By Alan MACLEOD

Amid tough talk from European and American leaders, a new MintPress study of our nation’s most influential media outlets reveals that it is the press that is driving the charge towards war with Russia over Ukraine. Ninety percent of recent opinion articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have taken a hawkish view on conflict, with anti-war voices few and far between. Opinion columns have overwhelmingly expressed support for sending U.S. weapons and troops to the region. Russia has universally been presented as the aggressor in this dispute, with media glossing over NATO’s role in amping tensions while barely mentioning the U.S. collaboration with Neo-Nazi elements within the Ukrainian ruling coalition.

Periodic hysteria

Western media and governments have expressed alarm over a suspected buildup of Russian military forces close to its over-1200-mile border with Ukraine. There are reportedly almost 100,000 troops in that vicinity, causing President Joe Biden to warn that this is “the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world in terms of war and peace since World War II.”

Yet this is far from the first media panic over a supposedly imminent Russian invasion. In fact, warning of a hot war in Europe is a near yearly occurrence at this point. In 2015, outlets such as Reuters and The New York Times claimed that Russia was massing troops and heavy firepower, including tanks, artillery and rocket launchers right on the border, while normally sleepy frontier towns were abuzz with activity.

In 2016 there was an even bigger meltdown, with media across the board predicting that war was around the corner. Indeed, The Guardian reported that Russia would soon have 330,000 soldiers on the border. Yet nothing came to pass and the story was quietly dropped.

With the next spring came renewed warnings of conflict. The Wall Street Journal claimed that “tens of thousands” of soldiers were being deployed to the border. The New York Times upped that figure to “as many as 100,000.” A few months later, U.S. News said that thousands of tanks were joining them.

In late 2018, The New York Times and other media outlets were again up in arms over a fresh Russian buildup, this time of 80,000 military units. And in the spring of last year, it was widely reported (for instance, by Reuters and The New York Times) that Russia had amassed armies totaling well over 100,000 units on Ukraine’s border, signaling that war was imminent.

Therefore, there are actually considerably fewer Russian units on Ukraine’s border than there were even 11 months ago, according to Western numbers. Furthermore, they are matched by a force of a quarter-million Ukrainian troops on the other side.

Thus, many readers will be forgiven for thinking it is Groundhog Day again. Yet there is something different about this time: coverage over the conflict has been enormous and has come to dominate the news cycle for weeks now, in a way it simply did not previously. The possibility of war has scared Americans and provoked calls for a far higher military budget and a redesign of American foreign policy to counter this supposed threat.

Russia, for its part, has repeatedly rejected all allegations that it plans to attack Ukraine, describing them as “fiction.” “Talks about the coming war are provocative by themselves. [The U.S.] seems to be calling for this, wanting and waiting for [war] to happen, as if you want to make your speculations come true,” said Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the Ukrainian government appears to agree, recognizing that any conflict would prove devastating to both the Russian and Ukrainian economies and that even the saber-rattling and prospect of such conflict is already having an impact on business and investment. “[W]e don’t see any grounds for statements about a full-scale offensive on our country,” said Oleksiy Danilov, the chief secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. In an interview with the BBC, Danilov also revealed his exasperation with the media for unreasonably ginning up fears and tensions.

Searching NYT, WSJ, and WaPo

To test Danilov’s claim that Western media have been among the loudest voices cheering for war, MintPress conducted a study of three of the most prominent and influential American outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Together, these three outlets often set the agenda for the rest of the media system, and could be said to be a reasonable representation of the corporate media spectrum as a whole. Using the search term “Ukraine” in the Factiva global news database, all opinion pieces on the conflict published in the previous three weeks (Jan. 7 – Jan. 28) were read and studied. This gave a sample of 91 articles in total; 15 in the Times, 49 in the Post and 27 in the Journal. For full information and coding, see the attached viewable spreadsheet.

Overall, the tone from the three newspapers studied was exceedingly hawkish, with around 90% of the columns expressing a “get tough” message. There was little to no variation among the outlets in their tone. “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin aims beyond Ukraine. Checking him right now is crucial,” ran the headline of former general Wesley Clark’s Washington Post article. Columnist Max Boot claimed that Putin “definitely wants to resurrect the Soviet empire.” Boot’s colleague at the Post, Henry Olsen, launched a bitter attack on Biden for not being hawkish enough, describing the president as a weakling who is unfit to lead. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal took the opportunity to denounce the American left for focusing on non-existent U.S. imperialism when it should be uniting with Washington to combat imperialism in the only places it exists any more: Russia and China. The little pushback to the incessant drum beats for war came from voices such as Peter Beinart in the Times, Katrina vanden Heuvel in the Post, or from more isolationist conservative voices. However, these were few and far between.

There was essentially complete unanimity in presenting Russia (and not NATO) as the aggressor, with 87 of the 91 articles presenting the issue as such (four articles did not identify any entity as the aggressor). There was overwhelming support for sending in both huge quantities of what the Biden administration has termed “lethal aid” (i.e., weapons), and also deploying American troops in the region – a move that would rapidly escalate the threat of terminal nuclear war. As Bret Stephens wrote in the Times:

The best short-term response to Putin’s threats is the one the Biden administration is at last beginning to consider: The permanent deployment, in large numbers, of U.S. forces to frontline NATO states, from Estonia to Romania. Arms shipments to Kyiv, which so far are being measured in pounds, not tons, need to become a full-scale airlift.

The Post went much further, however, with one column demanding that the U.S. send around 85,000 soldiers to the region immediately, a figure that it said must be matched by other NATO members as well.

However, the Journal went furthest of all, calling for the U.S. to be turned into a global military state in order to fight two world wars at once. With more than a hint of delight, columnist Walter Russell Mead claimed:

Military budgets will have to grow as the U.S. increases its capacity against both Russia and China. The fantasies of withdrawing from some regions to focus on others will have to be set aside; Europe, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America all require more American and allied focus and attention, even as we continue to gear up in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. will have to spend less time inspecting the moral shortcomings of potential allies and more time thinking about how it can deepen its relationships with them.

A sitting US Senator said on live tv today that use of first strikes nukes wasn’t off the table and I’m not sure why more people aren’t freaking out about that

— Jason Call for Congress (@CallForCongress) January 25, 2022

A long history and a broken promise

Biden shakes hands with Ukrainian fascist leader, Oleh Yaroslavovych Tyahnybok, in Kiev, Ukraine, April 22, 2014. Anastasia Sirotkina | Reuters

Context, it is said, is everything. The U.S. government’s view of the situation is that Russia is a perennially destabilizing influence. Putin, who has previously stated that Ukraine is “not a country,” has funded separatist groups in the Donbass region, illegally annexed Crimea, and bombards Ukraine with propaganda on a daily basis. From a war in Georgia to sending troops into Kazakhstan to quell a recent uprising, Russia is fighting a rearguard action to prevent the spread of democracy. It has also taken a confrontational stance to the U.S., hacking the 2016 and 2020 elections to help its preferred candidate.

However, many Russians would dispute these claims and begin the story in the ninth century with the Kievan Rus Federation, a nation whose capital was Kiev and from where the word “Russia” comes from. Fast forward a thousand years, and the broken promises made by the U.S. government to the U.S.S.R. also figure prominently. The first Bush administration, as well as the governments of West Germany and Great Britain, all assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would never expand “one inch” to the east of Germany. This, of course, proved a promise made to be broken, and the anti-Russian military alliance has advanced across Eastern Europe, now including three former Soviet Republics that border Russia.

The U.S. has been extremely active in Ukraine’s domestic affairs, as Russian-American journalist Yasha Levine has highlighted, forcing the government to hike gas prices and raise taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. It has also bankrolled NGOs and local media outlets and threatened to jail Ukrainian oligarchs if further American demands were not met.

Washington’s role in the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution, however, is the clearest example of American interference. Trying to play the two blocs off against each other, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych negotiated with both the European Union and with Russia on trade deals at the same time. In the end, he chose the superior Russian offer. Instead of accepting defeat, however, the West immediately began organizing a coup, funding and supporting street protests across the country. Senior U.S. officials like Senator John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland flew to Ukraine to lead the demonstrations, the latter even famously handing out cookies to protestors in Independence Square in Kiev. Yanukovych was eventually overthrown in February 2014.

That the Maidan affair was organized, at least in part, by the U.S. is not in doubt. Indeed, leaked audio of Nuland talking with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt showed that Washington effectively hand-picked Ukraine’s next government. “I don’t think Klitch should go into the government. I don’t think it is necessary. I don’t think it is a good idea,” Nuland can be heard saying, referring to the boxer-turned-politician Vitali Klitschko. “I think Yats [Arseniy Yatsenyuk] is the guy who has got the economic experience, the governing experience,” she continued. The two also discussed plans for implementing the new administration. Sure enough, less than one month after the audio leaked, Yatsenyuk became the next prime minister.

Victoria Nuland, center, watches cadets of the Ukrainian police academy receiving training from American policemen in Kiev, Ukraine, May 16, 2015. Sergei Chuzavkov | AP

Since 2014, the Ukrainian government has pursued a campaign of privatization, as well as entering into deals with the E.U. that Yanukovych previously rejected. It has also aggressively purged the Russian language from schools and media, jailed opposition politicians, and shut down media outlets opposing it. Around one-third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language.

This context was barely referenced in the three newspapers; but, when it was, it was usually described in glowing terms. The Washington Post claimed that the Ukraine-Russia trade deal amounted to a Russian “invasion of Ukraine” and was simply Putin’s effort to “bribe Ukraine with an offer of $15 billion in loans and lower prices for gas.” The Wall Street Journal defamed Yanukovych as merely “Mr. Putin’s puppet.” Meanwhile, The New York Times cheered on what it approvingly called “the process of Ukrainization” as “the Russian language is being pushed out of schools and Russian television out of the media space.” The Times currently accuses China of doing something very similar in its western province of Xinjiang, denouncing the process as a “genocide.”

Not seeing fascism where it is – and seeing it where it’s not

Volunteers of the ultra far-right Azov Battalion at a rally marking Fatherland Defender Day in Kiev, Ukraine, Oct. 14, 2016. Efrem Lukatsky | AP

The Maidan Revolution’s muscle was provided by far-right paramilitaries like the infamous Azov Battalion, a Neo-Nazi militia that has now been incorporated into the Ukrainian military. The U.S. government channeled huge amounts of money and resources to these groups, with fascist leaders like Oleh Tyahnybok sharing a stage with McCain and Nuland. Nuland’s leaked audio makes clear that she held some influence over Tyahnybok and his forces. Since at least 2015, the CIA has been directly training fascist militias inside the country.

