This Is Exactly Who America Is

 Donald Trump's big mistake is that he did not delegate the authority to smash democratic norms to his lawyers and various underlings so as to achieve plausible deniability. Throughout history, United States presidents have largely escaped widespread public opprobrium both at home and abroad via their studied personal absences from the scenes of actual crimes.

Richard Nixon was done in by the smoking gun of his tapes. Trump was done in by the smoking gun of his big fat mouth and his Twitter feed. When the ultimate sacrilege of the storming of the Capitol by his supporters came down, his various partners - who include both his right-wing pals and the liberal enablers who have profited mightily by substituting their contrived shock and outrage at Trump for providing any meaningful pandemic relief for the masses of people - cannot rid themselves of him fast enough.

His right-wing pals in the oligarchic establishment are cutting off the money spigots, and the neocon wing of the GOP is cutting off their political and emotional support. His Democratic enablers are impeaching him for a second time and fund-raising like mad as they attempt to elicit public sympathy for the physical danger they faced sheltering in place, and for the bodily fear they say they still experience, This fear in high places is already opening the doors for more social repression and more liberal McCarthyism to take up where #Russiagate left off.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested this week that Congress form a new commission to "rein in" the media in order to combat misinformation, the right erupted in anger. But there has been nary a peep from the establishment "left" about the censorship threat. If liberals and progressives think that our elected officials will stop at squelching the speech of Q-Anon conspiracy theorists and their ilk, they should probably think again.  Outlets (see, for example, this puff-piece in Jacobin) perhaps should also think twice about canonizing AOC the same way they once canonized Barack Obama, who later attained the dubious distinction of running one of the most secretive and repressive administrations in recent history.

Unlike Donald Trump, though, Obama did not make the mistake of tweeting and bragging about his right to target the very same perceived enemies, which include journalists, whistleblowers, immigrants, Muslims, and anti-police brutality protesters. When the nation's Democratic governors enforced a coordinated crackdown on Occupy camps in late fall 2011, Obama was conveniently out of the country on a trade junket. He did not unilaterally decide to assassinate thousands of people with his drones, but rather contrived a  Disposition Matrix with the CIA and enlisted his attorney general to write erudite legal opinions to give him the necessary cover for assassinating people. 

When the now fully rehabilitated George W. Bush gave his O.K. to mass surveillance and torture, he had his own team of lawyers write secret manifestos euphemized as "opinions." Thus do credentialed experts like John Yoo not only escape opprobrium and accountability, they are given regular platforms on cable news and the New York Times  from which to virtuously pontificate on Donald Trump's serial assaults on democracy and the rule of law, but at the same time "consult with" Trump on ways to skirt the law. No matter that declaring an atrocity to be legal doesn't miraculously make it morally right. They wear their historical precedents as shields.

Nevertheless, liberal interventionists and neoconservative warmongers alike are not only proclaiming themselves "woke" to the racism in this country, they are also congratulating themselves for the "courage" to label Trump and his base as fascists. Critics have pointed out, rightly, that American fascism erupted with a real vengeance during Reconstruction and the implementation of Jim Crow - under, of course, all the usual legal niceties and opinions written by the well-credentialed in order to give all kinds of inhumane horrors like lynchings and mob violence that all-important gloss of expert respectability.

Fast forward to 2021, and the newly Woke Elites are talking a lot about the Trump era being our own Weimar Republic. Fascism is suddenly all the fashion, but not the kind that they'd be caught dead wearing themselves, of course.

 They're certainly not talking so much about the American Jim Crow laws against miscegenation being one of the main inspirations for Nazi Germany's own September 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of most of their human rights.

The New York Times, even in its own contemporaneous coverage,  glossed right over the passage of those draconian edicts by headlining its article "Reich Adopts Swastika As Official Flag" and framing the Nuremberg Laws around Hitler's reaction to a group of anti-fascist protesters who'd torn down the swastika-emblazoned flag from a German ship docked in New York, and the ensuing diplomatic kerfuffle when a low-level New York City judge named Louis Brodsky dismissed all charges against the culprits. It was not the Nuremberg Laws themselves that the Roosevelt administration initially condemned. It was the fact that an upstart judge exceeded his job description and compared Nazis to pirates. Secretary of State Cordell Hull actually sent Hitler a letter of regret.

  A later New York Times article assured readers that the Nuremberg law forbidding Jews from hiring Aryan household help did not apply to Jewish-Americans doing business in the Reich.

But let's not totally pile on the Paper of Record, which did not yet even exist during the colonial era when the frenzy of corporate land-grabbing and extermination of native human beings proceeded, in tandem with the kidnapping and enslavement of African people, in full fascistic fashion.

Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report aptly calls last week's Capitol riot a "white settler uprising." Fascism has not sprung fully-fledged from the small brain of Donald Trump. Not by a long shot:

White mobs and armed groups have been inflicting violence against the non-white presence in their colonial settler state ever since their ancestors arrived on these shores. The Puritans – a colony-in-arms — had all but completed the mission of racially “purifying” New England within a century of setting foot at Plymouth Rock. Far more Native Americans were killed by massed, armed settler civilians than by uniformed armies of the British Crown or the young U.S. republic. Whites in the slave states of the U.S. South were a people perpetually in arms in “defense” against slave rebellions, with every able-bodied white man obligated to aid in suppressing real or threatened Black revolts. Hundreds of Blacks were massacred in the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion. 

Speaking of presidents, let's not forget the dude on the almighty dollar bill, Father of Our Country George Washington.

Before he fought the Brits and won the revolution despite his own ineptitude in battle, Washington was a slave-owning real estate speculator with a sick hunger for more riches no matter what the human cost. He was every inch the precursor of Donald Trump, only with a powdered wig instead of a comb-over. He relied on his base of aggrieved white settlers and failed farmers and small business people fleeing the East coast for native American territory to do his dirty work for him as much as Trump has relied on his. Washington flouted British peace treaties with the Indians as much as Trump flouts the "norms" of our own neoliberal system. 

Extracting from written correspondence of Washington and sundry of his  plutocratic pals, historian Peter Cozzens writes about the pre-Revolutionary class system, circa 1774, in his biography of the great Indian leader Tecumseh: 

The royal governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunsmore, who himself coveted Indian land for personal profit, had no expectation of peaceful denouement. Frontier subjects, he wrote the Crown, despised treaties made with Indians, "whom they consider but little removed from brute creation." So too did the Virginia aristocracy. With the spring thaw in 1774, surveyors representing George Washington, Patrick Henry and other Tidewater elites staked large claims along the Ohio River. Waving away the royal edict against land grabs as "a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians," Washington told his personal surveyor not to worry.

