Author: Alan Buddug

Estimates for how many fascists there are in the US hover around 35% depending on who is counting and what criteria they are using for “fascist”. We have a couple of good metrics available to us today, at this dramatic point in US history where the sitting US President has incited a half-assed insurrection.

First, among US adults, 33% still approve of Trump as President. This is the lowest approval rating he has received, and is a tie for the previous low, but his approval has never gotten lower than 33%. It’s cute that the press describes a 33% approval rating as “cratering” — it seems like an awfully damn high approval rating for a fascist. Frankly, it’s embarrassing for America.

Based on that approval rating, it might be smart to guess that about 33% of adult Americans are fascists, because this is one of those points in time where everyone has clarity about the fact that Trump is a fascist and that he wants to be a dictator.

However, the problem with the 33% figure is that it doesn’t count fascists who disapprove of Trump because he is losing — not because they disagree with his fascism. A post-capitol-sacking poll by the ADL sheds some light on how many US adults that might be. They found that 40% of those polled believe that antifa are somehow responsible for the capitol insurrection.

The reason we’re seeing so much misinformation in conjunction with the Trump regime is that what we call “misinformation” is something closer to “crafting reality” from the fascist perspective. Generally, the term people would use to describe it is “will to power”. Will to power is the process by which people manifest the things they want into the world and is a philosophical concept that is attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche.

Sometimes, this happens in a very literal, material way; for example, if I want a cup, I can find some materials and make a cup for myself. In this way, my will to have a cup is made into a material cup (manifested). This is pretty straight-forward and easy to understand.

The more important part of will to power is the social aspect of it. Sociologists sometimes refer to this process as the social construction of reality. To understand the social construction of reality, you first have to realize that many of the ideas people believe in aren’t real in an objective sense — they only exist because a bunch of people agree that they exist.

For example, Earth and the sun are both real things. We can observe them and see that they are real. And we can see that Earth moves around the sun one time for approximately 365 times that Earth completes one rotation on its axis. That’s all objectively true; everyone can make those observations and come to the same conclusion. But what about the New Year? The placement of both the western new year and the Chinese new year are completely arbitrary, having no relationship to any natural beginning or end of that trip around the sun. We could have chosen the winter solstice as the division between years, but we didn’t, and even if we had, it would still be just as arbitrary because we could have instead chosen the summer solstice. The “new year” is socially constructed.

Gender is also socially constructed. While there are broad differences is DNA, genitals and other attributes of what we usually identify as two genders, the objective truth is that our physical bodies are on a continuum of many different traits and so strict division into any number of genders is a construction. Furthermore, many of the traits we attribute to a gender are completely constructed. Most notably, the pink/blue gender color division is completely constructed and has no objective reality. In fact, the color pink used to be the color for boys.

Fascism takes the social construction of reality and weaponizes it. What non-fascists experience as misinformation is a fascist movement manifesting the reality it wants. And it works! A third grade teacher named Jane Elliot demonstrated this very effectively on the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

Jane Elliot’s demonstration focused on race, but it works for anything. The question for fascists becomes not, “What is real?” but rather, “What do I want to be real?”

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels

What do American fascists want to be real?

• That Hillary Clinton is a criminal.
• That Joe Biden stole the election.
• That people of color are inferior to white people.
• That their failures in life are not their responsibility, but rather the fault of a vast conspiracy of Satanists and Jewish people.
• That capitalism will make them wealthy.
• That anarchy is the same thing as chaos.
• That George Soros is a socialist.
• That George Orwell was a capitalist.
• That the Cold War was a fight between good and evil, with the US being on the side of God.
• That they deserve to be served by others.
• That they are patriots and not fascists.
• That the pandemic isn’t real.

I could go on, but you’ve seen them claim all sorts of absurd things. Each absurd claim is made because they are motivated to believe it is true, and we can figure out how each one would benefit them if it were true.

They make these things real by simply claiming them and repeating the claim over and over. And we could say “they believe their own lies” but what’s happening is that they are manifesting things that they already believed. It isn’t — strictly speaking — a process of lying. I might say, “Trump wanted to believe that antifa is responsible, so he claimed that they were,” but that hides the fact that he already believed that because he’s not able to believe reality. Reality is often too painful for his narcissistic personality to accept, so he doesn’t even entertain it as a possibility.