Today, Ukraine has openly Nazi elements within its government, which has passed laws designating World War II-era fascist Ukrainian death squads that perpetrated the Holocaust as heroes and freedom fighters. Every January 1 in Kiev there is a large torchlight march to honor the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, with chants of “Jews out” being very common. There are now hundreds of monuments to fascist collaborators all over the country.

For two years in a row now, Ukraine and the United States have been the only countries to vote against resolutions “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism.” The U.S. government calls the resolutions “Russian disinformation.”

The three newspapers studied solved the problem of Ukraine’s troubling fascist links by simply not mentioning them – even in articles where reporters appeared to be embedded with the Ukrainian military, a hotbed of far-right organizing. Only in one article in the sample of 91 – a calm and thoughtful Washington Post op-ed by alternative-media journalist Branko Marcetic – was it mentioned at all. And judging by the comments section underneath it, his thoughts were received with little short of rage from the Post’s readership.

Boot, an infamously hawkish columnist, might have obliquely referenced these bothersome facts when he wrote that “In [Putin’s] telling, nefarious foreign powers, ‘radicals’ and ‘neo-Nazis’ pursuing an ‘anti-Russia project’ have sought to lure Ukrainians from their rightful place under Moscow’s wing,” but immediately brushed this off as “incessant regime propaganda.” Apart from that, there was no mention of the far-right. On the contrary, the Ukrainian government was largely portrayed as a laudable, fledgling democracy fighting for survival.

This is not to say that there were no mentions of Nazis. In fact, the press is full of them. Over 10% of the articles studied directly or indirectly compared Vladimir Putin to Hitler. For example, The Washington Post’s editorial board began their January 8 editorial on Ukraine thus:

A brutal dictator, having staked a claim to power based on conspiracy theories and promises of imperial restoration, rebuilds his military. He begins threatening to seize his neighbors’ territory, blames democracies for the crisis and demands that, to solve it, they must rewrite the rules of international politics — and redraw the map — to suit him. The democracies agree to peace talks, hoping, as they must, to avoid war without unduly rewarding aggression.

What happened next at Munich in 1938 is a matter of history: Britain and France traded a piece of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler’s Germany in return for his false pledge not to make war.

It continued throughout to hammer home the idea that Putin = Hitler. Editorials are supposed to represent the collective wisdom of the senior staff, and set the tone for the rest of the reporting team and across the wider media landscape. Thus, the editorial board were making their feelings about what sort of coverage was required very clear.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both regularly warned against the “appeasement” of Putin – a term usually reserved for the period of Western soft collaboration with Hitler’s regime before they changed track and opposed it. Earlier this week, the Times claimed that the world was “holding its breath waiting for Vladimir Putin to bite off a slice of Ukraine the way another revanchist European dictator once took a slice of Czechoslovakia” – another reference to Hitler. The message conveyed was simple: this is a repeat of World War II.

While Vladimir Putin could reasonably be called many things, Hitler-incarnate is stretching credulity. Unable to introduce relevant context that would deviate from this line, however, the armchair generals demanding war took to psychoanalyzing the Russian leader, as well as throwing all manner of insults his way. In just this three-week sample, Putin was declared an “evil dictator,” a “thug,” a “KGB sociopath,” and a “pathetic throwback.” Longtime Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in his unique style, described him as “America’s ex-boyfriend-from-hell,” continuing:

Putin is a one-man psychodrama, with a giant inferiority complex toward America that leaves him always stalking the world with a chip on his shoulder so big it’s amazing he can fit through any door.

Yet for all the psychoanalysis, it was Western pundits who appeared to be in their own heads, and were obsessed with the supposed need to look tough in front of Putin. Citing South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC), the Post declared that “weakness is provocative.” “Vladimir Putin does not think like we do,” warned hawkish former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, going on to assert that Putin saw destroying America and the global order as his “sacred destiny.”

Putin’s allegation that Ukraine was being groomed to join a hostile military alliance was met with contempt and derision in Western media. “None of the fears the Kremlin’s propaganda play (sic) on have any foundation in reality… No one was seriously contemplating NATO membership for Ukraine or Georgia. Plans for U.S. missiles in eastern Ukraine targeting Russia are pure fantasy,” a Post opinion piece informed its readers last week, its editorial board then adding:

This entire crisis has been manufactured by Mr. Putin as part of his long-range effort to thwart the democratic development and growing Western orientation of Ukraine and restore Russian hegemony over the former Soviet empire. It has nothing to do with expansion by NATO, whose founding treaty authorizes only defensive military action.

Readers in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Somalia or Libya might have differing ideas about whether NATO has been used purely defensively.

Yet, at the same time as categorically denying Ukraine would join NATO, the articles studied dismissed Putin’s core request that the alliance simply put that in writing as “silly” “extravagant” “unrealistic” and a “nonstater”  – something that is hard to understand if this was all that was needed to avert World War III. In reality, NATO is indeed looking to admit both Ukraine and Georgia, having promised to both countries that they would do so as far back as 2008.

Pipeline politics and cracks in the NATO alliance

NATO’s Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg, center, makes opening remarks at the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Foreign Ministers’ Session 1 at the U.S. State Department in Washington, Thursday, April 4, 2019. Pablo Martinez Monsivais | AP

Last week, Washington Post columnist Daniel Drezner proclaimed that “Putin has succeeded in creating his worst strategic outcome: unifying NATO.” Yet this seems wishful thinking. Germany and France, the most powerful nations in Western Europe, have both openly expressed reluctance to escalate the situation. The German government did not allow British warplanes carrying weapons to Ukraine to pass over its airspace, and it blocked shipments of German-made arms from the Baltic States to Ukraine. Even more significantly, Kay-Achim Schönbach, vice-admiral of the German Navy, publicly condemned what he saw as a reckless buildup of tensions. Schönbach stated that the West was refusing to give Putin even a modicum of respect and that we should accept the Crimea annexation as a fait accompli. For this outburst, he was forced to resign.

Across the border in France, President Emmanuel Macron is so alarmed by the U.S./U.K. push to escalate tensions that he has called on the EU to start its own negotiations with Russia – negotiations that exclude the U.S. and U.K. Germany and France were written off as “appeasers” of a dictator by The Washington Post, and as puppets of Putin and of Chinese premier Xi Jinping by The Wall Street Journal.

Much of the EU’s reluctance to get behind an American-led war on Russia is attributable to their energy dependence on Moscow. Currently, Russia supplies nearly half of the EU’s gas and around one-quarter of its oil. This is likely only to increase with the imminent completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which runs undersea from Russia’s Baltic coast directly to northern Germany. The United States has repeatedly demanded Europe cancel this project, insisting that Europe service its energy needs from Middle Eastern dictatorships under U.S. control or directly from the U.S., at around four times the price of Russian gas. The U.S. is currently considering placing sanctions on German companies involved in Nord Stream 2.

“If Biden can’t stand up to Germany, how can he stand up to Putin?,” asked one Washington Post columnist last week, the same article demanding that Germany be “punished” with the removal of U.S. troops from its territories. “Why should Germany…continue to be rewarded with the economic benefit of U.S. bases?” the writer asked, framing the American occupation in a light that some readers might not share.

Meanwhile, the climate change skeptic board of The Wall Street Journal took the opportunity to assert that Russia had infiltrated the European environmental movement, convicing the movement to take up stupid positions like being against fracking or coal plants. This was, they claimed, all part of a successful effort to keep Europe dependent on Russian gas.

The war machine’s checklist

If Russian troop movements are mostly ordinary and not dissimilar to those that have happened almost every year since 2014, what explains the media circus?

To answer this question, we must examine a policy report prepared for Biden in March by NATO think tank The Atlantic Council. Titled “Biden and Ukraine: A strategy for the new administration,” it lays out a set of goals for the new president to achieve; under its “key recommendations” headline, it outlines a number of actions the Biden government should take. Among them are included: “Work[ing] with Congress to increase military assistance to Ukraine to $500 million per year;” “Deepen Ukraine’s integration with NATO” by potentially “establishing a permanent U.S. military presence” in the country; and “launching a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) for Ukraine,” if Russia remains “intransigent.” “Stay the course on Nord Stream 2” and a “Strategic approach to sanctions” are also included on the list of key bullet points, as well as supporting a host of free-market privatization drives inside Ukraine.

Compiled by former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine, Poland and Russia, as well as the ex-deputy secretary general of NATO, the report’s recommendations serve almost as a checklist of everything the U.S. is currently trying to push through. Last week, Congress began rushing through an emergency $500 million weapons bill that would make Ukraine the world’s third highest recipient of U.S. arms, rivaled only by Egypt and Israel. The U.S. is sending thousands of troops to Eastern Europe; its Nord Stream 2 opposition remains as loud as ever; while the Ukrainian government under President Volodymyr Zelensky is indeed moving towards the sort of economic shock therapy the Atlantic Council wants to see. All this might lead a cynic to see the current crisis as little more than an excuse to force through long-held U.S. establishment goals.

“We don’t need this panic”

None of this helps ordinary people living in the country White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has termed “our Eastern flank.” Ukrainians are concerned with the dire economic situation, which has plunged over half the country into poverty – the highest rate anywhere in Europe. Inflation and the rising cost of heating and electricity are the highest concerns among citizens, according to a poll conducted by the U.S. government-sponsored International Republican Institute. The same poll found the country was split on where it wants to head politically, with 54% wishing to join NATO and 58% the European Union, but significant minorities preferring more integration with Russia. Ukrainians perceive both Russia (63% of the population) and the United States (51%) to be a threat, according to a recent report from a NATO-aligned think tank.

Meanwhile in the United States, despite the media saber-rattling, there is limited public appetite for any conflict with Russia. Last week, a Rasmussen poll found only 31% of Americans think U.S. troops should be sent to Ukraine, even if Russia launches an invasion. President Biden himself has even tried to pour cold water on the flames of war, claiming that the U.S. would not react to a “minor incursion” by Russia – a statement that outraged hawks in Washington.

War profiteers are clearly expecting increased orders. Last week, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes confidently said, “I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from [the Ukraine crisis].” Raytheon and Northrop Grumman stocks are currently approaching all-time highs. Weapons industry-funded media like Politico publish content wondering whether the U.S. should “rattle Putin’s cage,” and journalists at White House press conferences continue to goad the administration into more aggressive posturing.

President Zelensky himself has chastised Western press for their hyperbolic coverage of the situation. “The image that mass media creates is that we have troops on the roads, we have mobilization, people are leaving for places. That’s not the case. We don’t need this panic,” he said. Studying the opinion pages of America’s three most prestigious outlets suggests that Zelensky is right: nobody wants war, except for hawkish elements in the national security state and among the press that increasingly does its bidding.

mintpressnews.com

Over the past year, the massive upheaval in the United States from workers going on industrial strike and walking off jobs signifies an increasing awareness of class politics. In the following interview, Harriet Fraad says that American workers are overcoming decades of suppression from anti-communist propaganda as well as a betrayal by the two main political parties.