With the surveyors came settlers willing to wage their scalps on a scrap of land.

So the original meaning of Patrick Henry's clarion cry, "Give me liberty or give me death" seems to have been "Give me the liberty to plunder and get rich and I'll give you the freedom to sweep up my crumbs and kill and die for me in the process."

Some things never change.

Forget AOC's special commission on reining in disinformation. We need a commission on disseminating the truth and not hiding it, as officials and the aristocracy and ruling elites have striven to do probably since hominids first figured out how to get up and walk with two legs and developed the ability to think with autonomous brains.  We need a well-stocked library in every neighborhood. We need courses in history, philosophy and the liberal arts much more than we need STEM curricula to prepare us for the low-wage precarious jobs of the future.

Our ignorance is their greatest strength. Always has been, always will be. 

Bad Fascism vs Less-Bad Fascism

First let's get the in-your-face variety out of the way. Donald Trump led another Nuremberg-style rally Thursday and vowed to bring the troops back home so that they might be deployed "somewhere else" - meaning, presumably, closer to home if not Homeland itself. And even though city cops were barred by their chief from attending the Minneapolis rally, Trump had his own detail of Redshirts on hand to escort protesters from the premises the moment he barked out the order.

Now let's get to the Democratic resistance to this offal-ness. Frontrunner Joe Biden (Fascist-lite) looks more corrupt by the minute, with reports (so far, by only right-leaning media outlets) that not only did he work closely with the CIA "whistleblower" in the White House, this same informant may also have accompanied the former vice president to Ukraine during and after the US-backed coup. Another report, via Rudy Giuliani, claims that Biden received a $900,000 contribution from a Ukraine lobbyist. Biden's campaign is furiously attacking the corporate media for covering all this sleaze, essentially demanding that they cease and desist from practicing journalism in the public interest (not that journalism in the public interest is that much of a thing any more.) Whether these allegations are true, mainly true, somewhat true, or false, mainly false or somewhat false seems moot at this point. Biden is being tainted by them. It's such a shame that this taint is covering up his proven 40-year record of anti-social neoliberal rhetoric and policy. But whoever said life was fair?

Elizabeth Warren, although inching up in the polls and threatening Biden's standing, is nevertheless being hammered from both right and left for "PregnancyGate." The scandal is that although Warren has been saying on the campaign trail that she was fired from a teaching job nearly half a century ago because of pregnancy, earlier video then surfaced of her explaining she'd quit the profession because she lacked the necessary teaching credentials.

Both narratives are likely true. Even if she weren't actually physically fired by her now-deceased principal, she had been due to give birth just as the new school year was starting in September. She knew she wouldn't be allowed to show up for classes either in labor or immediately postpartum, so she preemptively quit before they ever had a chance to fire her. Sure, she fudged the facts, but the essential truth remains that her pregnancy, and all the sexist bigotry then in play, got in the way of her career. She was, for all intents and purposes, barred from employment. So I'd give her a "mostly-to-somewhat true" rating. Her slanted version of events doesn't rise to the gross level of, say, Hillary Clinton's totally false claim that she once dodged sniper fire in Bosnia. Warren was trying to show empathy for women. Clinton was trying to show she was a war hawk to her bones.

But still, I'm torn. Even little bitty lies in the greater service to the truth are fraught, because they tend to turn into greater big fat lies in the service of whatever definition of "truth" is convenient at the time. What do you think?

Also of concern is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's implied threat that he will meddle with Warren's campaign by suppressing her ads and other campaign information as payback for her direct threat to break up his monopolistic social media giant. The pasty-faced little putz was caught on audio vowing to "go to the mat" to insure his continuing status as Master of the Universe. He might even do more damage than Russian troll farms in swinging the election away from Warren and toward, probably, Trump. Or just as bad, toward Hillary Clinton in the brokered convention lots of people are predicting.

Finally, there was Bernie Sanders's heart attack, and to make the blow even worse, the nearly simultaneous death of his daughter-in-law. The corporate press can barely contain its glee, producing an avalanche of "questions are now being raised about his candidacy" and "shadows are being cast on his candidacy" - which is nothing but code that ever so subtly bellows out "Quit, Bernie, Quit!"

My take is that if he wants to stop holding raucous rallies in order to rest and recuperate, then let him, and don't hold it against him. He can easily address the voters by video. Campaign seasons are way too brutally long anyway. If the other candidates in the field had any decency, they'd cut back on their own schedules out of solidarity, and as a way of protesting the made-for-TV spectacle that our politics has become. For those who market "party unity" above all else, then let them put their money where their mouths are for a change.

Speaking of protests, Tulsi Gabbard is threatening to boycott next week's debate over the continued rigging of the process by the Democratic National Committee, along with its rank commercialization into spectacle. If I were her, I'd use the few minutes allotted to her out of the dozen competing voices on the stage to vocally and loudly expose everything she knows about corrupt party machinations and profiteering media bias. Otherwise, the viewers at home might think she's acting out of sour grapes, or that she simply wimped out.

Somebody on that stage should, at the very least, express concern that a new poll reveals that fully 77 percent of Democrats "trust" the same CIA that, among its many other fascistic activities and atrocities, once rescued and then recruited Nazi war criminals to come work for the United States in the Cold War battles against "the Russians."

So my question is what they'll be chanting at next summer's Democratic Convention. Will "USA! USA! USA! be replaced by "CIA! CIA! CIA!"? 

This affinity for the "intelligence community" and "less-bad" fascism no doubt stems from Trump-hatred and not from any true admiration of this unaccountable and often rogue de facto branch of the government. Public opinion can turn on a dime, depending on whatever propaganda is being spooned out to the public at any given time. It was only a few short years ago that the public was on the definite outs with the spooks because of Bush-era torture and the break-in by the CIA of the computers of the senate committees that were investigating the torture.

But wait. Since comic Ellen DeGeneres recently shared a private box with George and Laura Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game, the message the ruling class wants to impart is that since the ruling class mission of Bush rehab has been accomplished, all the fans and maimed Iraq war veterans at home should just relax and enjoy it. If you're a contrarian who took issue with a celebrity schmoozing with a folksy war criminal, then it just proves how petty you are, announced a whole slew of co-celebrities and Democratic donors, strategists and pundits.