It’s a lot like a psychotic break. Literally speaking, a psychotic break is when a person loses contact with reality — their senses are no longer providing information to their brain, and instead their brain is feeding back imagined sensations. Whereas a psychotic break is an organic malfunction of the brain, fascism is a social malfunction having to do with the denial of reality in favor of willing a false reality into existence. It’s possible because a big part of how we understand what is real is by working it out with other people.

What we are seeing, then, is that 40% of Americans (83.6 million people) are so narcissistic and hateful that they’ve successfully induced a kind of psychotic break in themselves and each other. This is a big problem in that a peaceful solution would be a few weeks of intensive psychiatric care. Not only does the American system not have the resources for providing that to 40% of Americans, but there’s no way you’d persuade them to get the care they need voluntarily. And, of course, “forced re-education” and “declarations of mental disability” are both big items on the long list of things that these fascists believe that “the left” (anyone who isn’t a fascist) is going to do to them (suspiciously, these are also things they’ve actually done to their perceived enemies).

In case you were wondering, Kevin Sorbo is also garbage pic.twitter.com/CZCPbEuwxL

— B. Dave Walters: Revolutionary Content Creator (@BDaveWalters) January 11, 2021

To figure out what’s coming next, we need to understand what happened on January 6 at the Capitol. 

The participants in that insurrection included insurrectionists, law enforcement, and politicians.

The insurrectionists were:

– Donald Trump: Incited the insurrection at his rally directly before that, but had been preparing right wing radicals to reject democracy since before he won the electoral college in 2016. Trump was not always the creator of various aspects of the far right’s alternate reality, but he was clearly the leader, both requesting tweaks to the big lie and approving new aspects of it. Trump was the high commander of the insurrection.

–  Propagandists: Various propaganda outlets from the big (Fox News) to small (individual Trumpers on social media) have been pushing anti-democratic strategies and conspiracy theories since before Trump won the electoral college in 2016. Some propaganda outlets only became relevant during his time in office (Q Anon). These include Rudy Giuliani, who at the rally directly before the attack on the capitol said it was time for “trial by combat”. These can be considered assistant commanders of the insurrection. 

–  Co-conspirators: Individuals who became part of the executive branch during the Trump administration and were willing to actively game the functioning of the US government in an attempt to achieve a fascist dictatorship. Trump had been steadily replacing heads of important departments during his entire tenure for the specific purpose of facilitating a coup. Chad Wolf (head of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, Border Patrol, the Secret Service, and TSA; assigned in November of 2019) and Christopher Miller (head of the Pentagon; assigned in November of 2020) would be the most important two.

– Ground Troops: The small army of clowns numbered in the hundreds. Most of these were just garden variety Trump fanatics, but there were also Proud Boys, police, Oath Keepers, and Three-Percenters among them. Importantly, none of those organizations seem to have been organized at the insurrection in the sense of having any kind of plan or objective, and they were not effectively armed. Only the Proud Boys were present in significant numbers. These ground troops were never given a clear objective for the day by any of the people in leadership roles (above), were told nothing by the command hierarchy in advance of the day, and were only given vague instructions on the day.

The law enforcement actors included: 

– Capitol Police

– Capitol Police leadership (e.g., Steven Sund)

– Secret Service Agents

– National Guard troops

This moment had been building for 5 years; anyone who didn’t see it was willfully ignoring the evidence. For example, here’s an article that was published in Vox in March of 2016 explaining Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. Many Republican politicians fought against his election, but once he won, they were happy to kiss the ring. About a third of American adults embrace fascist ideals – usually calling themselves “patriots” – and those politicians were willing to go along with Trump’s agenda to try to satisfy those people and stay in office.

In fact, technically, this moment has been building since the big business response to FDR’s New Deal began in the 1930’s, and reflects a strong trend since then for the United States to ignore fascism (including white supremacy) and instead work every possible angle to destroy the good ideas of the left. Examples of that include the Red Scare, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the War on Drugs (designed specifically as a selective enforcement attack on leftists and the Black civil rights movement), and the international war against democracy manifested in coup after coup backed by the US government. You could even trace this back further to 8 years after the end of the Civil War when the US government decided to end the occupation of the south. Or you could trace it back to the day the first European boot landed in the Americas. Regardless of when you see the beginning of this trend happening, though, the upshot is that AMERICA CHOOSES FASCISM OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

This specific event itself was created on social media by various small-time propagandists.

