Today’s Rant: The Week They Finally Said It Out Loud

In a week where a US president refused to condemn right-wing protesters who drove through and sprayed a crowd in Portland with paint balls and pepper spray, and a another who shot three people in Kenosha, killing two, I believe that this will instead be the week remembered as the time that mainstream commentators finally quit pussy-footing around the truth, and said what they’ve long thought, but were reluctant to say aloud: our country is sliding into Fascism.

Among the most generous commentators, Dan Rather still held back, calling the Republican Party’s messaging machine a “fertilizer spreader in a windstorm.”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, who has spent her career studying the history of the Republican party, and who has almost always held back, just noting the events and their similarities to authoritarianism, but without passing judgement, finally said what she has long hinted: current events are “the rise of Fascism in the U.S.”

And former secretary of Labor Robert Reich finally quit beating around the bush and said “the choice in November is not Democrat or Republican. It is democracy or fascism.”

Almost with a sigh of relief, numerous others have finally spoken their agreement:

In his newsletter, The.Ink. New York Times journalist Anand Giridharadas wrote “We are locked in a cold civil war,” and that Fox News’s coverage of the Republican convention resembled “a complete, coherent, airtight, fascistic world.”

Former George W. Bush speech writer David Frum, in The Atlantic also uses a Civil War comparison, writing “Trump is a secessionist from the top,” noting “As my colleague Ron Brownstein often observes, Trump regards himself as a wartime president of Red America against Blue America.”

Ben Domenech, publisher of the conservative website The Federalist, also refers to a new antebellum United States, writing “The cultural civil war that has been simmering underneath the surface is now boiling.”

As if to add icing on the Fascist Civil War cake, It’s also a week where a federal Appeals Court has, against generations of precedence, declared open season on journalists and legal observers at protests; and Detroit police openly defied their deputy chief’s promise that legal observers would not be “impeded or arrested” and deliberately targeted them with violence and arrest.

For those of you unfamiliar, “legal observers,” often lawyers or law students, have since the 1970s attended protests not to take part, but to simply document the event, including protesters’ interactions with police. They wear bright green hats to identify themselves, and police generally, with a few exceptions, until recently left them unharassed.

However at a protest on Saturday, April 29, Southfield attorney and legal observer Sara Habbo told Michigan Radio that when legal observers reminded officers – who had announced that protestors must leave the street – of Deputy Chief Bettison’s assurance of non-interference, “the police officers hit one of our Legal Observers with a baton a couple times. Another one was hit with a police shield being used as a weapon. And then all three of them, who just happened to be together, were sprayed with pepper spray directly in their faces. And then one of our observers on the opposite side of the street was arrested.”

“They all knew what the hats meant and what we would be doing,” Habbo said. “We literally stand on the side and document. And when the deputy chief’s promise was repeated to one of the officers, he replied, ‘Deputy Chief Bettison isn’t here.’”

So, we have a court that gives police the OK to target journalists and legal observers for arrest; police departments deliberately targeting legal observers and journalists covering protests; a political party using over-the-top lies and propaganda to scare voters; an Administration that is full to the top with Trump lickspittles more intent on pleasing him than actually fulfilling their duties; a president who as a candidate advocated the jailing of his opponent and then as president requested help from a foreign country to dig up dirt on his reelection opponent; a president who continually sides with our greatest geopolitical rival; a president that will deny press credentials to journalists he dislikes or who write unfavorable articles; a president who continues to refuse to condemn right-wing violence, while spinning his own boogey-man-crazy conspiracy theories about people peacefully protesting police brutality; a president who not only openly states he is denying funds to the U.S. Postal Service to deliberately hamper mail in voting but has also put a crony at the top of the agency who immediately set about destroying the agency’s ability to deliver mail in a timely fashion to finish the job; all with a de facto state televison network to amplify the president’s and his party’s lies.

So, looking at the Princeton Election Consortium’s 2020 Authoritarian Checklist:

1. Taking sides with a foreign power against domestic opposition.
2. Detention of journalists.
3. Loss of press access to the White House.
4. Made-up charges against those who disagree with the government.
5. Use of the powers of government for retribution against individual citizens.
6. Use of a terrorist or other incident to take away civil liberties.
7. Persecution of an ethnic or religious minority, either by the Administration or its supporters.
8. Removal of civil service employees for insufficient loyalty or membership in a suspect group.
9. Use of the Presidency to incite popular violence against individuals/organizations.
10. Defying the orders of courts, including the Supreme Court.

Any points from the checklist that I didn’t touch on are explained at the link above.

I would add a check mark on number 10, as even though the Supreme Court has denied Trump’s claim that he is immune from investigation and upheld subpoenas from a New York Grand Jury, he continues to file specious claims designed to do nothing more than delay the release of the information.

As Dan Rather said

It’s also dangerous. Deadly dangerous.

And it’s only going to get worse from here.

But at least it’s being called for what it is. Maybe that step is the beginning of stopping our slide into Fascism.

However, it’s up to us where it goes from here.

Early on, I would hyperbolically ask “What would you have done if you were in the Weimar Republic of the 1930s?”

It’s no longer hyperbole. It’s reality. And we need to know your answer.