David Axelrod‏Verified account @davidaxelrod

What a horrific commentary about our times that @TheEllenShow should even have to explain herself for hanging with President Bush. Good for her!

Ellen, remember, is a treasured member of the same incestuous NBC family which employs Bush's daughter Jenna as a co-host on its infotainment "Today Show." Just like Meghan McCain, Hunter Biden, Chelsea Clinton, Ivanka Trump and virtually all children of politicians and plutocrats, she achieved her position based purely upon her own talents and merits and expertise.

NBC is the same network that for years ignored former Today host Matt Lauer's  sexual abuse of its less-elite female employees, including sweeping an alleged rape under the rug. It's currently reeling from a new Ronan Farrow book alleging that it also suppressed reports of Harvey Weinstein's long history of predation. 

But I guess it could always be worse. NBC could be hosting - and tainting - next week's Democratic debate, which will be jointly controlled by the private media companies CNN and the New York Times. NBC won't get its own turn until November, when the Gong Show field could be winnowed down to a shocking final ten contestants.  

It's a real nail-biter. The lucky viewers at home will have a chance to cast their votes as soon as next winter. If you're in an early primary or caucus state which doesn't require corporate party membership as a prerequisite to participation, your vote might even actually count a little bit.

Isn't capitalist Democracy grand? Isn't Fascism grand when it's a fully-owned subsidiary of capitalist Democracy?

New American Gothic

Make no mistake. This was a gleeful victory celebration for the pair of D.C. comics who currently reside in the White House. At the same moment that the Joker and Catwoman were holding up the human spoils of their Campaign of Cruelty and Fear, ICE agents were terrorizing at least a thousand other children by arresting several hundred of their parents, who were working for low wages at a poultry processing plant in Mississippi.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump family had invested in chicken futures that very morning, betting that the price of drumsticks will soon be skyrocketing for the lack of undocumented foreign workers in the nation's factory farms. That, besides their banal celebration of the latest gun mayhem, could have been another cause for their macabre grimaces in this now-iconic photo.

For those of you who haven't been keeping up on the news, the baby in the picture is the orphaned son of two of last week's victims of the Walmart massacre in El Paso, Texas. Little Paul had been released from the hospital before the Trumps' victory tour, but was summoned back for use as a prop after still-admitted patients refused to meet with the couple. The two other adults in the photo are Paul's aunt and uncle, perhaps invited to pose so as to quash speculation that the Trumps might even be applying to adopt or foster the child out of a sense of guilt.

I suppose it could have been worse. Melania could have been wearing the same Mussolini-inspired "I Really Don't Care" jacket she wore on a previous trip to Texas, when she visited incarcerated immigrant children who'd been ripped away from their parents on orders of the Trump administration. At least, unlike many of them, little Paul of El Paso isn't being housed or even trafficked ("placed for adoption") by the for-profit agency owned and run by Education Secretary Betsy De Vos's fundamentalist Christian family foundation.

The El Paso hospital picture is about as close to a maternal statement as Melania is willing to go. She holds the baby in the same way that a newly-crowned beauty queen holds her bouquet of roses. Donald could be giving the triumphant thumbs-up not only to celebrate the victory of Trump-inspired freelance gun violence, but to signal that he's very proud of his wife for winning the Miss MAGA pageant. It's an even greater honor than winning one of his Miss Universe titles, back when he still owned that particular meat market franchise.

At long last, Melania has evolved from mere arm candy to spokeswoman for a fascistic version of feminism. She is so liberated that she gets her own arm candy trophy, in the form of a helpless little baby. 

Luckily, both little Paul and his aunt and uncle are bona fide US citizens in Texas, which until only recently in the history of global imperialism had been part of Spain-invaded Mexico. It was briefly an independent republic before it became a state, post-US invasion/annexation. The shooter who attacked Hispanic-looking people in the El Paso Walmart perhaps was unaware of the historic fact that Texas was populated by Hispanics and Indian aboriginals long before the white folk refugees and migrants (and yes, a few fugitives and criminals) ever took it in to their heads to begin settling there in droves, especially in the 19th century.

The keyword is "Fact." Trump and his post-fascist fellow travelers don't need any stinking facts to arrive at their own special Truths. They abhor facts. Even the  kinder, gentler, and increasingly senile white supremacist presidential contender Joe Biden let the cat out of his own right-wing bag last week when he announced that "We choose truth over facts."

The denial of both present reality and history are tenets of faith in right-wing populism, which according to historian Federico Finchelstein is nothing less than the direct post-World War Two offshoot of the fascist totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which lost their legitimacy after the Nazi genocide and Allied/Soviet victories. 

Fascism never died. It has simply evolved into new forms. It has always been a worldwide phenomenon, despite the discovery by the corporate media conglomerate that far-right nationalism is a sudden worldwide phenomenon fueled by oligarchs and their think tanks and media outlets. The current form, as exemplified and amplified by Trump and explained by Finchelstein, operates within more or less democratic systems even as it belittles, challenges and damages these same systems. What all the right-wing/post-fascist populist iterations have in common is their devotion to cruelty, their gospel of fear of foreigners (xenophobia), their hatred of the Enlightenment and liberalism, and their strongman-type leaders who purport to act for "the People" and against so-called invaders and elites: the "Anti-People." 

As Finchelstein quotes the late Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, "most abominable of all, they promote idiocy."

The way to fight this idiocy is not, as many Democratic centrists like Biden simplistically propose, a return to the same "moral" neoliberal austerity agendas that helped to bring Trump to power. Coupled with their own cruel and idiotic resistance to policies like Medicare For All, debt forgiveness, guaranteed affordable housing and living wages, their neoliberal program not only ensures the survival of Trumpism, it willingly conspires with Trumpism. It also hastens the death of the planet through polluting militarized capitalism run amok.

Of course, the idiocy exemplified by the baby-holding photo proudly posted by Melania herself is also very cunning, designed as it is to provoke liberal outrage. This mass outrage in its own turn allows the Trumps to portray themselves as the victims, in fake solidarity with the very same left-behind people they oppress with their antisocial policies, but who've been taught to identify with the true oppressors and to direct their hate and fear to immigrants and other powerless manufactured enemies.

