Fascism Has Arrived in America. Will Civil War Be Next?

Congress and SCOTUS back Trump’s dictator bid, but as he screws up the economy and cuts health care and other support programs will his MAGA base quit or split?

CNN Report on the military-style ICE rade via Black Hawk helicopters and 300 ICE and Border Patrol ‘troops’ on sleeping Chicago families. To watch, click on image. To see the terrifying chaos the families faded, ski to 2:44 on fhe clip)

NOTE: Listen to Dave interviewed yesterday on this story by Gorilla Radio host Chris Cook in Vancouver. Also interviewed on the same program is noted US journalist Diana Johnstone reporting on developments in France. (My interview segment starts at about the 32.00 minute spot.

When Donald Trump’s razor-thin victory in key swing states in 2016 enabled him to win the electoral college vote despite his receiving fewer national votes, friends of mine in Europe and China asked me if the US was going nuts. I told them no, that his victory was a fluke of our profoundly and deliberately undemocratic system of indirectly electing our presidents. It was rigged system designed to give undeserved power to the white male owners in slave states where they were small in number in comparison to the northern states. (The system still favors smaller, mostly white states.)

When Trump lost his re-election bid to Joe Biden in 2020 and then tried to prevent the counting and “certifying” of state electors buy stirring up a mob to go storm the Capitol building and abort the process, I heard from even more anxious friends abroad asking the same questions. They added a new one too: Was the US heading towards a civil war?

Again, though I was starting to wonder about that myself, I assured them that the laws and the courts that enforce those laws would prevent that horror from coming to pass, and suggested that Trump would lose his hold on his cult following, once out of power.

Boy was I wrong! I simply didn’t appreciate the weird persuasive power of this whiny man with no moral compass, no human empathy, the attention span of a fish, and the intellect (and vocabulary) of a toddler. I was also caught by surprise at the abject lack of principle of Republicans in Congress, where the number of members from that party in both houses willing to stand up to Trump’s mad attacks on facts, law, tradition and the US Constitution could be on just two hands. I similarly failed to realize the callow lack of principle of the Supreme Court’s six right-wing members who readily tossed aside their vaunted “original intent” theory for determining constitutional issues. Instead, they simply supported Trump and his government-by-edict (“executive order”) — even ruling that the president has absolute immunity for crimes as long as they were committed as Presidential and not personal acts.

Now, barely nine months into Trump’s second term as president, we have seen not the advent of an American autocracy, as most mainstream media gently phrase it, but rather the constructing of a full-blown fascist dictatorship. It’s a dictatorship not so much under Trump, who is too self-involved and emotionally immature to orchestrate such a Gaza-like wholesale decimation of a nation, as by a cabal of billionaires and a braintrust of right-wing activists, lawyers and pseudo-intellectuals. These people have for years been patiently working out the steps needed to subvert whatever freedoms and shreds of democracy Americans have retained or won for themselves. Their goal is to replace all that with a fascist state where all the levers of power belong to the rich and powerful and to keep it that way with a domestic military police force that can enforce obedience on pain of deportation, prison or worse,

This has long been a cleverly hidden plan, now exposed (despite repeated lies by Trump about his feigned ignorance of the plan) as the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.”

Sort of an American Mein Kampf, the project is essentially a detailed and all encompassing roadmap to fascism decades in the making. It began with the gerrymandered creation of solidly Republican states where state legislatures, governorships and state courts were all carefully put into the hands of hard-right ideologues, bought by money from the rich and from huge corporations.

These bought-and-owned shills of the obscenely rich funded takeovers of local school boards by single-minded Christian fundamentalists insisting on promoting ignorance in upcoming new generations with their demands for prayer in school, teaching of creationism and banning or at best equal emphasis on the teaching of evolution. They also gutted environmental and worker safety rules, undermined the right of workers to join unions free of intimidation, sought year after year to terminate the Affordable Care Act with its premium subsidies for low-income families, and kept pouring prodigious sums of money into the military, and have sought to weaken faculty autonomy at public and even now at private colleges and universities.

Seemingly benign, apolitical billionaire donors who continue to make their publicly promoted charitable (and tax deductible0 donations to hospitals, nursing homes etc. But they are are also, out of sight, secretly shoveling cash to bankroll rightwing charlatans like politicians JD Vance, David Duke and Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA. They helped them and others like them to build careers and a massive youth base for fascism founded on white grievance, and dark fears that the white race was headed toward minority status in the US in what is called “The Great Replacement Conspiracy.’ One early driver behind this project was the notorious “Powell Memo,” written in 1971 by Lewis Powell, a Virginia corporate lawyer who who believed American business was under attack by Ralph Nader, environmentalists, unions and other reformers and needed to fight back. His alarmist memo made its way to the US Chamber of Commerce and eventually into the C-Suites of America’s corporate elite.