Workers are becoming aware of their rights and their conditions of exploitation under the corporate capitalist system. They are angry and restless for an alternative economic system. For the first time in a long time the words “capitalism” and “socialism” are now entering conscious public discussions. Workers, says Fraad, are well aware of their betrayal by the Democratic Party which has sold out their class cause for the benefit of the party’s leadership from corporate sponsorship.

More than ever, she contends, the working majority of the United States needs the representation and leadership of a new political party that galvanizes their needs and rights under a socialist program.

Historically, Fraad points out, the United States always had a strong movement of working-class politics and socialist parties, for example at the end of the 19th century and during the early 20th century. Unfortunately, much of that tradition was destroyed by the pro-capitalist establishment using Red Scare tactics during the Cold War, including the Democratic Party, the corporate media and official trade union bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, the recent acute exploitation of workers during the pandemic period and the grotesque growth in wealth inequality are forcing American workers to question the entire system and to realize their collective political power as a working-class constituency that comprises the vast majority of the 330 million U.S. population.

However, as Harriet Fraad warns, the potential for progressive change in the United States could still be hijacked and destroyed by the rise of right-wing populism under demagogues like Donald Trump. The Republican rightwing and the ineffectual Democratic Party under President Joe Biden are creating the base for fascism which may vanquish the potential for progressive socialism. Thus, America is coming to face an ominous crossroads, in her view, which boils down to this: will the United States embrace socialism or will it descend into fascism?

Dr Harriet Fraad lives in New York City. She has been a practicing psychotherapist and hypnotherapist for nearly four decades. She is also a political activist, a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in the United States during the late 1960s and co-founder of the journal Rethinking Marxism. Fraad is co-author of several books, including Class Struggle on the Home Front and Imagine Living in a Socialist USA. She broadcasts a weekly commentary Capitalism Hits Home covering current labor and economic issues as part of the Democracy at Work channel. Fraad is particularly critical of how the Democratic Party in the United States has elevated so-called “identity politics” over the more central issue of class politics, the fight for workers’ rights and the advancement of socialism. That subject of how the CIA and the Democratic Party played the U.S. population into the trivial pursuit of identity politics will be returned to in a future interview for Strategic Culture Foundation.

Interview

Question: Despite a lack of mainstream media coverage, nevertheless there is an unmistakable impression that the United States is undergoing widespread labor strikes and resignations over the past year. Can you give us some figures on this development in worker protests? How significant are these demonstrations in the historical perspective of the American economy, industrial relations and society?

Harriet Fraad: There are over 100,000 people currently on strike in the U.S. At least four million have dropped out of the labor force. There have been over 1,000 separate industrial actions during the past year. These are low estimates. With the exception of Mike Elk’s Payday Report, strikes and labor actions are routinely under-reported by our corporate media. As reported elsewhere, billions of dollars in profits were made by U.S. corporations during the pandemic and the recession that accompanied it. Billionaire wealth surged by 70 percent, or $2.1 trillion, during the same period that saw massive impoverishment of workers and their families; U.S. billionaires are now worth a combined $5 trillion. Meanwhile, wages were not raised.

Question: Do the mass labor strikes across the United States signal an increase in workers becoming more aware of issues of class politics and an increase in militancy to demand their rights as workers?

Harriet Fraad: The class awareness of U.S. workers is, at least up to now, not a conscious class awareness. It is not informed by a socialist media presence, any socialist daily newspapers, television stations, or socialist internet. Historically, class awareness was effectively crushed by a national anti-communist crusade with the public trials of hundreds of people suspected of belonging to the Communist Party or what they considered its fellow travelers in the Socialist Party and the left. The confederation of trade unions, the AFL-CIO, expelled the activist left and its communist and socialist organizers. They were the militants that kept the unions vital. Without them, the union movement lost its wider purpose of worker power. In the 1950s, 35 percent of U.S. workers were organized in unions. Now there is barely 10 percent in unions.

However, class consciousness was re-introduced with the Occupy Movement of 2011. There, the idea of the 1 percent super-wealthy and the 99 percent of the rest of society took root in popular perception. It is significant that former President Barack Obama, a supposed “progressive” Democrat, crushed Occupy sites across the nation in 2012. Having said that, class consciousness across the U.S. is just beginning to be revived.

Question: Can it be discerned that America’s workers and their families – who represent a majority of the 330 million population – are becoming: a) more critical of capitalism as an economic system; and b) more receptive to and supportive of an alternative socialist politics?

Harriet Fraad: For the first time since the 1950s, capitalism can be named as a system rather than the implicitly assumed only system for organizing an economy. U.S. grotesque inequality is exposed and becoming increasingly conscious among workers, especially for the young whose future is dire. Young Americans are mired in student debt, deprived of jobs with a future, and may even lose their planet due to capitalism.

Question: Traditionally, in the two-party U.S. political system the Democrats are viewed as being pro-labor and pro-union, but it seems that over recent decades the Democrats have become indistinguishable from the Republican Party as being loyal and pliable servants of Big Business. Can you explain this trend with historical reference?

Harriet Fraad: The big sell-out of the Democratic Party to corporate interests was launched by Bill Clinton in 1993. He had been elected with union energy and union financial support. Yet, he was most instrumental in making the Democratic Party a party serving corporate capitalist interests and taking corporate money.

When Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he allowed jobs in the United States to be outsourced to Mexico and he gave his blessing to the exodus of millions of U.S. jobs to nations with low wages, terrible working conditions and weak or no ecological protections.

Clinton initiated the Democratic Party’s new corporate strategy of verbally celebrating racial, gender and sexual equality and justice while advancing corporate interests and abandoning the poor and the white working-class. In just one instance, he killed cash assistance for needy families and ripped a huge hole in the American social welfare safety net. He threw millions of poor black and white women and children into bad jobs and terrible poverty while claiming “progressive” treatment for all.

Question: Does this historical background partly explain the phenomenal rise of Donald Trump as a “populist hero”?

Harriet Fraad: Yes. The neglected white working-class gave up on the Democrats that sold them out and they were ripe for Trump’s empty promise to “Make America Great Again”. They were outraged by their perception that the gains made by people of color and women were what took their jobs away. That was a misperception distorted and presented to them by Trump. People of color and women still earn less than white men. It was not people of color and women but rather corporate profiteering that took their better-paid manufacturing jobs to nations like Mexico, China and India with terrible job conditions. It was corporate capitalists like Trump and their servants like Clinton who took their jobs. Trump exploits white working-class rage. In the absence of a powerful present socialist analysis, Trump alone speaks to their outrage. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, had a chance to win as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. Sanders was defeated. He was outvoted by traditional African-Americans who chose Hilary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s defeat was aided and abetted by the Democratic Party leadership.

Question: If the modern Democratic Party is a hindrance to the cause of workers, shouldn’t workers then seek to establish a new third party that actually fights for their class interests?

U.S. workers are now beginning to reclaim class consciousness.

America direly needs a unified socialist voice that connects the various movements like Black Lives Matter, Climate Extinction, the Feminist Movement, MeToo# and Timesup#, Labor rights, transsexual rights, socialist and communist parties and the movement to transform capitalist business and all other forms of organizations into cooperatives. They need a movement and a party that is against all arbitrary divisions between people. The movement and party should be an umbrella organization. The handle and stem represent class justice. The spokes and their multicolored fabric are all of the movements that are needed to create class, race, gender, and sexual justice for all.

Question: The corporate news media and academia suggest that somehow socialism is antithetical to ordinary Americans. Is a mass movement for socialism possible in the United States? What would that take for it to mobilize and achieve governance?

Harriet Fraad: A mass socialist movement is certainly possible in the United States. In fact, there has been a long history of socialism in America from cooperative communal movements to official socialist and communist parties.

The Socialist Party was a powerful force in the U.S. from the turn of the century until the First World War. Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate won a million votes even though he ran from prison in 1920. Socialism and communism are not antithetical to Americans. However, when they actually threatened capitalism as mass movements they were severely repressed by the federal government in the service of corporate capitalism.

Question: The social discontent and political disorientation in the United States seems to have reached unstable levels. If a viable democratic socialist direction is not harnessed by the people, do you fear that a reactionary alternative is a real danger? That is, for fascist politics to fully emerge from the incipient forms we see already in an increasingly rightwing Republican Party?

Harriet Fraad: The U.S. empire, like the USSR, is imploding out of its own corruption. America is polarized. There is far greater acceptance of a socialist alternative to capitalism as well as the danger of a well-financed turn towards fascism. On the socialist side, labor, a mass base, is awakening to the outrage of super-exploitation by the 1 percent. People are politically active on the left as they have not been since the 1960 and 1970s. A majority of young people prefer socialism to capitalism. However, the U.S. left does not have a centrally organized national organization around which to unite. If it did, it could mobilize the majority of Americans.

The Trumpian right in the Republican Party has no positive program except for gun rights and police and military support. Instead, they rage at Democrats, progressives, people of color, immigrants and abortion rights. They have a strong presence in our capitalist media. They are well-funded and have a populist and visible leader.

Germany became fascist because when its capitalism failed and wild inflation wiped out the livelihoods of the mass of workers, although Germany had a powerful Communist Party at the time, the German corporate wealth supported fascism as an alternative to socialism.

The spontaneous labor uprisings in the U.S. are promising. But we do not know how it will turn out in the United States.

The embrace of political extremism by the Republican Party in the United States has Constitutional historians worried about the drift towards fascism. If that’s the case then the hapless Biden administration may go down in history as the imitation of the Weimar Republic before the rise of American fascism.

This week saw two examples of how the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln has descended into something of an extremist cult.

A Republican congressman, Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), was formally sanctioned for posting an edited cartoon video depicting him murdering another lawmaker, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York City). The video also showed Gosar wielding swords in a bloody attack on President Joe Biden.

The Republican politician remained unapologetic about the incitement of violence. Most of his congressional party members refused to vote for the censure.

This is not simply about a silly video that can be easily dismissed as a poor-taste joke.

There is an increasing endorsement of violence by Republican members towards political opponents. That is in line with GOP lawmakers openly taking public positions in support of extreme far-right militia groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Such groups are best described as fascist, promoting white supremacist ideology.

The other development this week was the formal indictment of Steve Bannon in connection to his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC. Bannon is believed to have coordinated with then-President Donald Trump in a bid to overthrow the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election as the new president. On that eventful day, Trump and his acolytes incited thousands of supporters to violently assault the Congress building. It was a coup attempt carried out by far-right extremists fired up by spurious claims of election fraud.