This technique is what the late Christopher Hitchens described as "co-opting populism in the service of elitism" in his critique of former Trump pal Bill Clinton.

Centrists falsely conflate Trump's right-wing populism with Bernie Sanders's left-wing populism, which is really nothing more radical than FDR-style liberalism.  New Deal programs have been under relentless duopolistic attack since the end of World War Two. Democrats, using the propaganda of #Russiagate, actually employ the same "Us Vs.Them" rhetoric as Trump and his fellow-travelers. In draining democracy of every last ounce of its emancipatory potential, these centrist technocrats abandon actually-existing people every bit as cruelly and effectively do their right-wing Republican counterparts. 

All they have to offer us are the grimaces frozen on their faces. They put the dental back in presidential. What is modern electoral politics, after all, but the shiny veneer covering up all the rot?

Grand Guignol Sold As Democratic Debate

The gilded, gaudy Phantom of the Opera stage was what immediately set the tone for the comic horror that was to be the second round of the Democratic debates. Then came the ominous sound of thumping military boots echoing throughout the auditorium as a prelude to the National Anthem. And then CNN cut to commercial.

Since I live-streamed the spectacle on a special CNN app which I was forced to download for the privilege of participating from afar in our money-soaked electoral democracy, I am sad to report that I missed the ads. But I did read that they included such regular CNN sponsors as the drug companies and the private health insurance lobbies who set the tone for the moderators' anti-Single Payer questions.

The combination of frenzied theatrical melodrama, jackbooted militarism, and rank corporatism gave the proceedings the distinct whiff of fascism. The only difference between the CNN debates and a Trump rally was that the CNN spectacle did not contain any obvious or overt racism or xenophobia.

You really had to listen very closely to detect it. Joe Biden, for example, bragged that he warmly welcomes any immigrant with a Ph.D who wants to enter our country to enjoy our freedoms. (translation: to help keep our corporate profits great) That statement kind of excludes the Central American compesinos seeking refuge from the US-engendered regime changes and climate catastrophes, and allowed him to elide the fact that he was President Obama's own special emissary to the region,  his mission being to stop the migrants before they even entered Mexico. Trump could not immediately enforce a similar agreement, thanks to his own lack of diplomatic skills.

Besides a jolly-sounding Cory Booker (D-NJ-Private Equity) the only people vociferously challenging Biden on Obama's record deportations and anti-immigrant policies, in fact, were a group of immigrant protesters in the audience.

It's amazing, really, that the protesters got inside the building, because Bernie Sanders supporters had just been physically barred from even entering a CNN-controlled section of the parking lot outside Detroit's Fox Theater.

As Status Coup's Jordan Chariton reported from the scene:

Multiple supporters for Bernie Sanders who were part of the “visibility zone” area—an area designated by CNN for supporters of candidates to stand with their signs and cheer on camera—told Status Coup that efforts were made by both CNN and local police to visually diminish their presence as compared to the supporters of other candidates like Warren. 

 "Four different police officers said we could not go that way, as it was reserved for the other candidates’ supporters,” Sanders supporter Victoria Bowman told Status Coup. “One even used a bullhorn to dissuade us, but we ignored them and carried on. A Bernie campaign person got us past the last battalion of officers intent on blocking us. That campaign person went back out into the streets to bring more Bernie people in, then she was not allowed back into the “cheering section." 

  There were very few Bernie supporters allowed into the lot that was full of Warren, Williamson, and Biden supporters. Their cheers nearly drowned out the voices of Bernie’s supporters. Bowman’s account was confirmed by other supporters who faced similar roadblocks from the police blocking them from entering the cheering section that other candidates’ supporters appeared free to come and go from as they pleased.

So we can add police repression to the theatricality, jingoism and corporate profit motive to make the privatized Democratic Debate franchise fit the classic definition of fascism.

One of the few full-throated rebukes to bipartisan complicity in the long-standing American institutional racist tradition also came from protesters in the audience, who shouted "Fire Pantaleo!" at candidate Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York. Daniel Pantaleo is the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death and who still, under de Blasio's liberal watch, remains on the several job years later despite an official ruling that Garner died of a police-inflicted homicide.

 Much to everyone's surprise, Kamala Harris did not reprise her Act One starring role as Biden foil in the second episode of Debate Thriller Theater. Her previous attack on him over his anti-busing record was apparently just a one-off. Biden's team had done its own homework on Harris's own authoritarian record as California's chief prosecutor, noting that she had failed to bring lawsuits against two heavily segregated school districts in her state.

But the most damage to Harris and her de facto Jim Crow agenda was inflicted by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii,who lambasted Kamala for abusing the rights of defendants in her jurisdiction. She perfectly clarified Joe Biden's somewhat garbled counter-attack on Harris's record. Here's how the whole exchange played out:

All Kamala Harris could do was say how proud she was of her hard work in "fixing the criminal justice system." When Tulsi Gabbard demanded that she apologize to all the poor people she has hurt, Harris simply offered her trademark nervous giggle.

Sadly, due to her own low poll numbers and individual donations (update: she has now met the donation threshhold) this was very likely Tulsi's last stand on the presidential debate stage. But she has certainly earned a permanent place on the national political stage as one of the country's last remaining anti-war politicians.

With a faltering Biden barely standing erect and Harris's reputation so damaged, it seems that the last best hope of the corporate wing is Mayor Pete Buttigieg. I can't wait for Bernie and Liz to confront him on, among other things, his attendance at a plutocratic "Stop Bernie!" strategizing fund-raiser earlier this year.

If the Democratic centrists were "agonizing" about Bernie's momentum last spring, they must really be in the thrashing and gnashing final throes of neoliberal misery by now, in the wake of his strong debate performance. As far as Elizabeth Warren is concerned, we'll just have to wait and see whether the corporatists will be as successful in co-opting her as they seemed to think they were only the other day. When you've lost Paul Krugman....

The next pseudo-debate is scheduled for September, and miracle of miracles, it appears that it will be a blessed one-night stand, with fully half of the candidates not expected to meet the rigid party criteria for appearing.

The news personalities playing the emcees will again do their own hideous best to pit the actors against each other and ensure that a gloriously gruesome time is had by all, especially by the corporate sponsors who pay their seven-figure salaries and rake in the profits at the expense of the millions of trapped paying subscriber-voters glued to their screens at home. Because admit it. You just can't look away.