Powell, installed by President Richard Nixon on the US Supreme Court in 1972, was liberal on race and some other social issues, but his memo was an apocalyptic hard right call-to-arms for US capitalists to take “aggressive action” to counter what what he rather ludicrously warned was “a broad attack” on the “American business system.”

The capitalists responded by beginning a push that continues to this day. It began with the undoing of laws preventing secret campaign contributions and that has reached the point today that we have virtually open bribery of elected officials. (Even Justice Powell, were he still alive in 2010, might, despite his elation, have blushed at the 5-4 Citizens United decision that year by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. That ruling effectively declared corporations to be “persons” with virtually all the benefits of the First Amendment on free-speech, publication and assembly.

This background is important for American citizens to know — including those on the right who claim to stand for liberty, personal freedom and for the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. That’s because at this point, what freedoms and democratic governance we still have in the US is rapidly vanishing as Trump, backed by his lockstep Republican majorities in House and Senate and all too often by the pliant Republican super majority the Supreme Court uses executive orders to construct his fascist dictatorship while orchestrating a massive shift of wealth from the poor and middle class to the super rich. It seems clear that all Republicans in Washington care about is permanently locking in their domination of the federal government.

Already, President Trump has crossed the line of the nearly century-and-a-half- old Posse Comitatus Act banning the use of military troops in domestic law enforcement. He’a done this both by sending in active-duty Army and Marine troops on the streets oF US cities, by federalizing National Guard units normally operating under the authority of a state’s governor, and then dispatching them, usually from Republican-led states to police cities in Democrat-run states, and by converting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service (ICE) into a kind of American Gestapo.

The epitome of this new reality was put on display occurred several days ago when, at 1-3 a.m. and without warning over 300 ICE thugs in military gear, making good on Trump’s threat to turn Chicago and other Democratic cities into “battlespaces” and combat drill opportunities, rappelled onto the rooftop of an apartment building from hovering Black Hawk military helicopters in America’s second-largest city. From there, having learned that many of the building’s tenants were immigrants, the armed ICE troops proceeded, employing stun grenades and battering rams, to smash their way into apartments occupied by sleeping families, zip-tying terrified parents and screaming children alike regardless of visa or citizenship status and hauling them away to detention centers. (“Fuck them kids!” one laughing ICE raider shouted back at neighbors in the street warning that children were being frightened.)

It’s not hard to imagine the terror and trauma of those victims of the raid, most of whom are likely in the country legally or are citizens. Few if any of those rounded up by the ICE storm troopers were found to be criminals.

One has to reach back to the Nazi SS raids on communists, socialists, Jews, Romani people and other “undesirables” in 1930s Germany to find a parallel to such soulless abuse by government agents. The Chicago apartment assault on unarmed sleeping civilian families was all too appropriately dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz.” Homeland Security, whose leaders, comfortable as they seem to be with the Nazi-evoking sound of the name of their Cabinet Department, are likely well aware of the Hitlerian roots of the term “blitz” they chose for their domestic military assault.

Or maybe the president himself, who is reported by his late first wife Ivana as well as a writer for Vanity Fair to have kept a book of Hitler’s speeches from 1919-39 titled My New Order at his bedside as a young man, picked the name of his first foray into war against his “Inside Enemy”: the People of the United States.

Already Trump has signed a new National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7). This order, drawn on decades of laws and court rulings since 9-11-2001 which step by step have ratcheted up presidential power in times of alleged national emergency, declares that the country is being threatened by potential leftist terrorists. According to Chip Gibbons, policy director or Defending Rights and Dissent in an article in Drop Site News, it calls for US intelligence and police agencies to “‘disrupt’ not just those allegedly carrying out left-wing violence, but those who fund it and those who ‘radicalize’ it and recruit individuals to partake in it.” Gibbons goes on to say the new memorandum “declares domestic terrorism to be a top priority and defines domestic terrorism priorities to include ‘civil unrest’ and ‘doxing.’”

Obviously this broad-brush definition of domestic terrorism on the left (which the FBI concedes is rare (especially compared to right-wing terrorism,} opens the door to Cointelpro-like harassment and disruption, (think infiltration and agents provocateur) and monitoring of groups organizing constitutionally protected non-violent protest.

As John and Nisha Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, a libertarian organization dedicated to defending the Bill of Rights,* write in an article on their site ‘Trump’s Everywhere War: An Insurrection Against the Constitution,” citing the new National Security Memorandum, write:

“When the government can label anyone or anything an enemy in order to wage war, we are all in danger. That danger is no longer theoretical.”

They warn that the message of the fatal US attacks on alleged Venezuelan drug boats in international waters, and the violent military assault on citizen and immigrant civilians in their homes in Chicago is an “everywhere war,” and explain:

“This “everywhere war” depends on a simple redefinition: call it a war, and the target becomes a combatant. Call the city a battlespace, and its residents become suspects.