Trump is still lurking in the shadows of the U.S. political process. Despite an impeachment over the January 6 debacle, he has never been held to account for what was an audacious fascist attack on the democratic institutions. Trump continues to spout the Big Lie about election fraud and being cheated out of the White House. He rails against how Biden is destroying America, accusing Biden with baseless slogans of “radical socialism” and “cultural Marxism”. Such labels are politically illiterate in the narrow spectrum of America’s two-party system. But they are handy for distracting voters from the real class war that is being waged ruthlessly against the majority of working Americans by the oligarchic system, a system in which both parties are loyal servants.

From the defiant, truculent demeanor of the Republicans dismissing charges of political violence, it is plausible to view the party as gravitating towards fascism. Combined with that drift is the espousal of racist enmity towards ethnic minorities and immigrants who are denigrated as “illegal aliens”. Republicans promote divisive conspiracy theories such as “white replacement” which claims that white Americans are deliberately being marginalized by people of color.

The political language is becoming ever more dogmatic and hateful whereby anyone not in agreement with the Trump-dominated Republican Party is liable to be vilified as a traitor and enemy. Among 13 GOP lawmakers who voted for passing Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, most of them were harassed by party supporters whipped up by extremists like Representative Majorie Taylor Greene. Some were even sent death threats.

Here’s the rub: the crisis in American society stems from capitalism and its oligarchy. Vast inequality, poverty, unemployment, crumby social welfare and healthcare, housing and education, and so on, are all rooted in the historic failure of U.S. capitalism. People like Trump and other GOP grandees, as well as Democrats, are the beneficiaries of the capitalist racket. Yet Trump and his ilk, as well as clueless media pundits, grossly mislead the public by telling them that their problems all stem from the “radical socialism” and “cultural Marxism” pushed by the Biden administration.

Trump and the Republican Party are pushing fascist politics as a panacea under the guise of “Saving America”.

Biden and his effete Democrat administration are aiding and abetting the rise of fascism in the U.S. because they are too timid in challenging the capitalist system and the entrenched oligarchy. The Democrat Party is too busy pursuing superficial “identify politics” rather than taking on the class politics that really impact most Americans.

Biden and Democrats are merely tinkering with the system in a vain attempt to make it softer. As the old quip goes: what’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats? The Dems use lube when they are screwing you.

By this stage, however, the entire rapacious system is destroying the fabric of U.S. society and impoverishing tens of millions of Americans. What is needed is a formidable, full-on socialist program that transforms the system of private profit and wealth for a tiny minority. The irony is that most Americans, including ordinary Republicans and Democrat voters, would probably support such a radical policy.

But radical policy is not going to happen under the Democrats. They will only prolong the system that is crushing society under a false veneer of “progressive reform”. In such futile circumstances, the Trump fascists can prey on vulnerable people looking for seeming quick fixes.

Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933) tinkered with capitalist failure and in so doing thereby created chaos and fomented extremism and fascism which culminated in the Nazi Third Reich. The soaring economic inflation and social woes under the Biden administration, as well as increasing disillusionment alongside the burgeoning of extremist politics, point to a similarly disastrous outcome awaiting the United States.

From 1920 to 1945, the formal name of the German Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, abbreviated NSDAP in German. Despite its name, there was nothing even remotely “socialist” or “workers” related about the Nazi Party. Its very foundation was t o combat the influence of labor unions, particularly those closely-linked to the Socialists or Communists. Socialist ideology, whether it was of the social democratic or Marxist -Leninist version, was anathema to Nazi policy. Therefore, it was the height of hypocrisy that the Nazis, with their financial backing from Germany’s leading industrialists – Krupp, Thyssen, and Opel, to name a few – would appropriate the terms socialist and workers for their own designs. When “socialist” was added to the “National German Workers’ Party” in 1920, in a jaded attempt to appeal to lower middle class left-wing laborers, Adolf Hitler vehemently objected. The term “socialist” within the official name of the Nazi Party was more of a mockery of socialism than anything else.

Today, there are elements within the Donald Trump wing of the Republican Party desiring to rebrand the party as a “Republican Workers’ Party.” There are indications that Trump supports these efforts. Trump, who eschews books or any other reading material for that matter, is known to have once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside. Trump is, therefore, keenly aware of the success the Nazis in Germany had in appealing to labor ranks to support its cause. However, just as the Nazis had no commitment to labor, the Republican Party has never supported the workers. It is and always has been a party representing the moneyed classes. Republicans serve the interests of Wall Street, not Main Street. Trump, more than anyone, knows this. In his four years as president, not one of Trump’s policies helped the workers of America, particularly those represented by organized labor.

Just as with the Nazis between the two World Wars, there is a coordinated global effort to re-brand far-right political parties as being friendly to and supportive of the working class. However, the financing for such re-branding emanates largely from billionaires, who have no interest in the working class. This is merely an effort to expand political power through running division and deception operations in electoral campaigns around the world. Those financing this disinformation program include the hedge fund father-daughter team of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, and billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. Former and, reportedly, current Trump strategist Steve Bannon has received funding from the Mercers and Guo to organize an international fascist movement of political parties, many with deceptive names.

Bannon’s fascist international, which is based in Brussels and called “The Movement,” has, in addition to the Republican Party in the United States, targeted parties in Brazil, where Bannon is close to far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his politician sons. In 2018, Bolsonaro, who has praised Hitler and Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, ran on the presidential ticket of the Social Liberal Party (PSL). One might believe that such a party would be socially liberal. They would be dead wrong. The PSL is as far-right as Bolsonaro and opposes equal rights for women and supports Brazil’s past military dictatorship. One faction wants to restore Brazil’s emperor and become a monarchy. Likewise, there is nothing “progressive” about the Brazilian Progressive Party – the Progressistas. The party is right wing and embraces Brazilian nationalism, which are Hardly progressive virtues.

The false branding of Brazilian political parties is made to order for fascists like Bannon, his financial benefactors, and the Bolsonaro family. Another example of false political advertising is the Brazilian Labor Party, which, far from embracing labor or workers’ rights, believes in fiscal conservatism, laissez-faire business policies, and social conservatism. Likewise, the Brazilian Labor Renewal Party is about as far from supporting labor as possible. It is pro-Bolsonaro and prone to advancing conspiracies that are also promoted by neo-Nazis. The Party of the Brazilian Women might be confused as a women’s rights party. They are not. They are anti-feminist and believe in paternalistic oligarchy and social conservatism.

A similar confusing situation exists in Colombia. The ruling Democratic Center party is neither democratic nor centrist. It is the party of current far-right President Ivan Duque and his mentor, former President Alvaro Uribe. The Democratic Center represents Colombia’s oligarchs and the interests of the Medellin drug cartel. Likewise, there is nothing “radical,” in the standard political definition, about the Radical Change Party. It is right-wing and supports both Duque and Uribe.

Around the world, the placement of the word “Christian” in a party’s title does not mean that it is committed to Christian teachings of tolerance and equality. Aside from Christian Democratic parties, far-right parties use “Christian” to entrap the politically gullible. Alliance C-Christians for Germany (Bündnis C) unconditionally supports Israel while it debases the United Nations, public education, and abortions. Similarly, political Islamic parties use the word “democratic” in their titles even though their 13^th century platforms, inclusive of arcane sharia law, are far from democratic.

Deceptive political party names and the confusion they cause are not limited to Latin America. Voters in California have erroneously registered to vote as “Independents” by mistakenly registering under the “American Independent Party,” which has appeared on California ballots since 1968 when Alabama Governor George Wallace ran on the party’s ticket as a third-party presidential candidate. Wallace subsequently abandoned the upstart party and returned to the Democratic Party fold four years later. However, the American Independent Party lived on in California, where it served as a political umbrella for several far-right candidates, some tied to neo-Nazis. During the 2016 presidential race, after an upsurge in party registrations by voters who believed they were registering as generic independents, the American Independent Party falsely claimed that it was the “Fastest Growing Political Party in California.”

Bannon’s “Movement” in Brussels is headquartered at the same address used by Mischaël Modrikamen, the leader of a defunct far-right political party that was mis-named the “Popular Party.” In Ukraine, “People’s Front” is used by a decidedly right-wing party that has menacingly organized a military branch. The words “popular” or “people’s” have traditionally been associated with left-wing and progressive broad fronts going back to the Popular Front of President Salvador Allende of Chile and, before that, of Socialist-Communist Popular Front coalition governments of the Spanish Second Republic of 1936 and pre-World War II France. The pre-war Popular Fronts in Spain and France, as well as those in other countries, including Germany and Great Britain, failed because of the perfidious attitude of Trotskyists, who were more than willing to disrupt anti-fascist Popular Fronts, even if they gave way to fascist victories. Today, there are ample examples of Trotskyists cooperating with neo-fascists against established parties of the left. That is why Bannon has, on occasion, expressed his admiration for “Marxist-Leninists.” It is nothing more than a power play to entice confused “populists” of the left, particularly the “Bernie or Bust” supporters of Vermont Independent Socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who has never been a member of the Democratic Party, although he caucuses with them in the Senate.

As Trump, Bannon, and others seek to re-brand the Republican Party, they will not only be reaching out to die-hard Sanders supporters, who falsely contend that the Democratic Party twice cheated their candidate from the presidential nomination, but also to blue collar workers in the rust belt who have been taken in by Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric on international trade and U.S. industrial decline.

Around the world, political parties and movements, as well as the media, should remain vigilant against the far-right, which continues to misappropriate the historical and traditional names of the parties of labor, the popular masses, equality, and progressivism.

The Republican Party of the United States has reconstructed itself as the party of Donald Trump and, as such, has become no different than the minority rule political parties of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.

By seizing de facto control of the Republican Party, once a center-right party, and moving it to the conspiratorial far-right fringe of the political spectrum, Trump and his supporters have established themselves and their revisionist party as representing a minority of Americans. Because the U.S. Senate constitutionally allots seats to thinly-populated states like Wyoming, North Dakota, and Idaho – giving them the same voting strength as California and New York – and House of Representatives districts being ridiculously gerrymandered to favor Republicans, the far-right Trump Republicans currently exercise far more political power than their actual voting strength warrants.

The dismal historical record of minoritarianism should not inspire those who now lead the Trump Republican Party and its various neologisms, including the “Patriot Party” and the “MAGA Party.” Trump Republicans, representing no more than about 30 percent of the voting public, are facing the same disaster as faced by the 22 percent of white South Africans who once ruled over the rest of South Africa’s black African, mixed race, and Asian population. In addition to apartheid South Africa and white minority-ruled Rhodesia, other nations that have experienced minority rule include Liberia, where descendants of Liberian-American slaves held minority political sway for decades over the majority exclusively African population, and minority Tutsi-ruled Rwanda, which continues to dominate politic power to the detriment of the nation’s majority Hutu population.

