One of the most distinct and notorious features of fascist regimes is the creation of a national paramilitary force and secret police to go after political opponents and keep the population in line. A secret police has the following characteristics:
It is a political police force, denoting that it targets political opponents and dissidents to preserve the status quo;
It is not controlled by other security agencies and answers directly to the authoritarian leadership;
The identity of its members and its operations are secret;
It is an internal security organization that specializes in political intelligence and surveillance operations;
It carries out violent policing practices such as arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, torture, indefinite detention, and disappearances.
A secret police can therefore be defined as: A police force that targets political enemies to protect the regime in power, is controlled by the regime in power, has its identities and operation kept secret, spies on its own countrymen, and uses violent policing to further its goals of keeping the regime in power.
The definition above is taken from this video, which explains why ICE is so problematic as an organization:
As the video outlines, the danger with immigration enforcement is that it occupies a gray area in the legal system which makes it the ideal Trojan Horse for the creation a repressive secret police force, as many—including myself—have been warning. The creation of a class of “stateless” people who are denied fundamental rights and legal protections is the perfect pretext to enforce state terror and was, in fact, the exact same strategy the Nazis used against the Jewish population.
According to the video, courts have repeatedly granted the U.S. government plenary power—that is, absolute power—to enforce immigration laws. The only other plenary powers are war powers, foreign affairs, Indian Affairs, and authority over U.S. territories, all of which are outwardly facing or narrow in scope.
This means that immigration as a field of law is placed largely outside the judicial scrutiny applied to other types of domestic law enforcement. Immigration cases are prosecuted through the civil justice system, not the criminal justice system, allowing the bypassing of procedural safeguards which typically accompany criminal policing such as indictments, jury trials, proof beyond a reasonable doubt and judicial oversight. Immigration law itself is complex and opaque, and even many lawyers do not understand it fully. As the video notes, “There is nothing like immigration law as a field, where there is so much power involving so much of the population concentrated in a virtually unchecked judicial environment.”
Furthermore, over the years Congress has passed laws which have delegated much of its authority over immigration to the executive branch. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, immigration enforcement became integrated with intelligence and counterterrorism in a vast new bureaucracy. The Department of Homeland Security combined twenty-two separate agencies under a single cabinet-level department. ICE was created in 2003 as a civil agency with nationwide authority to enforce immigration, not to catch criminals. The video states,
“What ICE represented was something completely new in American governance—a civil enforcement agency with nationwide reach, broad discretionary authority, operating outside the criminal justice system, under direct executive control.
It was all of the worst fears of the framers [of the U.S. Constitution] put together: a federal, domestically oriented, civil police force, not accountable to state governments, given unprecedented leeway to act by Congress and the courts, under the exclusive control of the President.”
Because immigration enforcement is administrative rather than criminal, the safeguards put in place to protect citizens from arbitrary arrest and detention are not present. For this reason, ICE operates effectively outside the normal boundaries of law, transparency and accountability. Once detained, people are denied even the minimal protections theoretically available to them in the criminal legal incarceration system such as the right to government-appointed counsel and defined lengths of incarceration. Due to “Kavanaugh stops,” ICE agents are allowed to engage in racial profiling and stop and harass people based on simply their appearance or manner of speaking. More recently, ICE has used so-called “administrative warrants,” rather than judicial warrants signed by a judge, to conduct searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Allies of the president have called for ICE agents to be deployed to several states to monitor polling stations for alleged “voter fraud” (about which, more below). The recent deployment of ICE to airports—recall they’re theoretically for domestic immigration enforcement—indicates that they have already transformed into the President’s all-purpose personal fix-it force.
As the video notes, “Abolishing ICE doesn’t mean abolishing immigration enforcement. It means abolishing an institution whose very structure is an exception in the American legal system, a structure that makes abuse not only possible, but likely.” Not only are the safeguards against abuse by ICE not being strengthened, they are intentionally being removed:
The Trump administration has so radically transformed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) independent watchdog teams that thousands of cases related to conditions in immigration detention, deaths in custody and officers’ use of force are not being investigated…
Hundreds of pages of court filings in a key legal battle in federal court serve to contradict the Trump administration’s repeated claims that the DHS watchdogs are performing “all required functions”. The allegations of failings within the shrunken oversight offices at the DHS, tasked by Congress with investigating civil rights and related concerns, come as the department grapples with public criticism of killings by immigration agents, escalating arrest tactics and plans to increase immigrant detention.