“With the stroke of a pen, President Trump continues to set aside the constitutional safeguards meant to restrain exactly this kind of mission creep, handing himself and his agencies sweeping authority to disregard the very principles on which this nation was founded—principles intended to serve as constitutional safeguards against tyranny, corruption, abuse and overreach put in place by America’s founding fathers.”

Even more troubling, they argue, is the way imaginary “threats” are being tossed about and exaggerated, whether it’s Haitian immigrants eating neighborhood pets or rown Latino residents sporting Disney character or Hello Kitty tattoos supposedly denoting their being Veneuelan gang members).

“What is being sold as a campaign to disrupt left-wing conspiracies,” they say, “now includes simply an individual’s ideology, rhetoric, or belief.” Clearly, they suggest, this is not just another surveillance program. NSPM-7 is a framework for rebranding dissent as a danger to be quashed.

“The government has a long history of using vague definitions of “extremism” to justify ever-expanding control. Once dissent is rebranded as danger, every act of resistance can be swept into the government’s dragnet.

“Whether through counterinsurgency tactics abroad or domestic militarization at home, the pattern is the same: dissent is rebranded as danger, and those who resist government narratives become subjects of investigation. NSPM-7 merely formalizes this cycle of suspicion.

“For decades or longer the US national security state has defined certain beliefs like communism or Marxism as subversive. To that list, the Whiteheads write, “You can now add ‘anti-Christian,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ and ‘anti-American,’ among others. What this means, in practice, is that sermons, protests, blog posts, or donor lists could all be flagged as precursors to terrorism.

“Under this policy, America’s founders would be terrorists. Jesus himself would be blacklisted as ‘anti-Christian’ and ‘anti-capitalist.’”

The Whiteheads’ closing words are grim:

“The raids in Chicago and the White House’s evolving attitude towards surveillance confirm what follows from that logic: this war footing is not confined to foreign shores [or to immigrants I would add!]. It is being turned inward—toward journalists, political opponents, and ordinary citizens whose beliefs or associations are deemed “anti-American.”“

By anti-American, this administration really means anti-government, especially when Trump is calling the shots.”

All of which is to say fascism isn’t just a potential threat in the US any longer; it’s already here. That means we must start figuring out how we respond to the national disaster, which is bound to get worse and quickly.. Hitler’s rapid rise from a hate-spewing windbag to all-powerful Führer of the Third Reich in Germany is an object lesson of a people not taking the threat of fascist dictatorship seriously until it becomes too late.

As in 1930s Weimar Germany almost a century ago, in today’s US, determined resistance or escape are the only sensible choices.

As for my worried foreign friends left wondering if the US is facing civil war and whether I and my family are safe, I have to say the latest developments, with Trump deliberately dispatching federalized National Guard troops from Republican-run states into cities like Chicago and Portland that he calls battle zones in Democratic-run states whose governors and mayors object to them seems hell-bent on igniting one. Like an earlier Führer Trump also seems hell-bent on exacting vengeance on his perceived enemies.

My hope is that Führer Trump, the guy the right-wing fanatics and the self-aggrandizing billionaires have picked as their frontman, is a whack job and is screwing up the nation’s economy so badly and attacking programs so important to his MAGA base like ACA insurance premium subsidies and Medicaid as well as SNAP food assistance, that that he may lose them and his rich backers will be seen for what they are: insanely greedy parasites.

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*Note:

In the interest or full disclosure, during the last two years of the first Trump presidency 2017-18, I discovered that my name had been added to the FBI’s Terrorism Watch List, apparently, as I learned, by some office or agency within the Pentagon, as punishment for a cover story I had done a month earlier for the Nation magazine exposing decades of budget and accounting fraud amounting to perhaps hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars over the years and making military spending impossible for Congress to track or evaluate. The Rutherford Institute and its director John Whitehead quickly found me a pro-bono attorney from a major Washington law firm who had ironically been deputy chief counsel for the new Homeland Security Department. Saying “Wow! That watchlist really went off the rails!”, when apprised of my situation, this attorney provided me with the number for his private cell phone which he always keeps on and wihin reach 24/7, so if I were picked up by some traffic cop running a make on me and seeing “terrorist” on accessing my record, he could get me out of a tight spot. I’m grateful for that assistance. (Eventually during the Biden administration, I found I was no longer being subjected to such invasive searches on international flights…at least so far, Though I was never told my name had been removed from that list, because neither the FBI nor the Pentagon will “confirm or deny” to anyone once put on the Terrorist Watch List whether they are on It or not, I have to assume I could still be stopped and searched and perhaps worse on any international trip at any time. It’s part of our reality as citizens (and journalists!) in today’s fascist America.