United In Exile

With about eight dynasties now possessing as much money as half the entire world's population combined, it is impossible to ignore the fact that extreme wealth inequality is antithetical to the health and future of humanity and every other living thing on earth. 

Despite the dystopian title - American Nightmare - of his latest book, cultural critic and prolific author Henry Giroux thinks that with a combined regimen of education and organization, we might still overthrow neoliberal fascism, of which the Donald Trump administration is only the most recent and most noxious end-product. He writes: 

There is certainly something to be learned from older, proven tactics including using education to create a revolution in consciousness and values, and using broad-based alliances to create the conditions for mass disruptions such as the general strike. These tactics combine theory, consciousness, and practice as a part of a strategy to dismantle the complex workings of the death-dealing machinery of casino capitalism and its recent intensification under the Trump administration. Certainly, one of the most powerful tools of oppression is convincing people that the oppressive conditions they experience are normal and cannot be changed. The ideology of normalization functions to prevent any understanding of the larger systemic forces of oppression by insisting that all problems are individually based and ultimately a matter of individual character and responsibility.

Evidence abounds all over the world that oppressed people are no longer convinced. Workers in European Amazon fulfillment centers walked off the job during the peak of the Christmas buying season over the weekend, and citizens of France are demonstrating all over their country against a new punishing diesel fuel tax. Migrants from Central America defied a tear gas assault by Trump's military forces at the Mexico-US border, bringing anew their own message of democratic defiance and courage to the world at large.

Meanwhile, back in the US capitol, House Speaker-in-Waiting Nancy Pelosi took to the pay-walled pages of the Amazon Empire's Washington Post mouthpiece in yet another attempt to convince the oppressed that her plutocratic Congress is in their corner.

But her words can't help but betray that the Democratic Party's toothless new "restoring democracy" legislation is simply more sugar-coating of the continued oppression of ordinary people by the Amazon-America League of Oligarchs. She follows the neoliberal playbook of diagnosing the lethal cancer and then prescribing band-aids to keep it nicely hidden. The "big tells" are highlighted in my bold.

(First, here's the obligatory big brave honest and carefully nitpicked "feel your pain" admission of some of the horror oppressing us): For far too long, big-money and corporate special interests have undermined the will of the people and subverted policymaking in Washington — enabling soaring health-care costs and prescription drug prices, undermining clean air and clean water for our children, and blocking long-overdue wage increases for hard-working Americans. 

(Now comes the standard laundry list of bromides and placebos) So let’s rein in the unaccountable “dark money” unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision by requiring all political organizations to disclose their donors and by shutting down the shell game of big-money donations to super PACs. We must also empower hard-working Americans in our democracy by building a 21st-century campaign-finance system — combining small-donor incentives and matching support — to increase and multiply the power of small donors. Wealthy special interests shouldn’t be able to buy more influence than the workers, consumers and families who should be our priority in Washington.

The solutions offered by neoliberals for what they themselves have wrought are aspirational at best and devious at worst. Pelosi doesn't want to outlaw money in politics, she merely wants to "rein it in" and encourage more oppressed voters to donate as a way for the wealthy to be inspired to give (more) in kind. She merely wants to pretend to "level" the playing field by strewing it with cold hard cash from all classes, in order to give our de facto oligarchy the fig leaf of egalitarianism. Your dollar and their million dollars are all the same color and it naturally follows that you, too, can be as influential as they are. But tellingly, she gives discriminatory priority only to those "hard-working" people who still have the power to consume more stuff from Amazon fulfillment centers. There is no mention of the poor and near-poor, who now account for at least half the population. When you consider the fact that fully two-thirds of Americans don't even have a couple of hundred bucks stashed away for a household emergency, the methods by which experts measure poverty in this country become ever more ludicrous.

Pelosi concludes:

And with a system that works for the people, we will deliver policy outcomes that make life better for all Americans: We will lower health-care costs and out-of-control prices for prescription drugs. We will rebuild the United States’ infrastructure, raise the minimum wage and put leverage back in the hands of workers and consumers. We will finally advance common-sense, bipartisan solutions to prevent gun violence. We will confront discrimination with the Equality Act , pass the Dream Act to protect the patriotic young undocumented immigrants who came here as children, and take the first step toward comprehensive immigration reform.

Translation: there will be no single payer, Medicare For All legislation coming from her party, despite the fact that more than 90% of registered Democrats are in favor of it, and nearly half of registered Republicans are, making for a combined 70% favorability factor. You might save a few bucks on your drugs, but that's as far as they'll go.

 The dreaded "common-sense bipartisan solutions" to prevent gun violence do not actually translate into banning gun ownership and assault weapons manufacture, or drastically diminishing America's violent role as the biggest arms dealer on the planet. It doesn't translate into government-subsidized medical and surgical care for gunshot victims.

 Democrats will timidly "confront" discrimination and only "take the first step" on immigration reform. There will be no more talk of abolishing ICE and protesting Trump's pediatric concentration camps at the border. The midterm election campaigns are over.

I asked Henry Giroux whether his opinion of Democrats has changed at all since his book was published last summer, in light of their recent takeover of the House of Representatives, and their self-advertised nouveau-progressivism. 

 "I think the hard line against both parties that the book takes still holds true, and is an antidote to people like Jason Stanley and others who rail against fascist politics but still push a misguided faith in liberal politics and the two party system," he replied in an email. "This is the dreadful political and moral hangover that gets them reviews in the press."  

Nancy Pelosi is, of course, only one of the zombie characters in our collective American Nightmare. She will likely continue as House leader, because the right-wing Blue Dogs and "New" Democrats currently posturing as her foes actually do make her look "progressive" by comparison. She is an integral part of what Henry Giroux calls "America's shopworn legacy of 'habitual optimism,' one that substitutes a cheery, empty, Disney-like dreamscape for any viable notion of utopian possibility. The Disney dreamscape evacuates hope of any substantive meaning. It attempts to undercut a radical utopian element in the conceptual apparatus of hope that speaks to the possibility of a democratic future very different from the authoritarian past or present."

He continues:

Trump's unapologetic authoritarianism has prompted Democratic Party members and the liberal elite to position themselves as the only model of organized resistance. It is difficult not to see their alleged moral outrage and faux resistance as both comedic and hypocritical in light of the role these centrist liberals have played in the past forty years - subverting democracy and throwing the working class and people of color under the bus."

But as I mentioned above, people are emerging from underneath that bus. The fact that the vast majority of us live in exile does not also mean that we are squashed into helpless pulp by the machinery of capitalism on crack.