Court records reveal gutting of DHS oversight: ‘Incredibly dangerous’ (The Guardian)
Rather than simply “enforcing the law,” the Department of Justice has repeatedly been found in contempt for violating court orders. Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. According to documents filed by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, ICE has been lying for a year about being authorized to make arrests at immigration courts. Detainees are moved around in a shell game designed to keep them out of the reach of the courts. Legal procedures such as due process and habeas corpus are routinely violated—something we see in fragile states rather than established democracies theoretically bound by the rule of law. Immigration courts are being overwhelmed and abuse is rife. There are a quarter fewer immigration judges than there were a decade ago, largely by design. As agents grind toward their government-mandated quotas, one DOJ lawyer asked to be held in contempt so she could get a good night’s sleep.
While the initial rhetoric claimed that ICE would be exclusively going after “the worst of the worst,” an analysis found that 77 percent of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal convictions. The government’s own Web sites depicting so-called “hardened criminals” being detained by ICE have been found to be full of lies and exaggerations. Not only are illegal immigrants with otherwise clean records targeted, so are asylum seekers, legal immigrants, and those who are retroactively made illegal due to a concerted effort to strip protections from people who were previously accorded the right to be in the country legally by the courts. As the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia demonstrated, even having the legal right to be here did not offer protection from being sent to an overseas torture prison. The administration has sought to strip temporary legal status from several groups, including Somalis, Haitians and Syrians. Detainees included a four-year-old with Stage 4 cancer (who was sent home without her medication), and a seven year old Canadian girl with autism and her mother.
Even more troubling has been the arrest and detention of American citizens:
During the second presidency of Donald Trump, federal immigration enforcement policies and operations have resulted in the documented arrest, death, detention, and removal of American citizens. As of October 2025, the U.S. government was not tracking the number of detained or missing citizens, but ProPublica confirmed at least 170 citizen detentions by that time. The deportation of U.S. citizens from the United States is illegal.
High-profile detention cases of American citizens include arrests of elected officials, disabled adults and children, and Puerto Rican and Indigenous people. Donald Trump has supported taking away citizenship from Americans and detaining citizens in foreign prisons noted for human rights abuses…
Deaths, detentions and deportations of American citizens in the second Trump administration (Wikipedia)
According to The Wall Street Journal, “Americans Are Now a Target in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown.”
The Wall Street Journal found that the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against citizens. Of the 279 people accused by officials on X of attacking federal officers in the past year, 181 were U.S. citizens, the Journal found. Close to half of those Americans were never charged with assault. None have been convicted at trial.
Yet names, mug shots and other identifying details posted by the government put a bull’s-eye on them. They had to explain the accusations to family, friends and employers. In a few cases, their home and workplace addresses were leaked online, drawing death threats.
Masked and armed agents seizing random people off the streets, breaking down the doors of private homes, and throwing people into unmarked vans, is something we expect to see in totalitarian dictatorships not hypothetical democracies like the United States. It is reminiscent of historical fascist dictatorships. ICE agents are masked and anonymous, and their identities are kept secret for alleged fear of “doxxing,” unlike regular law enforcement officers who are required to display names and badges. They have arrested journalists and opposition politicians—a clear case of going after enemies of the regime. And they have engaged in domestic spying on American citizens. We have seen ICE compiling a database of protestors, using facial recognition scanners, accessing sensitive government data like Medicaid and IRS data, and using cell phones to track American citizens. Some of this software has been developed by Palantir. Agents are even taking samples of people's DNA. This video by investigative journalist Taylor Lorenz discusses just some of the tools routinely being used by ICE:
A massive and unaccountable surveillance state is being constructed in the United States under the guise of “immigration enforcement, and you would be a fool to think it will be all dismantled once the immigrants are gone. This was the true purpose of the immigration crackdown. Republicans are cheering their own enslavement.
‘We know you live right here’: No secrets in America’s new surveillance dragnet (MSN)
ICE acknowledges it is using powerful spyware (NPR)
Thus we see all of the hallmarks of a secret police listed above. In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) were the secret state police, a branch of the state’s policing system. Like ICE, they operated without judicial oversight, allowing them to detain, interrogate, and torture individuals arbitrarily. The Gestapo was allowed to send people to detention camps without trial. The S.A., or Brownshirts, began as a paramilitary unit of the National Socialist Party (much the same as the Proud Boys or Patriot Front today), and were eventually superseded and incorporated into the Schutzstaffel (SS), which began as Hitler’s personal bodyguard. Eventually, all policing operations were overseen by the SS and combined into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) to centralize Nazi security operations, similar to the centralization of policing and internal security under DHS.