At the event Trump, Giuliani and (I presume) others incited the crowd to attack Trump’s latest list of enemies (including the Vice President) with the bigger goal of stopping the electoral college vote count. Although this count is technically a “ritual” and not a necessary part of the election, the concern that politicos showed it revealed a more important truth: That the entire election procedure is meant to create legitimacy. This idea of an election being “valid” is socially constructed, and this ritual is part of that construction. If Trump could stop the performance, it would allow that fascist third of Americans to believe that the election was not valid. The election was valid, but the aspects of it that make it valid are not as salient or compelling to a normal human as this string of important people blessing the work of bean counters and robots.

In addition, Trump hoped that the riot would create terror among the trapped politicians — including Pence — and thus convince them to participate in the coup. He was actively contacting them during the attack asking if they were ready to cooperate yet. Had Congress decided to comply with his demands, Trump would have called off the attack.

In the background, Trump and his co-conspirators had arranged for help to be dramatically delayed once the siege began. I’ve mentioned before that force is the ultimate authority; in this case, Trump and his co-conspirators were not confident that the agents of violence that they command would comply with illegal orders to eliminate congress, or even a subset of congress. Therefore, they decided to simply not send help. More specifically, Christopher Miller (or people directly under him) delayed the deployment of National Guard troops (Sund says he requested the National Guard six times ahead of and during the attack on the Capitol, and each request was delayed or denied). They assumed that if they could wait 4 hours before sending help, the deed would be done.

In addition, the Capitol Police command hierarchy, which includes chief Steven Sund, the DC mayor, and the Sergeants-at-arms of the House and Senate, either purposely sabotaged the Capitol Police response on the day or were so comfortable with Trumpism that they simply didn’t imagine that there would be any issues. Today’s news indicates that they were more concerned about the “bad optics” of securing the building than the threat of an attack. The Capitol Police were warned by both the FBI and the NYPD (which has its own intelligence unit) about the potential for violence on that day making their failure all the more suspicious. (The police chief and both Sergeants-at-arms have resigned.)

The ground troops were completely incompetent. I don’t think that’s something that can even be debated. They had no idea what they were doing, and were completely ill-prepared. Trump said he didn’t like that they appeared to be “low-class”. If there was an organized element, it wasn’t what you’d call effective, either. We’ve seen an effective show of force many times by right wing militias – they didn’t show up; if they had, the story would have been dramatically different thanks to Trump’s executive branch basically leaving the door wide open for the attack.

It’s extremely important that some people did not show up:

– Antifa

– Black Lives Matter

– leftist community defense organizations

Had any elements of the left shown up that day, it would have provided for a plausible alternative narrative for the day and we would not be seeing the nearly universal condemnation of the insurrectionist mob today. In addition, the police would have been even more ineffective against the mob as it would have been overly focused on those leftist elements. Most concerning is the fact that this could have given Donald Trump an adequate excuse for declaring martial law, which is something his co-conspirators have been advising him to do for a very long time.

Today, Congress is threatening to finally do something about Donald Trump, but the level of agreement required to accomplish anything is still greater than what they can likely achieve.

Going forward, Trump and all of the villains that he chose to control executive departments are still in place. The propagandists that helped him create the alternate reality that Trump fanatics live in are still out there; thankfully, social media is starting to take deplatforming them seriously. Deplatforming fascists, which is today almost universally supported, was the sole purpose of antifa — will Americans now embrace antifa as the good guys? We don’t think that will ever happen.

Joe Biden has requested that Trump co-conspirators participate in making sure that the inauguration is secure against violence. At first blush, this seems stupid, but we already know that those agency heads are not confident that their troops would obey an unlawful order to attack Congress or the President Elect, and a further performance of incompetence would make it all too clear that they were willful participants in the insurrection. Therefore, I think we will see a peaceful inauguration with a huge police presence.

But that’s just DC.

Just like the January 6 riot was planned online, Trumpers are now planning a second insurrection event on January 17 – this time, the focus appears to be on state capitals. Here, the calculus for the left becomes more complicated, but, in my opinion, the result is the same whether you live in a red state or a blue one, or even a liberal-controlled city: Let the insurrectionists fight the police. No matter whether they decide to have a truly peaceful protest or engage in violent insurrection, the result is the same: We win if we don’t show up. This is definitely not always the case; the difference is that right now, law enforcement appears to finally be willing to fight them.