Henry Giroux sounds an alarm tinged with optimism in the last chapter of his American Nightmare, in which he explores the notion of Democracy in Exile.

We ourselves, he writes, must be 

(A) counterforce and remedy to the Jacksonian intolerance, violence, expulsion, and racism of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and Trumpism as a nationalist movement drifting in plain sight from plutocracy and authoritarian nepotism to fascism. Democracy in exile is the space in which people, families, networks, and communities fight back. It unites the promise of insurrectional political engagement with the creation of expansive new manifestations of justice - social, economic, environmental. 

Spaces for democracies in exile include churches and homes and cities and counties which give sanctuary to refugees and undocumented migrants facing deportation. Henry Giroux explains that

Such cities and counties, and a host of diverse public spheres, function as parallel structures that create alternative modes of communication, social relations, education, health care and cultural work, including popular music, social media, the performing arts, and literature. These spaces are what Vaclav Benda has called a 'parallel polis' which brings pressure on official structures, implements new modes of pedagogical resistance, and provides the basis for organizing larger day-to-day protests and more organized and sustainable social movements.

We have to crawl out from beneath that neoliberal nightmare bus, hoist ourselves up, and start talking to each other, finding common ground and reclaiming our humanity. We have to start somewhere, despite how small and puny our efforts might seem to us in the beginning. We have to keep in mind that what we fight against - neoliberal financialized capitalism and its resultant oligarchic power structure - is a small-minded ideology fostered by greedy, small-minded people who have to tell us constant lies to maintain their increasingly shaky grasp on power. 

Red Fascists, Blue Fascists, Old Fascists, New Fascists

With the Democratic Party and its various media sycophants and fund-raising offshoots now planning mass rallies in support of fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, I think it's safe to assume that fascism has officially arrived in America. 

Rather than march against Trump's militarization of the border, or for that matter, the US's brutal global militarization in general, liberals will be marching to express their shock and displeasure at the ouster of one of the most racist and xenophobic officials in modern American history. 

House Speaker-in-Waiting Nancy Pelosi got knocked off the playground seesaw within 24 hours of verbally pandering to Trump - in the name of "national unity" - in the wake of her party's feeble midterm victory, and immediately characterized the firing as a "constitutional crisis" because it endangers the interminable RussiaGate investigation of Trump by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is subordinate to the Attorney General.  

The media-political complex is shocked, shocked that Trump would replace Sessions with a DOJ "loyalist," who, we learn almost in an aside, has also been employed by CNN as a legal affairs talking head.

The outrage is not so much that Matthew Whitaker crossed the red line between public service employment and private media employment, but that he allegedly is a hypnotized Trilby to Trump's Svengali.  

The New York Times editorialized:

 Mr. Whitaker — who has been called the “eyes and ears” of the White House inside the Justice Department by John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff — has expressed a Trumpian degree of hostility to the investigation he is now charged with overseeing. He has called it a “witch hunt” and, in its earliest months, wrote an opinion piece arguing that Mr. Mueller was coming “dangerously close” to crossing a “red line” by investigating the president’s finances. He has suggested there was nothing wrong in Mr. Trump’s 2017 firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and he has supported the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. In an interview last year he described “a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment, and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.” In 2014, he headed the political campaign for Iowa state treasurer of Sam Clovis, who later became a Trump campaign aide and, more recently, a witness in the Russia investigation.

Rather than criticize the glaring conflict of interest in Whitaker's recent post at CNN, the Times carefully limits its ire to Whitaker's conflict of interest regarding the Russiagate investigation. That's because emphasizing the CNN connection would not be in keeping with the "narrative" that Trump persecutes the corporate media and its various personalities by calling them "fake news" and "enemies of the people."

As I wrote in my published response to Charles Blow, whose own column on the subject also concentrated on Whitaker's pro-Trump verbiage on CNN rather than on this Department of Justice official's monetized connection to CNN:

The only thing more (ahem) shocking than Trump firing Sessions is that his successor, Whitaker, also works as a paid CNN legal contributor. The conflicts of interest in this American oligarchy, which still ridiculously poses as a republic, extend so far beyond the Trump gene pool, it isn't funny.

You'd think that Trump would disqualify Whitaker because of his connection to CNN. But the truth is that Trump loves the corporate media, and they love him right back. They give him all the free air time he requires, and then some. He, in turn, supplies them with record-breaking ad revenue and viewership.

The back-and-forth at the post-midterms press con between Trump and CNN star Jim Acosta appeared completely staged to me. These men are filling their required roles for "The Spectacle" (in lieu of gathering actual news or discussing the problems of ordinary people.)

Trump relishes this role because casting himself as a beleaguered victim-warrior endears him even more to his fans, who have been manipulated into channeling their very real grievances into the Trump "kampf." The Republicans owned by the wealthy stay silent because plutocrats and fascists have historically made very cozy bedfellows. I think it's now safe to declare that fascism has arrived, blue wave or no.

What if Trump held a rally or a press conference and nobody televised it? He'd immediately collapse like the over-inflated balloon of fetid hot air that he is. And the corporate sponsors would be very sad.

For those of you who missed it, here's the full clip of Wednesday's press conference:

 As presidential press conferences go, it was a riveting and bizarre treat, an entertainment special tailor-made for the profit driven corporate media. It even has a sequel, with the White House later accusing Acosta of "touching" the White House intern who'd attempted to remove his microphone, and then revoking his press access to the building. As if that wasn't enough, Trump Press Secretary Sarah Sanders began sharing a doctored video of Acosta accosting the intern. And that has led to  further outrage from the champions of a free corporate-sponsored press who simultaneously and hypocritically applaud the censorship efforts of Facebook and Google as pertain to more independent (unapproved) news outlets. 

 All concerned are playing their parts to perfection. Nothing buries popular demands for the public good, such as Medicare for All, like Democrats attacking Trump from the right and rallying neoliberal neofascists to protest the firing of their new confederate anti-immigrant hero, Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III. It's a professionally coordinated "rapid response" astroturfed uprising reminiscent of the Tea Party.

Wall Street has declared itself well-pleased with all the outcomes of the Midterminals, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average shooting up more than 500 points after the cosmetic restoration of two-party, duopolistic rule. The record $5 billion invested by the oligarchy into the one democratic vestige we still have left was money very well spent indeed, because most of the Democratic wins came in affluent Congressional districts.