The Republican-fascist-Trumpist political movement is displaying all of the authoritarian techniques used by the South Africans, Rhodesians, and other minority governments to retain political power. These include the use of vigilante militias and sympathizers embedded in the law enforcement and state security forces. This dynamic was on full display during the recent siege of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. Among them were not only right-wing private militia members, but members of the reserve armed forces, National Guard, and off-duty police officers. If the experiences of South Africa, Rhodesia, the South African territory of South-West Africa, and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola are any indication, the situation among the right-wing white supremacist minority and its Republican political operation will get much worse for domestic security in the United States before minority government permanently collapses.

As long as the minority rulers at the federal, state, and local level have under their control the police and other security forces, they can be expected to step up their harassment of African Americans, Hispanics (except Cuban-Americans, most of whom, pining for the days of the fascist Fulgencio Batista regime in Cuba, are happy to assist in fostering Republican minority rule in the United States), and Native Americans.

When South Africa fully instituted racial apartheid and white minority rule, its police and security forces engaged in many of the actions seen in recent years in the United States with white police officers, all of whom having supported the Trump agenda, indiscriminately killing or maiming African American men and women. In South Africa, police conducted routine identity card checks of blacks, Indians, and mixed race “Coloureds.” Such police encounters with non-whites often led to arrests and convictions on trumped up charges.

When blacks in South Africa organized protests against apartheid rule, they were branded by the government as “Communists.” There is little difference between this policy and that of the Republican Party in calling Black Lives Matter and its leaders “Marxists” and “Communists.” The other pejorative used by Trump Republicans to label progressives is “antifa,” a concatenation of “anti” and “fascist.” Antifa is wrongly described by the Trump fascists as an organization when it is nothing more than a phrase to describe opposition to fascism. Yet, “antifa” has become as much a catch-all label as “Communist” was for the apartheid authorities in South Africa and the white minority rulers of Rhodesia to describe black African liberation movements.

Apartheid became official South African state policy from 1948 to 1994, when African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for several years by the apartheid regime, was elected President in the nation’s first multi-racial election. The South African National Party, the enforcer of apartheid, eventually faded from the scene. During the apartheid years, the government relied on a network of informers and armed white private militias to conduct surveillance of the majority black population. The strong links between the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) and unofficial white informant groups in apartheid South Africa is striking in their resemblance to similar networks linking the police and National Guard and Reserves to racist groups like the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and neo-Nazi militia groups in America today.

In minority ruled Rhodesia, where 7 percent – the white population – ruled 92 percent, the black population, the Central Intelligence Organization and paramilitary Selous Scouts enforced white rule through a network of informants, particularly among white farmers. Eventually, the artifice for white rule, the Rhodesian Front party of Prime Minister Ian Smith – who said minority rule would last a thousand years – would yield power to black majority rule. Many white Rhodesians would later emigrate to the United States, where they were received with open arms by white supremacist groups who championed the “lost causes” of apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Confederate State of America. In 2015, Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, gunned down nine African Americans, including a South Carolina state senator, in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof operated a website called “The Last Rhodesian.” On a Facebook page, Roof was pictured wearing a jacket with patches of the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.

South-West Africa, originally a German colony that was handed over to South Africa as a League of Nations mandate following World War I, saw a happy marriage between Afrikaner apartheid and vestigial German racism in the mandate as South Africa imposed racial segregation and minority rule on its territory. This was especially the case after the National Party became the dominant party in the South-West African Legislative Assembly in 1950. South Africa’s BOSS could count on a ready supply of informants in such German-speaking South-West African towns as Luderitz and Swakopmund, as well as among the anti-black South-West African civil service, to enforce apartheid in white minority-ruled South-West Africa. Colonialism and minority rule in South-West Africa collapsed in 1990 when Sam Nujoma, the leader of the black African pro-independence South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), was sworn in as the first President of Namibia.

Apartheid South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia could feel relatively secured that the right-wing government of Portugal aggressively maintained colonial control over Mozambique and Angola. That was the case until 1974, when a left-wing military coup, the Carnation Revolution, ousted Portugal’s fascist government and quickly moved to grant independence to Portugal’s African colonies. In cooperation with Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Organization and South Africa’s BOSS, the International and State Defense Police (PIDE) or Portugal, kept close tabs on African liberation movements and relied on white Portuguese colonial civil servants, businessmen, and farmers as informants. In turn, this intelligence was fed into a joint South African, Portuguese, Rhodesian alliance called ALCORA – Aliança Contra as Rebeliões em Africa – or “Alliance against the rebellions in Africa.” The ALCORA countries firmly believed their status quo of colonialism, segregation, and minority rule would last indefinitely. They were as wrong as their Republican Party ideological heirs are today.

Currently, a far-right white South African group, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), has been found to have links with like-minded groups in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Britain, as well as globally-linked fascists like Steve Bannon and others close to Donald Trump. These links were on full display in August 2018, when Trump, being interviewed on Fox News by white supremacist poster boy Tucker Carlson, said, “I have asked Secretary of State to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.” Trump’s information was based on bogus reports being spread by the AWB and amplified by Bannon and other notorious fascists in Trump’s inner circle, including Pompeo.

In time, the names Trump, Pompeo, Bannon, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio will languish in historical obscurity with names like Ian Smith, Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster, and P.W. Botha. It is only a matter of time, a very short period of time.

Most Americans can probably still remember a time when U.S. companies were in business with one goal in mind – providing a product or service for profit. It was a noble idea, the bedrock of capitalism, in which everyone stood to gain in the process.

Today, the monopolistic powers now enjoyed by a handful of mighty corporations, which are no longer shy about declaring their political bent, have tempted them to wade into the deep end of the political pool with deleterious effects on democracy. Indeed, corporate power wedded to government is nothing less than fascism.

In presenting such a case, it is important to put aside the notion that fascism is a purely right-wing phenomenon, complete with a chauvinistic demagogue haranguing a frenzied crowd. The new dictator on the block is not some fanatical Fuhrer, but rather Silicon Valley, the fountainhead of technological advancement and the formidable fortress of liberal ideology. In other words, fascism is an ideology that moves fluidly along the political spectrum, although some say the ideology grew out of European progressivism.

Jonah Goldberg argued in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism, that even before World War II “fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States.” Many years earlier, the late political theorist Hannah Arendt described the Nazi Party (which stands for, lest we forget, the ‘National SOCIALIST German Workers’ Party’) as nothing more than “the breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad…basing itself on the intoxication of destruction as an actual experience.” That sounds like a pretty accurate description of the cancel culture mentality that has now gripped the ‘progressive’ left with an almost demonic possession.

Did Twitter just delete and lock the @POTUS account as well now?

That’s a US Government account… now we’re on another level.

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) January 9, 2021

It should be shocking to Republicans and Democrats alike that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States is banished from all of the main social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – denying him the ability to communicate with his 75 million constituents, or one half of the electorate. This is real and unprecedented violence being committed against the body politic and far more worrisome than any breach of federal property, as loathsome as such an act may be.

The Capitol building is, after all, ultimately a mere symbol of our freedoms and liberties, whereas the rights laid down in the U.S. Constitution –the First Amendment not least of all – are fragile and coming under sustained assault every single day. Why does the left refuse to show the same concern for an aging piece of parchment, arguably the greatest political document ever written, as it does for a piece of architecture? The answer to that riddle is becoming increasingly obvious.

We are living Orwell’s 1984. Free-speech no longer exists in America. It died with big tech and what’s left is only there for a chosen few.

This is absolute insanity! https://t.co/s2z8ymFsLX

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 9, 2021

Big Tech began its slide towards marked fascist tendencies thanks to one of the greatest hoaxes ever foisted upon the American public, known as Russiagate. One after another, Silicon Valley overlords were called before Congressional committees to explain “how and why Russian operatives were given free rein to tamper with 2016 U.S. election,” in favor of the populist Donald Trump, no less.

After this made for television ‘dressing down’, the Big Tech executives at Google, Facebook, Twitter and others got busy reconfiguring their software algorithms in such a way that thousands of internet creators suddenly lost not only a lifetime of hard work and their sustenance, but their voice as well. This is the moment that Big Tech and the Democrats began to really march in lockstep. A new dark age of ‘McCarthyism’ had settled upon the nation, which gave the left unlimited powers for blocking user accounts they deemed “suspicious,” which meant anyone on the right. Now, getting ‘shadow banned,’ demonetized and outright banned from these platforms has become the new dystopian reality for those with a conservative message to convey. And the fact that the story of ‘Russian collusion’ was finally exposed as a dirty little lie did nothing to loosen the corporate screws.

Incidentally, as a very large footnote to this story, Big Tech and Big Business have not dished out the same amount of medieval-style punishment to other violators of the public peace. The most obvious example comes courtesy of Black Lives Matter, the Soros-funded social-justice movement that has wreaked havoc across a broad swath of the heartland following the death of George Floyd during an arrest by a white police officer.

Both BLM and Trump supporters believe they have a very large grudge to bear. The former believes they are being unfairly targeted by police due to the color of their skin, while the latter believes they are not getting fair treatment by the mainstream media due to ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’, and possibly also due in part to their skin color. But at this point the similarities between BLM and Trump voters come to a screeching halt.

Taking it as gospel that America suffers from ‘systemic racism’ (it doesn’t, although that is not to say that pockets of racism against all colors and creeds doesn’t exist), dozens of corporations jumped on the woke bandwagon to express their support for Black Lives Matter at the very same time the latter’s members were looting and burning neighborhoods across the nation. Strangely, violence has never shocked the progressive left, so long as the violence supported its agenda.

FLASHBACK: Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Cory Booker called for violence against elected leaders and Cabinet membershttps://t.co/L7aIAV4hg4

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) January 13, 2021

Here are just some of the ways the corporate world responded to charges that America was a racist cauldron ready to blow, as reported by The Washington Post: “Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, knelt alongside employees during his visit to a Chase branch. Bank of America pledged $1 billion to fight racial inequality in America. Tech companies have invested big dollars in Black Lives Matter, the Center for Policing Equity, Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp and other entities engaged in racial justice efforts…” And the list goes on and on.

Of course, private corporations are free to express their solidarity with whatever group they wish. The problem, however, is that these monopolistic monstrosities have an overwhelming tendency to pledge allegiance to liberal, progressive values, as opposed to maybe steering clear of politics altogether. Nowhere was Corporate America’s political agenda more obvious than in the aftermath of the siege of the Capitol building on January 6, which led to the death of five people.