In January 2026, the President threatened Minnesota with a “DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION”—something you would expect to come from a foreign adversary or terrorist (or perhaps a Supervillian), and not your own nation’s chief executive. The assault on the citizens of Minneapolis was staggering. ICE agents outnumbered police officers by a 2:1 ratio. Incidents of deadly force by ICE against American citizens were not investigated, and local authorities were repeatedly blocked and prohibited from conducting their own investigations of these incidents. Justice department officials were ordered to go after the victims’ families instead, and the victims were slandered by federal officials as “paid agitators” and “domestic terrorists” without evidence. Officers who shot and killed Americans were not reprimanded and have suffered no penalty, essentially giving a tacit green light to conduct state-sanctioned executions. Citizens cowered in their homes, businesses shut their doors, and students were whisked from school as soon as the day ended.
While the whole nation witnessed the cold-blooded executions by ICE of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti with their own eyes, they were not the only victims. In Texas, Ruben Ray Martiniez was killed months earlier. Recently, the death of a nearly blind Myanmar refugee abandoned in a Buffalo doughnut shop by ICE was ruled a homicide. In every instance video and eyewitness evidence directly contradicted the testimony of ICE officers:
In six violent encounters, evidence contradicts Trump immigration officials’ narratives (Reuters)
DHS keeps making false claims about people. It’s part of a broader pattern (NPR)
The many claims by Trump’s DHS that have fallen apart (CNN)
ICE is currently planning to recruit up to 40,000+ officers—a veritable domestic army. Its budget is greater than all other law enforcing agencies combined, and larger even than the U.S. Marine Corps, which is currently engaged in a war overseas. Recruits are given lavish bonuses and student loan forgiveness. According to a whistleblower, the the agency’s training program for new recruits is “deficient, defective and broken.” Many trainees cannot pass even the most basic physical and mental tests. Most concernedly, there seems to be a deliberate attempt to recruit from white nationalist rallies and websites.
The scale of detention is also breathtaking. As of 2026, ICE is operating over 225 detention centers around the country and has around 73,000 people in custody—the highest since the agency’s founding in 2003. ICE is currently planning to spend 38 billion dollars building a vast network of holding centers by buying up warehouses across the country, often paying inflated prices for them. Given that the government can shuttle illegal immigrants out of the country fairly quickly, the need for such vast detention centers is highly suspicious. Many of these prisons are privately owned and operated for profit. Agreements have been made with foreign governments to send prisoners overseas including to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, Costa Rica, and South Sudan. According to a report by the ACLU, some of the conditions inside the detention centers include:
Hazardous facilities and inhumane treatment
Forced labor
Inadequate sanitation
Denial of health care
Fear of retaliation
Given all of the above information, it’s not unreasonable to describe these as concentration camps, or even torture prisons. It’s important to remember that the first Nazi detention centers like Dachau—which opened only three months after the Nazis came to power—were not initially death camps. Instead they were for “legitimate” enemies of the state. It was not until much later toward the end of the war when these camps were retrofitted to the task of mass extermination. At least twenty-nine migrants had died in these facilities last year, and six in January this year, including a teenager. Historian Heather Cox Richardson has frequently defended the use of the term “concentration camps” when describing these facilities:
Richardson’s insistence on calling these facilities concentration camps is analytically exact. A concentration camp, in the historical sense, is not necessarily a death camp; it is a place where a state concentrates populations it considers threats or burdens, subjecting them to confinement, disease, abuse, and often death through neglect rather than industrialized extermination. By that definition, the sprawling network of ICE and Border Patrol detention centers, where people are warehoused for months to years, often in horrific conditions, qualifies.
New reporting details how this system is poised to scale up dramatically. An internal ICE memo, recently surfaced, outlines a $38 billion plan for a “new detention center model” that would, in one year, create capacity for roughly 92,600 people by purchasing eight “mega centers,” 16 processing centers, and 10 additional facilities. The largest of these warehouses would hold between 7,000 and 10,000 people each for average stays of about 60 days, more than double the size of the largest current federal prison. Separate reporting has mapped at least 23 industrial warehouses being surveyed for conversion into mass detention camps, with leases already secured at several sites.