When, in her post-midterminal victory speech (pre-Sessions ouster), Nancy Pelosi gushed that these meager victories prove that "we have a marketplace of ideas that makes our democracy strong" she wasn't kidding. The emphasis on the "we" serves to define unfettered capitalism as democracy for the very few and the very privileged who. she said, "have all had enough of division." Oh, and maybe they'll even give a little token relief to "hardworking Americans" who can demonstrate a lot of skin in their game. Pelosi is so into plutocratic unity that she even cadged a page from the Trump playbook and promised to Drain the Swamp of dark unaccountable money.

"Let's hear it more for pre-existing medical conditions!" she unnecessarily added to the cheers of an exclusive crowd of party operatives and donors and, of course, those dedicated and unpaid volunteers.

The Other F Word

It is a truth universally acknowledged that we are all f***ed. The question is whether Trump-style fascism is shafting us, or whether neoliberal capitalism is doing the job.

As Henry Giroux posits, it's both: a deadly hybrid combined into a humanity-destroying racist, sexist, xenophobic greedzilla of doom. Or, as Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford views it, it's the modern Democratic and Republican parties acting as two bickering factions of the same fascist regime.

I've been reading a lot of books about fascism lately in preparation for a blog post, only to discover that I've amassed enough material to write another book about it. And I'm still not done. And I still have more questions than I do answers.

What I can say is that there are two main categories of books about fascism. The first set includes scholarly volumes of history, psychology, sociology and politics, written long before Donald Trump ever arrived on the scene.  The second set belongs to the new genre of alarm-bell fascism, which either is arriving fully formed on our shores in the person of Donald Trump all dressed up as Hitler, or is still only kind of scary-ghosty, with Donald Trump secretly wearing his swastika armband high enough on his fleshy arm so nobody can see it, even when he's playing golf.

The best example of this genre has been on the bestseller list for months. It's called Fascism: A Warning" and its author is Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. You might remember her as the Clinton official who told CBS that the price of half a million Iraqi children dying of starvation as a result of US economic sanctions had been "worth it." She doesn't delve, in her version of fascism, into one of its main tenets being expansion of the nation into the far corners of the earth. But that's not her point. Her point is falsely equating Donald Trump-style fascism with Hugo Chavez-style socialism and trumpeting the need to vote Clintonite Democrats back into power before Russia takes over and the New World Order goes kaput. You see, "liberal interventionism" killing is not the same thing as conservative imperialistic killing.

And now that the midterm elections are nearly upon us, the liberal media itself is getting into the Albrightean act with a vengeance. If you won't accept that we're either living under Nazi rule or about to, you're part of the problem. Be very, very afraid. And get out there and vote as though your lives depended on it!

The Huffington Post got into the act over the weekend with a banner scare headline announcing that a white supremacist hate group had invaded New York City. This was slightly misleading, given that at most, about a dozen alt-right "Proud Boys" beat up an antifa protester outside a Republican club which had just featured an alt-right dude as its featured speaker. The HuffPo has since removed the scare-mongering headline of its piece.

Another example of the genre is a video editorial posted in the New York Times on Monday. The star of this show, which is preceded by a Democratic Party campaign ad, is a Yale philosopher and fascism expert named Jason Stanley. He provides us with plenty of easy evidence showing that Donald Trump talks the fascist talk and walks the fascist walk: his ultra-nationalistic, racist and xenophobic rhetoric combined with the relentless repetition of Goebbels-style lies and the well-televised Nuremberg-style campaign rallies for his hordes of besotted fans and greedy cable infotainment outlets. After the good professor explains to us that too often, politicians resort to calling one another fascists as an all-purpose insult, his talk becomes replete with graphics showing Trump  dressed up as Hitler, and lots of video of the real Hitler, and even a clip of a Madison Square Garden Bund rally from the 30s.  

After spending his allotted few minutes explaining why fascism is so awful, and that we should be very afraid of both it and Trump, he runs out of time before he can explain just how this ideology can gain national power in the first place, and what we can do about it other than simply running out to vote for the allegedly lesser evil Democrats.

My published comment:

While Jason Stanley correctly describes the techniques of fascists like Trump, he ignores the situations which permit fascism to rear its ugly head in the first place.

The previous major outbreak occurred in the aftermath of World War I and the worldwide depression. Combined with pre-existing anti-Semitism and the weakness and corruption of liberal democracy and the mutual hatred of both the right-wingers and the "liberals" for communists, it allowed Hitler to step into the vacuum.

Despite the Depression, fascism didn't similarly catch on in the US as a mass movement because first, the war had been fought across the ocean, and second, FDR enacted the New Deal under pressure from a then-vibrant left wing, aka socialists. The Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden soon became a thing of the past.

Fast forward to Trump. Decades of neoliberal capitalism have created severe wealth inequality, with most Americans not even having $200 saved up for a household emergency. Only the poor and working class fight in our endless wars. Politicians from both parties are beholden to the rich.

So yes, we should be very, very afraid of fascism while acknowledging that a form of it -- corporatism - has been suborning democracy for quite some time now. We cannot expect to defeat Trump and the GOP without transforming our government into a force for good for all the people, not just for a handful of oligarchs.

Otherwise, the next fascist leader will make Trump look downright benign.

So far, anyway, Donald Trump is simply an aspiring fascist leader, spending most of his time tweeting and flailing about in the Oval Office as the derogatory leaks from his staff are nearly a daily occurrence. At best, he is only a semi-successful fascist leader. He commands no mass movement. He has not shut down any TV stations or newspapers nor thrown any reporters in prison, despite his dangerous rhetoric about them being enemies of the people. That big military parade in his honor has been called off indefinitely.

But he's getting there. His imprisonment of migrant children in holding pens and tent cities is a step up from the Obama administration's draconian deportation crusade and  "family detention centers," which at least kept mothers and kids together and therefore were not subject to widespread criticism by liberal pundits and the Democratic Party faithful. The fascistic tendencies of Obama and his predecessors were of the sort called "friendly fascism" or what the late Sheldon Wolin termed "inverted totalitarianism." 

And of course, if you are a black person in America, you have indeed been living under de facto fascism for probably your whole life. Three out of every 10 black males are imprisoned at least once during their lifetimes. Three people, mostly black, are killed by law enforcement in the United States every single day. Michael Bloomberg, the "moderate" mayor of New York City who is now contemplating a challenge to Trump on the Democratic ticket, instituted a policy of Stop and Frisk directed against all black men. This thuggish practice finally got overturned by the courts, just as many of Donald Trump's own anti-immigrant and racist policies have been.