Corporate America missed a very good opportunity to keep quiet and remain neutral with regards to an issue of incredible partisan significance. Instead, it unleashed a salvo of attacks on Trump supporters, even denying them access to basic services.

Aside from the most obvious and alarming ‘disappearing act,’ that of POTUS being removed from the major social media platforms, were countless lesser names caught up in the ‘purge.’

One such person is conservative commentator and former baseball star Curt Schilling, who says that AIG terminated his insurance policy over his “social media profile,” which was sympathetic to Donald Trump, according to Summit News.

“We will be just fine, but wanted to let Americans know that @AIGinsurance canceled our insurance due to my “Social Media profile,” tweeted Schilling.

“The agent told us it was a decision made by and with their PR department in conjunction with management,” he added.

We will be just fine, but wanted to let Americans know that @AIGinsurance canceled our insurance due to my “Social Media profile”

— President Elect Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) January 13, 2021

While all forms of ‘cancel culture’ (which seems to be part of a move to build American society along the lines of the Chinese ‘social credit system,’ which rewards those who toe the party line, and punishes those who fall out of favor) are egregious and counterintuitive to American values, perhaps the most astonishing was the cancellation of Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s book deal with Simon and Shuster.

“We did not come to this decision lightly,” Simon & Schuster said in a statement over Twitter. “As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: At the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat.”

My statement on the woke mob at @simonschuster pic.twitter.com/pDxtZvz5J0

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) January 7, 2021

The so-called “threat” was a photograph of Hawley raising a fist to the crowd that had assembled outside of the Capitol building before it had breached the security perimeter. It seems that corporations may now serve as judge, jury and executioner when it comes to how Americans behave in public. Is it a crime that Hawley acknowledged a crowd of supporters who were at the time behind the gates of the Capitol building? Apparently it is.

By the way, the name of the Hawley’s book? ‘The Tyranny of Big Tech’. How’s that for irony?

In conclusion, it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to believe that they are safe from the same sort of corporate and government behavior that has now dramatically silenced the conservative voice across the nation. The United States has entered dangerous unchartered waters, and by all indications it would appear that the American people have inherited a ‘soft’ form of fascism.

Although there may not be troops and tanks on the streets and a dictator inciting crowds from his bully pulpit, the end result has been pretty much the same: the brutal elimination of one half of the American population from all of the due protections provided by the U.S. Constitution due to an unholy alliance between corporate and government power, which is the very definition of fascism. Democrats, you may very well be next, so enjoy your victory while you still can.

The Flynn petition also warned of a “civil war” if his demands were not carried out. The petition stated: “Failure to [suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and conduct a re-vote] could result in massive violence and destruction on a level not seen since the Civil War.” The petition adds, “Limited Martial Law is clearly a better option than Civil War!” Flynn was recently pardoned by Trump for his criminal conviction of lying to federal investigators.

Flynn’s dangerous anti-constitutional rhetoric has not been seen in the United States since the Civil War. To be sure, there have been right-wing generals who defied various post-Civil War administrations in the past – Army General Douglas MacArthur, Army Major General Edwin Walker, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, and Army Major General John Singlaub are four of the most notorious in that respect – none have come close to Flynn in advancing insubordination to outright insurrection and sedition.

MacArthur had his showdown with President Harry S Truman during the Korean War and Truman fired him. Walker violated the Hatch Act by persuading troops in his command to vote against Democrats and distributing material published by the far-right John Birch Society to his troops. President John F. Kennedy sought and received Walker’s resignation of his officer’s commission in 1961. Walker came the closest to committing outright insurrection when he participated in white segregationist violent upheaval at the University of Mississippi over the admission of a black student in 1962. Walker was arrested by U.S. Marshals in Oxford, Mississippi and charged with four federal criminal counts, including inciting insurrection against the United States and conspiracy to overthrow the laws of the United States. The charges were later dropped. Walker’s political career ultimately ended after his arrest on two occasions, in 1976 and 1977, for “lewdness” in public men’s toilets in his hometown of Dallas, Texas.

Strategic Air Command chief LeMay clashed with President Kennedy over LeMay’s insistence that the United States launch a nuclear bombing campaign against Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. President Lyndon Johnson forced LeMay to retire in 1965. LeMay served as vice presidential running mate on the extreme right-wing American Independent Party presidential ticket of candidate George Wallace in 1968. The ticket, which was endorsed by General Walker, received 46 electoral votes. Singlaub, the chief of staff for U.S. Forces in Korea, publicly argued with President Jimmy Carter in 1977 over U.S. troop withdrawals from the Korean Peninsula. As a result, Carter relieved Singlaub of his command and ultimately forced him to retire. Singluab associated himself with the far-right activities of the John Birch Society and other extremist groups.

As far right as were the politics of Walker, LeMay, and Singlaub, for the most part and unlike General Flynn, they tended to work within the political system. Flynn’s calling for a free and U.S. presidential election to be overturned and a military regime to take over running a new election is straight out of the playbook of every novel and film that dealt with a right-wing military coup seizing control over America’s instruments of political power from civilian leadership. These include the novel and film “Seven Days in May,” the television movie “Shadow on the Land,” and the film noir black comedy “Dr. Strangelove.”

Military coups are almost never operations designed to preserve or enact democratic rule. In only three cases have coups been designed to move politics to the center or left: the July 20, 1944 unsuccessful plot by German military commanders to assassinate and overthrow Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government in Germany (Operation VALKYRIE), the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal that ousted a right-wing dictatorship and replaced it with a democratic Socialist-Communist coalition government, and the 1981 military counter-coup that successfully put down the 23-F Francoist military putsch attempt in Spain.

Flynn’s call for a coup in the United States places him in the camp of some of the vilest military fascist tyrants who have seized power in nations around the world. Such regimes were supported by civilian paramilitaries that acted as street vigilantes and thugs against pro-democracy opposition parties and leaders. Such would-be “enforcers” for a Trump/Flynn dictatorship today routinely issue death threats against public health officials, health care workers, state governors, mayors, municipal and county council and board members, and election officials around the United States. Fascist enablers like Trump and Flynn have encouraged their supporters to see those trying to ensure free and fair elections and those trying to protect the health of the public as a common enemy to be dealt with by intimidation and violence.

The world has seen the blood-soaked results of paramilitaries and civilian vigilantes teaming up with military dictators to enforce fascist rule. Trump and his supporters are encouraging a similar alliance in the United States. This unholy alliance comprises neo-Nazis, white nationalists, police officers and sheriff’s deputies, and other various social misfits and dead enders. These are the shock troops for the fascist ideology of Trumpism.

Every fascist regime requires its violent enforcers. For Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the enforcers were the SA (“Sturmabteilung” – the Storm Troopers or “Brownshirts”), the SS (“Schutzstaffel”), and the Gestapo (“Geheime Staatspolizei” or “secret state police”).These paramilitaries were aided by the civilian police. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco had his Falange Militia or “Blueshirts.” Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s power was bolstered by his Voluntary Militia for National Security or “Blackshirts.” Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier, also known as “Papa Doc,” was backed by his personal militia, the “Tonton Macoute.” Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet had his Patria y Libertad (PyL) militia. For the Brazilian military junta, vigilante police death squads carried out targeted political assassinations of opponents of the regime (these vigilante police gangs have reformed and now support the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro). Nicaragua’s fascist dictator Anastasio Somoza relied on his National Guard militia to retain power until the 1979 Sandinista Revolution. Other tyrants and dictators around the world were supported by their own militias and paramilitary brigades of civilians and on-duty and off-duty police.

Trump has cobbled together a similar violent force to intimidate his opponents and public officials. They include the fascist Proud Boys, the white nationalist “Boogaloo Bois,” the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, Atomwaffen Division, White Aryan Resistance, American Identity Movement/Identity Evropa, Patriot Prayer, Light Foot Militia, Forza Nuova – USA, National Policy Institute, Oath Keepers, 3 Percenters, and various regional and state militias and groups, such as the Michigan Militia, Wolverine Watchmen, Virginia Militia, Georgia 229 Militia, Pennsylvania Volunteer Militia, Wisconsin Kenosha Guard. Through the auspices of criminally charged former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, the embryonic Trump militias have been able to coordinate their activities with likeminded groups in Europe, Latin America, Australia, and South Africa.

With General Flynn and his confederates calling for a military coup in the United States, Trump’s paramilitary militia-in-formation is waiting for the call to arms to wage civil war and draw blood on America’s streets. That is the enemy every loyal American now must face and deal with swiftly and with certitude.

Patrick Henry, one of America’s more outspoken Founding Fathers, famously remarked “give me liberty or give me death” when the life of his nation was on the line. Today, America’s famous battle cry has been replaced by a masked and muffled gasp that advises, without hope of a second opinion, “give me lockdowns and keep me safe.” So terrified is the American public of catching a virus that comes with a 99 percent survival rate that they are willing to forego Thanksgiving, the great national holiday commemorating – with no loss of irony – their Pilgrim ancestors’ collective courage to overcome the wild, hostile conditions of their new land.

It must be said that no fascist party has ever been so adept when it came to sealing the collective fate of their people to a common enemy. That’s because the threat facing mankind today, or so we are told, is not some nefarious ideology, like communism, or even a terrorist organization that the masses can be rallied to fight. Rather, the threat is a microscopic contagion that is capable of invading every nook and cranny of our lives. Already the age of manly handshakes is over, replaced by an emasculated majority, while an entire generation of youth now looks at their fellow human beings as infernal germ factories.

And unlike a traditional enemy that can be seen, attacked and eventually defeated, the coronavirus – we have been oddly forewarned – will make landfall again and again, while regularly morphing with comic book abilities into an increasingly deadlier villain. In this landless battle, only the medical authorities are decorated as heroes, while the people, lacking the professional credentials, are forced to be passive and helpless onlookers, their freedom of movement severely constrained. More importantly, the forces of nationalism have become irrelevant; only a globalist, one-world-order response can defeat this pandemic.

There is very good reason to suspect, however, that either the science on all of this is half-baked, or we the people are being intentionally duped on a grand scale. In fact, it’s probably a little bit of both. First, relying on nothing more than empirical evidence, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that there is no existential emergency confronting mankind. If there were, we would expect to see decomposing bodies piling up in the streets, like in the medieval times during the Black Plague. This would be especially the case among the homeless population, which is certainly not practicing social distancing etiquette as they pass around open containers on street corners.

Nor does there seem to be any massive queuing up at hospitals for emergency treatment. In fact, as early as April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told President Trump that the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort deployed to New York City by the federal government to help fight the coronavirus outbreak was “no longer needed”. Cuomo said the need for the support vessel “didn’t reach the levels that had been projected.” And I am certainly not the only one who has noticed that Covid cases seem to fluctuate curiously with the political climate.