If you have specific individuals in your community that need to be protected from a fascist mob, encourage them to be in a safe location that entire weekend. That almost no politicians are on our side and it is a weekend should make this fairly easy.

While I don’t think we will see anything significant during the weekend of the 16th and 17th, the potential is there. Trump has already used Department of Homeland Security as a gestapo, and that could happen again. The Proud Boys — Trump’s brownshirts — are still out there and seem interested in participating that weekend. Three-percent militia and Oath Keepers could also decide to show up in an organized fashion.

I’m sure the liberal response to this will be, “They’re no match for the government,” but keep in mind that they have control of the executive branch, so the government might not show up to stop them or might even participate in the insurrection. Also, keep in mind that there are about 700,000 law enforcement officers in the US, and at least half of them are Trumpers. There are about 1.3 million troops in the US military — and they’re mostly occupying other countries. They are also majority Trumpers. If we make the false assumption that these troops would oppose an insurrection, there are still 100 million gun owners in the US (5 million of those are new in 2020); if even a third of them are fascist maniacs (which is a conservative estimate), you’re talking about over 30 million armed fascists against the roughly 2 million government troops, most of whom are not in the country. The widely-held belief that the US can use its weapons of mass destruction against a domestic insurrection is absurd — that strategy would kill far more civilians than insurrectionists. What you’d see instead would be state, local, and even the federal government trying to negotiate a peace with the fascists.

If the far right wants to have a protracted, horrific civil war, they’re in a good position to make that happen. What we have to hope is that they choose not to do that. It’s entirely up to them. It might seem self-destructive to you that they would choose a civil war, but you have to understand that their entire way of life — white supremacy, male supremacy, Christian supremacy — is being destroyed in a very real way and if they don’t make a stand now, they’ll be subjugated by capitalist elites in the same way that everyone else is. (They falsely call this subjugation “socialism” because they’ve been misinformed their whole lives.)

Regardless of what the far right decides to do before January 20, we are a very long way from resolving this. Given that fascism is a foundational element of US culture, the only thing that will permanently resolve the problem would be using any and all strategies to completely destroy fascism. We know this works, because the left has been dramatically hobbled by American society’s war against it. If we use our resources against fascism instead of the left, we can definitely beat fascism. (There was a candidate for President that promised to do exactly this — Democrats voted against him.)

If, in contrast, we choose to just look away yet again, fascism will be back, and it will be stronger and smarter next time. While the left has consistently and accurately pointed out fascism, conservatives deny it exists or pretend that the left are “the real fascists”. However, the most significant part of this erasure is from Democrats pretending that their politicians haven’t also been participating in fascism. Fascism denial by both Democrats and Republicans is motivated by misinformation about the left and “socialism” and the rot at the core of US culture that says that human beings are innately evil.

We all need to believe in democracy, and we need to believe that people can be good, and then we need to be willing to fight for good people and for democracy.

This is from April, but contains the same ideas that are very important to understanding the recent attack on the US capitol.

Legend has it that in 1517, Martin Luther nailed a document to the door of a church and began the Protestant Reformation. Before then, there was really only one church — the Roman Catholic Church. The most revolutionary concept in Martin Luther’s document was the idea that all people have a direct connection to God through prayer. By pointing out the irrelevancy of the Catholic hierarchy in terms of salvation, Luther democratized access to God. He was a Christian anarchist. Every church in the world that isn’t a Catholic church owes its existence to this man and this simple, yet revolutionary truth.

If I were to choose one important idea to nail to an important building today, it would be that cultural narcissism has poisoned the west, and that our only way forward is to face this ugliness in ourselves and in each other. Anything else will mean our destruction. I think the document that would best embody this idea is this article by Umair Haque.

2020 Revealed The Truth Of Our Societies — And It Was Ugly

Umair Haque, January 3, 2021

If the truth can set us free, this is the truth we need to examine.

If humanity wants to survive climate change, we have to find a way to create negative CO2 emissions — that is, emissions must not just go to zero, but we have to actually remove CO2 from the air. If we want to continue to have automobiles, those automobiles will somehow have to change to produce nearly zero carbon emissions. The situation reminds me of a bit by Louis CK; he’s trash, but the story in this routine is a golden example of what it’s like to coexist with narcissistic people:

There are ways that we can keep using automobiles — the problem is that they only meet 99% of America’s criteria.

