany, Italy, France and Spain.
More on this to come …
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