Plenty of hospital rooms. You’ve got that right! https://t.co/lg0Bb2Ai9j

— Richard citizen journalist (@DPotcner) October 28, 2020

Let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of Covid ‘victims’ recover nicely at home, according to no less of an authority than Anthony Fauci. At the same time, many people who acquire the disease are asymptomatic and never even knew they were infected. Children, meanwhile, seem amazingly impervious to the virus. That is not to say that there has been no sign of a virus this winter season. Of course there has been, just like every year. But while Covid cases may be on the rise in some places, and invisible in others, the death rate from this illness remains low and tumbling, predominantly hitting elderly people already suffering from comorbidities.

There are other reasons to be suspicious that what we are dealing with is not a first-class medical emergency, but rather something much more sinister. Like maybe an excuse for rolling out a Western-made vaccine that carries a microchip implant with tracking technology? Such a claim will sound less fantastic when it is realized that it has already been developed.

It is no secret that just one month before Covid-19 made its dramatic landfall in the United States, purportedly from Wuhan, China, MIT researchers announced a new method for recording a patient’s vaccination history: storing the smartphone-readable data under the skin at the same time a vaccine is administered.

“By selectively loading microparticles into microneedles, the patches deliver a pattern in the skin that is invisible to the naked eye but can be scanned with a smartphone that has the infrared filter removed,” MIT News reported. “The patch can be customized to imprint different patterns that correspond to the type of vaccine delivered.”

Would it surprise anyone to know that the research was funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same family venture that now provides the bulk of funding to the World Health Organization?

In a new interview, Bill Gates authoritatively states that mass public gatherings will not come back “at all” until we have mass vaccination. Who made him king of the world? https://t.co/siW7bZ9yGc … https://t.co/ivaCI8eAEl

— Alternative News (@NewsAlternative) April 4, 2020

Then, in September 2019, ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members, announced a new project that involves the “exploration of multiple biometric identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization.”

We could continue here with a long list of other disturbing technologies that would effectively turn people into walking antennae for the rest of their lives, but the point is hopefully clear: although many people might be willing to accept a vaccine against Covid-19, they probably do not want the extra technological add-ons that people like Bill Gates, a man with zero medical qualifications, seem extremely anxious to include.

“The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods warns in a full page ad in NYT today pic.twitter.com/5cyusH6L9V

— Ana Swanson (@AnaSwanson) April 26, 2020

So what can Americans expect next? How about ‘Freedom Passes’ that Britons may need before they are able to return to some semblance of normalcy?

According to the Daily Mail, “Britons are set to be given Covid ‘freedom passes’ as long as they test negative for the virus twice in a week, it has been suggested…To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will then be given a letter, card or document they can show to people as they move around.”

And this is what they call a “return to normalcy.”

Personally, I call those plans the approach of fascism. And for those who doubt that it could not happen in America should heed the words of the late sagacious comedian George Carlin, who once quipped that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Had Carlin been alive today to see the tremendous mess we’ve inherited, he would most likely have included a syringe in the neo-fascist’s toolkit.

DeWine may have also been targeted for his denunciation of the plot against Whitmer in neighboring Michigan. After 13 men were arrested in the Michigan plot, DeWine told WEWS-TV in Cleveland, “It is a despicable act. It is horrible and everyone has to denounce this. You want to talk about our political process, this is outside our political process. We have a great process; we have a great system. We are a nation of laws.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker had been the target of so many death threats over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that the Illinois State Police was required to use a PowerPoint presentation to detail all of them.

The far-right is not interested in laws and assassination plots against government officials in the United States have expanded from federal government targets to state and municipal officials, including governors and mayors. When similar groups that were linked to government officials engaged in such assassinations in Latin America, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia they were properly called “death squads.” Today, rather than being endemic in some far-off land, these death squads, some linked to local law enforcement officers, are active inside the United States.

In August of this year, the Democratic Governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, reported that not only had she received death threats from right-wing agitators but so had her daughters and grandchildren. In the Spring of this year, Democratic Governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear received death threats, along with members of his Kentucky State Police security detail. North Carolina Democratic Governor Roy Cooper received death threats from various neo-Confederacy racist groups in the state. The Democratic Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, a previous target for right-wing violence, also received death threats as she began issuing public health restrictions to combat the spread of Covid-19.

The actions of the right-wing death squads and the encouragement they received from Donald Trump and other leading Republicans have driven many moderate Republicans from their party. Those Republican voters in Michigan, who describe themselves as “Gerald Ford Republicans, were so disgusted by Trump’s support for the militia plotters in their state, they voted early for a straight Democratic ticket, from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the top to local state legislators and county officials at the bottom. Among the rightist plotters were armed individuals who early appeared in the Michigan legislature while it was in session. Their actions were in response to Trump’s Twitter messages urging his armed supporters to “Liberate Michigan” and “Liberate Virginia.” Never before in the history of the United States had a president urged armed supporters to take up arms against established governments.

The right-wing threats did not end with the governors of Michigan, Virginia, and Ohio. Wichita, Kansas Democratic Mayor Brandon Whipple was the target of a right-wing extremist who said the mayor was “a viable target for elimination,” adding that he had “a date with the hangman.” The far-right terrorist also included other political leaders, who he did not name, in the category of those who were “viable targets for elimination.” The mayor said the man, a supporter of Trump and the Republican Party, said that “he [the would-be assassin] was going to kidnap me and slash my throat and he needed my address because I needed to see the hangman.”

Whipple was not the only mayor to have been threatened by Trump loyalists. The Democratic Mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, told WBBM-TV in Chicago that there were “serious” threats against her. She added, “we spend, my detail and the police, a significant amount of time unfortunately on tracking down these threats that come in from various parts of the country… Some of them are quite sophisticated, because they’re using landlines that are not actually the people that are involved, but there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t get some kind of harassment, whether it’s just repeated calls with things left on voicemail or other things, threatening violence.” Lightfoot also laid blame for the threats at the feet of Trump. She said, “There is a real cause and effect when the President names me in a disparaging way which is usually what he does, and people feeling like they have license to make, what I regard as real threats. When somebody’s calling in the middle of the night repeatedly, that’s an issue. And that only happened since Donald Trump has been trying to attack me personally, and it’s an issue that many of us as mayors [have] and he seems to have a particular obsession with female, and particularly, mayors of color.”

Many of the far-right terrorists receive their encouragement and direction from various vigilante and conspiracy groups, including the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Qanon. Public health restrictions instituted as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought many of the far-right agitators from under the rocks and into the public.

Right-wing threats against political leaders have not been limited to state and municipal targets. One man with a cache of rifles, a handgun, bomb-making materials, and a one-half million dollars in cash was, prior to his arrest, stalking Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s home in Delaware with the stated intent of assassinating Biden. A Maryland man was arrested for plotting to assassinate both Biden and his vice-presidential running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California. While there have been many plots throughout American history to assassinate presidential candidates, none have ever been linked directly to the rhetoric of the president of the United States. What all the recent would-be assassins and terrorists have in common is an unswerving loyalty to Donald Trump.

In June of this year, a right-wing activist was charged with plotting to assassinate Democrat Bennie Thompson, Mississippi’s only black member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the chairman of the House Homeland Security. The would-be assassin was also targeting African-American members of Thompson’s staff. Around the same time, a right-winger from Texas was charged with plotting to kill the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who is second in line to the presidency, pursuant to the constitutional line of succession. The Michigan vigilantes also communicated a threat to Democratic Michigan U.S. Representative Elissa Slotkin to shoot her in the final days of her re-election campaign.

Trump and his administration have been so toxic to the American body politic that in the wake of their disastrous rule, the machinery of government will require a sanitization of all of those who nested in government agencies as a result of the Trump infestation of the government with unbridled fascism and racism. This necessary purging of fascists should be guided by the words of Democratic Vice President Henry Wallace in 1944: “The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”

Antifa’s fascist violence will return on election night. That’s why it’s important to understand their fraudulence and fascism, and reject the politics of plutocrat-contrived violence. Perhaps strangely, Marxian analysis itself is best suited to communicate this point to the radical left.

This is because at the root of Marxian analysis are not self-declarations, nor definitions based in superstructural manifestations, but rather the material relationship between base and superstructure.

In layman’s terms this boils down to two things in practice: ‘follow the money’, and ‘watch what they do and not what they say’.

The real existing financial motives and the socio-economic class behind those motives is what we will find driving the base, even while at the superstructural level we find an ideology which only nominally, only apparently, appears at odds with the real motives at the base. Antifa, at its class and financial base (i.e., its objective and material base) is a plutocrat supported and controlled operation against the republic.

“Unlike the old left, rooted in radically independent organized labor, Antifa’s leadership and activities, to the contrary, are financed through billionaire oligarchs both directly and indirectly, like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg.”

In the simplest possible terms, Antifa is fascist because while they use some of the talking points and imagery of the old left, they actually work towards a plutocratic coup (or counter-revolution) against the republic. This is not to say there is a system-wide fascist threat, for reasons we will explain in an upcoming installment. In short, the coming coup against republican norms will not establish ‘fascism’ as historically understood, but a new kind techno-industrial repressive society within the rubric of post-modernity, which has hitherto not been contemplated rigorously outside of small circles of futurists and science fiction authors.

Antifa and BLM protests have generally disappeared from the simulated reality of the controlled media lens, because these riots did not have the intended effect of delegitimizing the Trump administration, instead working against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Antifa Explosion – What the Week of November 2^nd Will Look Like

Once Trump declares victory at around 11:30 pm on November 3^rd, right as social media bans, blocks, and censors Trump’s announcement of victory, we will see the start of mass Antifa violence in key cities in swing states. As the French Marxist Baudrillard would have explained, an entire media simulation will ensnare (within its simulacra) whole portions of the population, which will be encouraged to send in their late ballots, following a last minute strategic ballot harvesting ploy targeted at key locations.

The disastrous ruling of the Supreme Court allowing three-day late ballots to be counted, will encourage a whole post-election drive to harvest ballots precisely in those precincts where the known data is already in from election night. The push to throw the election for Biden post facto will focus largely on those precincts within particular communities, within swing states. The problem for Biden has been the lack of a ground campaign and any sort of excitement.

This means we should expect a very big controlled-media scandal to captivate headlines right after the election. Whether or not this will actually motivate post facto ‘voting’ is beside the point. It most only be a semi-credible narrative that will explain why hundreds of thousands of voters turned out starting November 4^th to cast their late ballots organically, even as in fact these will have been the result of targeted ballot harvesting.