Investigations by Amnesty International and others into prototype facilities have found detainees shackled in overcrowded cages, underfed, forced to use open‑air toilets that flood, and routinely denied medical care. Sexual assault and extortion by guards, negligent deaths, and at least one homicide have been documented. These are not accidents; they are predictable outcomes of a profit‑driven system where private contractors are paid per bed and oversight is weak, and of a political culture that dehumanizes migrants as “invaders” or “animals.”
Richardson highlights another crucial dimension: the way DHS has been retooled to project this violence into the interior as a form of political terror. Agents from ICE and Border Patrol, subdivisions of a relatively new department lacking the institutional restraints of the military, have been deployed in cities far from any border, often in unmarked vehicles, wearing masks and lacking visible identification. Secret legal memos under Trump gutted the traditional requirement of a judicial warrant for entering homes, replacing it with internal sign‑off by another DHS official, a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
This matters both instrumentally and symbolically. Instrumentally, it enables efficient mass raids and “snatch and grab” operations that bypass local law‑enforcement norms and judicial oversight. Symbolically, it communicates that the state reserves the right to operate as a lawless force, unconstrained by the very constitution it claims to defend. When masked, unidentified agents can seize people off the streets, shove them into unmarked vans, and deposit them in processing centers without due process, the aesthetic of fascism…thugs in the night…becomes reality...
America’s Oligarchic Techno‑Feudal Elite Are Attempting to Build a Twenty‑First‑Century Fascist State (Collapse of Industrial Civilization)
List of immigrant detention sites in the United States (Wikipedia)
In addition, Richardson also notes that the creation of such a large and lavishly funded carceral state creates perverse economic incentives to maintain, and even expand it. These centers provide an economic lifeline and jobs to people in rural communities. Even if every single immigrant in the country were removed, then what? Do we really expect that all of these detention centers will simply be closed and the tens of thousands of ICE agents and guards laid off? I doubt it. What will happen is that the police state apparatus will go after other targets, and those detention centers will be filled with someone else—perhaps the “enemy within?” According to the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the government can now “disrupt” groups that “foment political violence” before they commit such acts. Indicators of violence include such things as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
Anti-ICE protesters accused of being part of antifa found guilty of support for terrorism in Texas (Politico)
Elections are the most basic and fundamental hallmark of democratic societies. Elections hold the government accountable. Under a democracy, if citizens are unhappy or dissatisfied with those who are governing them, they can remove them and appoint new leaders. Without free and fair elections where the majority of eligible citizens can exercise their right to vote, a country can no longer be legitimately called a democracy.
Fascists hate elections because they fundamentally do not believe in democracy. One of the first things historical fascist regimes did was restrict or remove the right to vote. In Italy, Mussolini passed the Acerbo Law which stated that the party with the largest share of the votes would automatically receive two-thirds of the seats in Parliament, as long as they received over 25 percent of the vote. The 1924 Italian general election was the last multiparty election held in Italy until after World War Two. In the March 1933 German Federal Election, held just days after the Reichstag fire, the National Socialists received 43.9 percent of the vote, with the Brownshirts conducting widespread campaigns of voter intimidation. The Nazis claimed that 75 percent of 51 percent (the far-right coalition’s margin in the legislature) amounted to an outright majority. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany weeks later, and in the months that followed all other parties were outlawed. This was the last federal election held in Germany until after the fall of the Third Reich in 1945.
Trump had previously attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election via the Fake Electors Plot, which was investigated by the Justice Department. According to sworn testimony by special counsel Jack Smith, he believed Trump was indeed guilty of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, but was forced to drop the charges when Trump was elected president a second time. Trump has continued to insist—against all evidence—that there is an epidemic of voter fraud and that the 2020 election was “stolen,” and a vast right-wing media ecosystem echoes this “Big Lie”.
Since the beginning of 2026—the year of the November midterm elections—attacks on the election process have stepped up considerably. The U.S. Constitution delegates full authority to the states to conduct their own elections, yet Trump has repeatedly sought to take over (i.e. federalize) national elections.
The government has been attempting to gain access to state voter rolls throughout the United States. Election ballots were seized in Fulton Country, Georgia, regarding debunked accusations of vote fraud. Ominously, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was present at the search, despite the fact that it had nothing to do with national intelligence. The government gave conflicting and contradictory reasons for her presence. Gabbard’s office has also investigated voting machines in Puerto Rico, allegedly for foreign interference by Venezuela.