And, since under the Obama administration the longstanding law known as Posse Comitatus was overturned by Executive Order, we've all been living under technically fascistic authoritarian rule for the past eight or nine years, whether we've been blissfully unaware of it or not. If enough of us ever take to the streets in unsanctioned mass protests, the military now has the authority to turn against its own rebellious citizens by whatever means necessary. It is even deemed technically legal for our government to assassinate us by remote-control predator drone, should the rights of the ruling class to ownership and control of everything become seriously threatened.

So insofar as Trump is a fascist, he inherited the fascism, and has remade it into his own brand.

Meanwhile, the term "fascism" is so hard to define precisely because it is inherently self-contradictory. It is both radical and reactionary. It picks and chooses among several "isms," discarding its beliefs and policies willy-nilly, and does the same thing with its leaders and supporters, as the need arises. Its main requirement is a constant state of crisis, whether real or manufactured, alongside maintaining a permanent mythic core leading to a new revolution growing out of the old order. (Make America Great Again. Drain the Swamp.)

As Roger Griffin writes in "The Nature of Fascism," 

On susceptible people, it has the almost magical power to transmute black despair  into manic optimism and thus enable a party that promotes this vision to win a substantial mass following. It promises to replace gerontocracy, mediocrity and national weakness with youth, heroism and national greatness and put into government outstanding personalities instead of non-entities. If the times are ripe, the vague or contradictory implications of the policies proposed to realize such nebulous goals do not diminish their attraction because it is precisely that mythic power that matters, not their feasibility or human implications.

Hope and change, We are the ones we've been waiting for. Yes, we can! America is already great, because America is good. We are the One Indispensable Nation. 

(Griffin doesn't consider Trump to be a bona fide fascist, by the way, simply because he has not met the strict requirement of ordering or even advocating for the overthrow of democratic institutions. But does he really have to, when staffing them with incompetents and corporate infiltrators does the job just as well, if not better?)

Arthur Koestler writes in The Ghost in the Machine that our human brains have not kept pace with science and technology, which have at least partly replaced religious belief in modern civilization. Thus has come the rise of ultranationalism, because people still desperately need something to believe in, especially when economic times are hard.

In the case of fascism, its core myth of the regenerated national community led by a revolutionary elite calls a priori for an act of identification, a neurologically based mischanneling of the human drive for self-transcendance. This engenders a paranoid, dualistic mindset conducive to boundless idealism and fanatical devotion toward the embyonic new nation, coupled with ruthless violence directed at its alleged enemies.

In Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm noted of Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes that although many people were able to take advantage of the freedom engendered by industrial progress, others felt increasingly unmoored and thus turned to authoritarian leadership to avoid an all-pervasive loneliness.

For the past half-century, we have been living under the regime of neoliberalism, or corporatism, where all lives are defined or dominated by market forces, and in which we are judged primarily on our ability to earn and consume. When people lose these abilities, as they have in vast numbers since the 2008 financial collapse and the transfer of 94% of all that "lost" household wealth to the moneyed elite, they become depressed, confused, and insecure. Millions of them have turned to Donald Trump, who alone among the other presidential candidates at least addressed the unfairness and corruption, albeit only for his own nefarious and self-interested purposes.

Roger Griffin lists four pre-conditions for the rise of fascistic leadership:

1. the presence either of native currents of ultra-nationalism, or of fascist role models to build on.

2. Adequate political space in a "modern" society is undergoing a structural crisis, for example, after an economic collapse and costly war.

3. An inadequate consensus on liberal values. Fascism can only break out of the lunatic right when society is struck by a crisis. Even then, the  seizure of actual power is doubtful.

4. Favorable contingency. Chance or "destiny" comes into play. A charismatic leader with a flair for propaganda and self-advertisement and co-option of human psychology, emerges.  The "elective affinity" with fascism is experienced by every individual involved in it, from the leader to the most lukewarm fellow traveler, is the product of unique psychological predispositions which are reducible to tendencies, patterns and types. The "chance" factor also relies on the vagaries of the electoral system.

Taking this list of requirements into account, there is a case to be made for Barack Obama as the charismatic "friendly" proto-fascist, whose cult of personality swept him into power. After all, he did win the "advertiser of the year" award after his first campaign. His sellout of his voting base to corporate interests, ironically juxtaposed with the pre-existing "native currents" of racism in this country, paved the way for the decidedly uncharismatic Donald Trump, whose very loathsomeness is his paradoxical attraction for the cynical as well as for the desperate. He also profited by the "chance contingency" factor of the archaic Electoral College system, winning the office despite massively losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

As a bundle of inconsistencies, he simply represents the vicious, built-in contradictions of fascism which make the term so hard to define. But since he is not a fanatical ideologue, and since we still live do in a putative democracy with three branches of "checks and balances" government, and the Constitution remains more or less intact, Trump is no Hitler.

Maybe Mike Pence can be more successful, especially since he is the one who filled the White House with all those oligarchic enablers, and since he is the one who is a true believer in the subversive Prosperity Gospel and hardcore Christian fundamentalism. Perhaps he will strive to become the leader of a full-blown fascist theocracy. Cue The Handmaid's Tale.

And of course, don't rule Hillary Clinton out just yet, despite her and Bill embarking on the lucrative paid speaking circuit. If Trump has accomplished anything, it is showing that you can still win high office despite shady financial dealings.

As Wikileaks revealed (and as even the New York Times reported) Hillary certainly fills the fascistic requirement of unlimited brute-force national expansionism:

When she became secretary in 2009, she posed a question about China to an Australian leader: “How do you deal toughly with your banker?” In the Goldman transcript, she suggested that she had answered her own question when sparring with the Chinese over its claims in the South China Sea.

“I made the point at one point in the argument that, you know, you can call it whatever you want to call it,” she said. “You don’t have a claim to all of it. I said, by that argument, you know, the United States should claim all of the Pacific. We liberated it, we defended it. We have as much claim to all of the Pacific. And we could call it the American Sea, and it could go from the West Coast of California all the way to the Philippines.”

 (my bold.)

So, what is fascism anyway? The answers are still as varied and as confusing as Hillary Clinton's American Sea is wide.