Why Antifa’s ‘Communists’ Are Actually Fascists

1. It Doesn’t Matter What You Call Yourself

Many Antifa members, as well as the BLM leadership, call themselves Marxists, and because this self-declaration is also convenient for their conservative opponents, these self-descriptions go unchallenged.

Likewise in terms of its membership, fascist movements a hundred years ago were largely drawn from workers and small business owners who saw themselves as socialists and liberal-progressives. People do not fit into easy categories, and besides socialism and liberal-progressivism were a mix of both enlightenment and romantic ideas relating to both myth and utopia.

What defined them as fascists in Marxian terms was not the self-professed utopian, futurist, religious, socialist, or reactionary beliefs of this or that member of the movement, but by the objective material and financial reality of being backed by the plutocracy against the public, itself. All the while posing as guardians of the public.

Marxian analytic tools demonstrate that the same as true of Antifa in the U.S. today. The conservative right has long enjoyed throwing around the term ‘socialist’ and ‘Marxist’, especially ‘cultural Marxism’, to denounce their opponents within the Democrat Party, and this has the inverse effect of drawing elements of the populist and radical left who have no relation to the ruling plutocracy within the DNC, towards down-ballot DNC politics and Antifa protest-riots.

We cannot characterize a party or movement by the plurality socioeconomic class of its members in a vacuum. Otherwise both the Democrats and Republicans are ‘labor parties’.

2. We Already Proved That Antifa Is Financed by the Plutocracy

Indeed, Antifa in the U.S. has become a plutocrat-financed fascistic movement if we are using any Marxian metric. This seems counter-intuitive, for after all they profess themselves to be antifascist, and the fascists they are opposed to are allegedly the ‘basket of deplorables’ that back Trump. This means we need to set aside the institutionally approved (Eco, Griffin, et al) definitions of fascism, ultimately liberal ones in service of the status quo, to arrive at any meaningful definition of any utility. The academic institutions themselves are compromised with regard to these matters.

This is why in our piece ‘How Can the Deep State’s Antifa Organization Be Stopped?’ we showed the plutocrat financed NGO industrial complex through organizations like Democracy Alliance, was the defining base of Antifa activism – what Marxian analysis has always held, far and above, as defining the objective nature of a movement, and not its self-professions nor characterizations by their opponents.

Marxian analysis requires that we assess a movement by a.) Its material base, meaning which class empowers it and makes it possible (finances it) and b.) In whose class interest they work to empower. The answer for both here is the plutocracy. Because they pose as ‘revolutionary left’ but are in fact plutocratic, means they are fascist.

Marxian analytic tools must be salvaged from today’s ‘Marxists’, as these are as prescient as they are timely. They go farther to explain the 4^th Turning, the 4^th Industrial Revolution, the declining rate of profit, the internet of things and 3D printing, and the potential for a future economy based on the natural right of liberty and human dignity, both in the world and of the soul. But its vulgar misrepresentation as the ideology of Antifa and BLM serves the purpose, perhaps intentionally, of turning-off tens of millions of Americans who could otherwise see what is useful within the analytic framework of class and economic development through history.

3. Their Tactics Are Taken From Fascism

Of course the fascism of Antifa is visible to many, because of its gang-stalking and arson, the mob intimidation of citizens and small businesses to support this nascent totalitarian movement. To force passersby to raise the fist just as eighty-five years ago, Germans and Italians were identically forced to give the Roman salute, is only a corroborating piece of anecdata, and not the root of the reasoning that Antifa is fascist in nature.

But insofar as the Antifa mob and BLM leadership situates itself ostensibly in Marxism, this is perhaps even more dangerous for the reasons we’ve explained. And yet it is Marxian analysis itself which is best suited to demonstrate that even at a theoretical level, Antifa is fascist.

The owning class weary of radical economic changes and a rising ‘right-wing’ populist movement which itself is fixated on economic issues historically associated with the left, deploys the very same ‘victims of modernity’ (war veterans, permanently unemployed of all ages, workers, vagabonds, indebted students, adventurers, petty thieves and released criminals) to bring its definition of order out of chaos by operationalizing the chaos and the chaotic tendencies of its minions.

Unlike the old left, rooted in radically independent organized labor, Antifa’s leadership and activities, to the contrary, are financed through billionaire oligarchs both directly and indirectly, like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg.

Likewise we cannot characterize something as ‘fascist’ by its explicit beliefs or by views that may be projected onto them, but rather by the class that operationalizes them, and towards what end. Race, nationality, ethnicity, religion – these are but superstructural permutations of the givens of a time and place. Here is, among many other places, where Umberto Eco and Roger Griffin and those in their image are critically errant in understanding fascism. Fascism is a matter of methods, of tactics, and of financing – not of symbols, explicit ideology, or specific positions on culture-war (wedge) issues.

That said, Griffin’s point that fascism no longer has the ability to mobilize a mass movement in the way it did prior to WWII, but that it can carry on as a smaller phenomenon that can inspire terrorism, is agreed. Many of his reasons for stating so are incorrect, even if this conclusion is apt.

4. Antifa Punches Down, the Historic Labor Left Punches Up

Both the traditional radical left and fascist right were proponents of violence towards political goals, even if in self-defense, but the traditional radical left used to focus on ‘punching up’: Attacking capital, the ruling class, the banks, big land owners.

But historic fascism in its late-nascent stage is more similar to Maoism during the Cultural Revolution (there’s a strong New Left orientation to Maoism as well). It organizes and concentrates power by ‘punching down’.

This dangerous fascistic trend among what has come to be known as ‘the left’. At the level of universities, it began in the late 90’s when coastal university classrooms became ‘call-out sessions’. It moved into mass culture through venture-capital funded click-bait websites like Buzzfeed and Jezebel. Of course all of these antics would have been unrecognizably alien to militant rank-and-file labor union members in decades past.

That Antifa punches down and that mainstream media echoes their talking points, and that public service announcements are increasingly indistinguishable from Antifa propaganda, is a clear sign of its fascist essence. Punching down is always from a position of power, and its appropriation by the overt sections of power is a clear sign that their ideas have become what the French Marxist Althousser called the Ideological State Apparatus: That anything and everything outside of nebulous, ever-changing shibboleths (i.e. ‘community standards’) can potentially be called ‘fascist’ as a justification for ‘cancel culture’ and black-listing, is precisely that which the growing ‘illiberal liberalism’ of the plutocrats indeed flourishes on.

Pro-systemic propaganda punches down. Anti-systemic propaganda punches up. It’s an equation as simple as it is true.

5. Like Fascists, Antifa Relies on Support from Local Law Enforcement, Local Business, and an Entrenched Local Political Class to Place Them ‘Above the Law’

Perhaps you’ve seen old film reel of Nazis in the 1920’s in paramilitary uniform, long before they had official power in the governmental sense, seemingly able to physically attack those they wanted at whim, without local authorities intervening. From a position of power, from local friendly police departments, business interests, and politicians who at the very least ‘look the other way’, Antifa – like its fascist counterpart – is able to get away of enforcing its power on a down vertical. Road-blocks, riots, home-burnings, against the general public – all with local official support. Their aim is to coerce from the public a fear-based passivity and conformity to the politics of their program.

It matters very little in this sense, that they call themselves Antifa. While history moves in one direction, and historical parallels are fraught with contradictions, Antifa today in the most simple terms is recruited and built from that disenfranchised and permanently unemployed hodgepodge of people of various socioeconomic backgrounds, along with thrill-seeking youth (in that age-old quest for meaning, purpose, and identity) which formed the bulk of fascist mobs in the teens and twenties a hundred years ago in Europe.

When we understand that their ability to operate ‘above the law’ in many cases, find large groups of philanthropically minded lawyer’s groups (like the National Lawyers’ Guild) to work to have their charges dropped, district attorneys who are lenient, and the media industrial complex including monopoly social media, all work in coordinated fashion to enable the Antifa organization.

6. Their Violence Has Not Once Been in Defense of Labor Strikes and Pickets

Their methods and tactics are entirely uninvolved in labor ‘general strike’ type strategies that would more correctly characterize them as traditionally leftist. As seen above, rather, their methods are taken solely from the rise of fascism. Their material financial base, as well as their methods and tactics are fascist, as we have shown. Legitimate left-wing movements arise from, and are materially (financially) rooted in organized labor at its base. The various superstuctural manifestations along the ideological plane, whether nationalist, fascist, social-democratic, communists, anarchist, etc., are not – in the final analysis – determinative of the class and socio-economic nature of its (conscious or not) ‘leftism’ in terms of its relation to organized labor.

7. Their Cancel-Culture and Voter Disenfranchisement Campaign is Against Democracy

This critical in separating Antifa from historical bourgeois-democratic movements. In Marxian terms, in the transition from feudal modes of production to capitalist modes of production, the plutocracy helped arm and organize workers and peasants, the poor and disenfranchised, to overthrow the feudal nobility and usher in an history period characterized by bourgeois-democratic liberties and freedoms, which have come to characterize the ‘western tradition’ in modernity. Antifa is not a bourgeois-democratic movement because the U.S. is not a feudal, nor semi-feudal country, and also because their actions work against the existing rights to association and speech (cancel-culture), and work against enfranchisement as they have been operationalized towards a ballot harvesting scheme.

Concluding Commentary

The views of Griffin and Eco focus overwhelmingly upon the superstructural manifestations of the fascism of a century ago, so much so that Eco’s attempt to uncover an ‘Ur-fascism’, or generalized theory of identifying fascism, is an utter failure. Rather, Marxian analysis demonstrates that both historical fascism regardless of name as well as contemporary movements of the same essence are defined not by these superstructural manifestations (ideology, aesthetics, etc.) but rather by its driving base in terms of socio-economic class (economic foundation, private property, capital.

Election night and the weeks to follow will be met with a wave of violence larger than seen before. It will be difficult for those remaining on the left to understand that the Antifa foot soldiers are agents of capital, and not of labor. This is largely because of the gradual takeover of the left by new-left identity politics which crept slowly, and then rapidly, with May of 1968 and the Situationist moment being a key signifier.

We know that the FBI’s field offices which historically have infiltrated radical left-groups are also compromised, because we would otherwise see these FBI agents – whose work is often to act as agents provocateurs – to act as de-escalating agents urging calm from within the ranks of these fascistic Antifa outfits. We have not seen this, which is a key sign that the FBI at the very top is wrought with complicit activity, which incidentally is another piece of evidence in 5., above.

Perhaps it is ironic that Marxian analysis itself is best able to demonstrate that Antifa – whose members often describe themselves as Marxists (socialists, communists, etc.) – is in fact fascist.

The defense of the republic, of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary gains of 1776-89 which were expanded in 1865, today rests upon election integrity, voter enfranchisement, and in a strange twist of fate, the Justice Department under AG Barr.