Index

Trump is Actually a Hopeful Sign

First off, 9/11 was not a foreign attack

On this anniversary of the destruction of the Twin Towers, I feel the need to unload some things that have been bothering me since then.

First off, it was no more a “foreign attack” than was the Bush twit in the Whitehouse. It had to appear to be foreign to generate the “terrorism” fear that made the public swallow what followed, but that was transparently obvious even at the time. Having the camera on Bush when he was supposedly told about the “attacks” was all I needed to see - there was no surprise or anything else there. The (essentially unconstitutional) “USA PATRIOT Act” was pre-written by those who planned the whole thing, and slid right through a scared legislative branch like a greased pig at a barbecue.

Back to the roots - Fascism and Antifa

Antifa in America pointed out the obvious fascist patterns in the Reagan administration, and became the poster child for any intellectual response to the fascist takeover of the U. S. government. Reagan was the idiot front man for the far-right at the time I first heard of Antifa. He read his lines like the actor he was, but couldn’t hide the fascists behind him. Trump hates “Antifa” because the name represents the destruction of the whole fascist enterprise - smart people using their brains to help history repeat itself.

Even Putin, with his experience gleaned from decades of completely authoritarian rule, has not been able to destroy the combination of individual freedoms and cooperation that the real American experiment with democracy and (at least some attempts at) equality have created.^[1] The Post-WWII economic growth in America came from a combination of Baby Boomer population growth, the education they received, people cooperating with each other, and the largely untapped (at the time) fossil resources of the North American continent.

As that combination of factors has been used up, the boom has also gone and left some groups fighting for a standard of living they no longer can earn. In combination with the destruction of public education by the right wing and its fellow travelers in the GOP, ignorance plus rabble-rousing created Reagan’s “Southern Strategy,” and later, Trump’s “base.” Earlier versions - the Confederate whites-only society, the American Nazi party, the KKK, the John Birch society, the flat earthers, and other splinter cults have mostly been subsumed into the current collection.

Mass education and its post-WWII improvements powered the growth of a technological society, and the destruction of that system has hastened the collapse of the technological economic engine. This has allowed the resurfacing of ignorance and fear-based political movements. Between the increases in mass ignorance and the expert rabble-rousing from the former Republican party, this collection became a mob, and the orange cult has ridden this wave to the current mess.

The current batch of fascists have taken some lessons from previous populist-movement failures, of course. One of the major points that the current orange rabble-rouser is perfect for is that populist movements are mob actions, and die when the mob-driven aspects fade, as they inevitably do. Humans do not stay scared or angry indefinitely, they have to have continuous stimulation to remain animals. This is where Trump excels - his narcissism drives him to keep himself front and center, and to do that he keeps his mob mindless, scared and angry. The limitations of that approach are already visible in the public fragmentation of the MAGA movement into incompatible ideologically-driven pieces.

Trump’s Mission

The only hope that the fascists have is that they can destroy the democratic institutions that make up the American experiment before the adults wake up and send the mob back to the nursery. After World War II, fatigue set in and the intellectuals moved on to less emotionally taxing and more enjoyable pursuits than continuous vigilance in defense of liberty. Since our economy was booming, we allowed ourselves to relax and go along with the improvements and play with our social and technological toys rather than watch for the barbarians in our midst. The hyper-rich Uihleins, Musks and Theils are not the first ultra-rich to fall in love with fascism and won’t be the last, but we hadn’t been watching for them and their anti-democratic actions.

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. ” —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, April 29, 1938 (Message to Congress)

In the future, awake and aware adults will have to challenge the existence of above-the-fray über-rich every time it starts to happen. This is the essence of “woke” that the orange cult sees as incredibly threatening - the existence of the cult and its political power is completely financed by this very small but very rich group, so any attempt to rein them in threatens the fascists’ existence.

Other factors

There are other things that are driving the powerful and their fellow travelers to attempt to wreck democracy. Technology and its expanding knowledge are in the process of destroying the last vestiges of religions’ once complete power over the minds of the citizenry, and the remaining theocrats are trying to turn the clock back on the Enlightenment and the power of reality, science and knowledge. Someone actually said publicly that “the Enlightenment was a mistake,” although nobody with any grasp of reality did more than laugh at them. I doubt that this has a chance of happening, since every war that religions have waged on this front has failed miserably and completely, albeit sometimes slowly. Given that we have had roughly 1000 years of progress and improvements to our way of life thanks to the changes in thinking that started then, I cannot see people giving all of that up.

Likewise, the need for creativity to continue the growth of technology has led to a flattening of the power structure in the business world, and a tempering of the power of money. While large amounts of money can buy some people and some influence, the fact that it cannot create new anything without creative people has become more and more a limit on money’s real power. Ignorance, fear and the mob mentality that the experts have used to create the fascist changes in the country right now are the only real weapons the rich have in the fight, and those weapons destroy their own power in the end, because they cannot create new wealth without the creativity that they so want to control or destroy.^[2]

Fallout and Endgame

The damage the fascists, etc. are doing to America is undeniable. More than one person has succumbed to panic because this-or-that chunk of liberty suddenly vanished under the fascist assault. The Voting Rights Act being destroyed by SCOTUS worries me as much as anything, because it shows how much of the government the fascists now control, but we still have a midtem election that the orange cult has to either prevent somehow or deal with losing badly, and hopefully more elections after that. The fact is that the adults are beginning to wake up, and the fascists have zero chance once that happens unless they can take over with a full authoritarian government first, and history tells us even that is only temporary.

The fact that Trump (as emperor-to-be) is the best that the fascists could do says a lot for their chances of success. Instead of a really intelligent person that would have a chance of convincing people with brains that he or she would be worth having as a dictator, Trump is a rabble-rousing moron with zero connection to the world of smart people. The intelligent, creative people that made the current country and world have no interest in an idiot ruler and, like the intellectuals in Germany, Poland and other threatened parts of Europe early in WWII, will either leave or become ineffective. The country that once attracted brains for the intellectual freedom and availability of jobs is now running them out the same way.

One of the biggest advantages the allies had in WWII was the mathematicians that came over from Poland and helped build our cryptographic cracking skills, and in the U. S. helped build the atomic bomb that finished off Japan. That sort of intellectual power is already fleeing the U. S., and that is a giveaway as to the future. At the current rate it will destroy our technical military capability in short order.

Pete Hegseth is rapidly destroying the human side of the contry’s military readiness, and intellectual flight will eventually destroy the technological side. What was once a strong military power has remade itself in Trump’s image - A weak, narcissistic third-grade playground bully just itching to get pounded into rubble by someone smarter and stronger.

Footnotes

[1]: I chuckled when I read where Putin babbles about Ukraine having Nazis in charge as one of his excuses for attacking them. After all, he has backed the fascist orange cult to the hilt in the U. S. Pravda, indeed! ↩

[2]: I have to laugh at the over-selling of A. I. in this context. The salesmen are pushing A. I. as something that can replace the creativity of the people that the hyper-rich fear are destroying their power. The fly in that ointment is the basic reality that A. I. cannot be creative. It is nothing but a computer program with a computer's limitations. It can manipulate data, but cannot create anything except new combinations of what it already has. While it is true that the mechanical morons lie, it is quite obvious to anyone looking that lying is no great talent, and certainly nothing creative - just look at the poster child for a-lie-in-every-breath, Donald Trump - intelligent and creative are NOT words that apply there. A. I. is not going to be a panacea for the rich. It is just another way to separate the (not so bright) rich from their wealth. It might become a useful tool for the creative to speed up their output once they figure out how to keep it from lying. ↩