Take, for example, the Aptera. It’s a car design from a US company, and they just started taking order reservations. You can order it with up to 1000 miles of range and it is so gosh darn efficient that if you get the $900 solar package, you might never need to even charge it (depending on where you live). That’s right — it literally gets more energy from the sun than most people will use driving it on a daily basis. And it isn’t even very expensive — for a cutting-edge car.

But wait. It looks like this:

I’m sure you have questions.

Does it only seat 2 people? Well, yes, most Americans rarely have more than 2 people in their automobile. Maybe some other car could take care of the rare occasion when you all need to go together.
What are the top speed and acceleration like? 100 MPH max speed, 0-60 in 3.5 seconds
Only 3 wheels? Yes, that was the efficient way to do it. It isn’t legally a car, just like a short barreled gun with a “pistol brace” isn’t legally a rifle. If you think of it as a loophole that gets you out of obeying the law, does that make it more sexy?
Does it have air conditioning? Yes
What if I need to bring along a pet elephant? Sorry, your pet elephant won’t fit, but your dog will fit in the back., as will your groceries.
Where do they hide the motor? The motors are in the wheels. They’re manufactured by a Slovenian company named Elaphe, who also makes the motors for Lordstown Motors.
It looks weird! Yes — yes it does.
It’s so weird!!! You already mentioned that.

In short, this car meets 99% of the criteria that Americans have for a car — and allows us to both keep having automobiles and not kill off humanity with climate change. But it sure isn’t our favorite way. Americans would rather kill the planet than drive a car that looks weird.

You might point to Tesla as a company that is making great strides in creating eco-friendly vehicles; however, Tesla’s cars are not efficient enough to reach zero post-manufacture emissions. They weigh too much, and are not aerodynamic enough (the Tesla model 3 has a drag coefficient of 0.23, vs. 0.13 for the Aptera). For the sake of aesthetics, no Tesla is available with any solar option at all. Although Tesla’s vehicles produce less CO2 per mile than the average gasoline automobile, they’re primarily just moving CO2 production from the tailpipe to the electric plant — very few Tesla owners can also afford enough solar power on their house to cover the entire power requirement of the car.

(Please remember that even if we all switched to vehicles that produce zero post-production CO2, the manufacturing process still produces CO2, and we still have to come up with a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at an enormous scale.)

In the final analysis, Tesla is a method for capitalism to create an empty display of eco-friendliness to appeal to the market and grow the economy. Much like plastic recycling, it’s a scam targeting your self-image and won’t have a significant effect on the environment. Just as gasoline-powered vehicles push the US to invade and control oil-producing nations, the battery-powered vehicle market has already contributed to the US attempt to overthrow the government of Bolivia.

(Some commentators are pretending that because Tesla didn’t order the coup, that there isn’t a relationship; the point was that the US would like to be able to control the lithium market, and they can do that by having a major producer as a puppet, even if that producer isn’t a major exporter to US manufacturers, specifically.)

The number one selling vehicle in the USA is a pickup truck. So is the second-best-selling vehicle. And the third. When I drive into work in the morning, I see those pickup trucks heading into town with one person in them each, and certainly no significant cargo. As is the case with other types of vehicles, they’re primarily being used as a commuter vehicle for one person. Typically, they’ve got 4 full doors and a stubby little bed that won’t carry most building materials. The primary purpose of the pickup truck has become to present the driver as strong and dominant. Many pickup owners don’t consider a pickup to be a “real pickup” unless it weighs over 4000 lbs — a Ranger or Canyon don’t count.

The size of American pickup trucks has increased dramatically over the years as car companies engage in a competition to make the truck that most satisfies the American truck buyer’s need to appear dominant. You can’t even buy a truly small pickup anymore. Because the primary purpose of the American pickup truck is to represent dominance, manufacturers have determined that it doesn’t make financial sense to build a pickup that is fuel efficient (an F-150 only gets about 20 MPG). Fuel efficiency is considered to be a sign of weakness. Instead, they’ve built things like the PowerBoost engine that uses an electric motor to increase acceleration and horsepower. It does use less gasoline, but the marketing materials don’t mention that.

Americans might be able to buy an electric pickup soon, but I’m confident the majority of pickups will still be belching out CO2 when our civilization collapses due to the effects of climate change. Just like the conservatives who have used their dying breath to continue to claim that COVID-19 isn’t real, America will die refusing to believe that climate change is a significant problem. Don’t forget: Automobiles have no future if we’re all dead.