The attorney general offered to lift the siege of Minneapolis if the state turned over its voter rolls—decidedly at odds with the publicly stated reasons for the invasion. Voting records for the 2020 election have recently been subpoenaed for Maricopa country, Arizona. There are unprecedented redistricting efforts during an election year expressly designed to remove Democratic districts in a number of key states, and the SAVE act is an attempt to federalize elections and disenfranchise voters by imposing what amounts to a voter ID poll tax. Software designed to check for voter citizenship keeps making mistakes, removing people incorrectly from voter rolls.
Key 2020 election denier is still working to prove it was stolen — now from inside the White House (CNN)
A Republican plan to overhaul voting is back. Here’s what’s new in the bill (NPR)
Only a fraction of House seats are competitive. Redistricting is driving that lower (NPR)
It’s now virtually certain that Trump and his minions will interfere with the upcoming midterm elections in some way. It’s been speculated that Trump will attempt to interfere in one of several ways, ranging from marginally legal to outright illegal:
Disenfranchise enough voters to skew the results.
Claim “foreign interference” in order to nullify results.
Claim “vote fraud” without evidence and simply appoint winners by decree.
Declare a “national emergency” in order to cancel elections. Note that the United States has never cancelled an election, even during the Civil War, World War One and World War Two.
This post from Hacker News does a good job of summarizing Republican vote suppression efforts going back decades, and why they don’t hold up to scrutiny:
There is a long history of Republican voter disenfranchisement:
In the 1980s The RNC created the Ballot Security Task Force, which was a scheme to strike people off the voter rolls by sending them a mailer if they didn’t respond. This led to a consent decree requiring “preclearance” for any voter roll enforcement that lasted 25+ years;
Republicans lead the charge in restricting access to mail-in voting because it’s used more by Democratic Party voters despite there being no evidence of fraud;
In response to Arizona turning blue in 2020, Republicans went on a massive voter suppression spree, which disproportionately impacts Native Americans;
Nationally, the push to have a street address unfairly impacts Native Americans who often don’t have an official [street] address if they live on a reservation. That’s not an accident. It’s the point;
Even the push to force people to have birth certificates is aimed at Native Americans and poor people. There are quite literally millions of Americans who don’t have them;
Even if you have the necessary documentation to get an ID, you may have problems getting access. Again, this is by design. For example, Louisiana closed a bunch of DMV offices in minority areas such that the only DMV in certain black-majority areas was only open one day a month;
The so-called SAVE Act recently passed by the house required your birth certificate to match your ID. Well, that’s a problem for married women.
States such as Florida have used private firms to strike people off the voter rolls if their name sounds like a convicted felon anywhere else in the country.
And why are we doing all this? There is zero evidence of voter fraud on a large scale. And those convicted of voter fraud are most commonly Republican anyway.
But let’s just say that we want an ID to vote. Why don’t we fund the Federal government to issue it and make sure it is readily available and cheap or free? No, we can’t have that because it’s never been the point.
At some point you have to realize that they don’t care about “integrity”. Voter suppression is the point because it’s the only way they can win elections.
Those who point out that other countries require a national ID to vote fail to mention that these countries also provide a nationally-issued ID card to all citizens free or cheaply as a matter of course. Not only does that not exist here, but Republicans have continually opposed doing such a thing. It’s worth noting that, not only is vote fraud more likely to be done by Republicans, Elon Musk himself conducted illegal voting activities in Georgia. And voting by illegal immigrants is vanishingly rare, as the Heritage Foundation’s own data shows:
How we know voter fraud is very rare in U.S. elections (NPR)
So, if there is no reasonable, good faith argument to be made about “fraud” or “stolen elections,” what then, can be the reason for these activities? There can only be one—an attempt to steal future elections on behalf of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Elon Musk’s doge effort illegally stole reams of data from the Social Security Administration. What effectively amounted to a hack of the government’s databases led to the improper transmission of sensitive social security data to a Cloudfare server where it was improperly stored. SSA officials disclosed that doge staffers were contacted in March 2025 by a political advocacy group seeking help scrutinizing voter rolls, a group dedicated to overturning the result of the 2020 election. Is it possible that the SSA data will be used to predict voting patterns by using AI in a manner similar to Cambridge Analytica? Was this the real reason for doge, since it obviously made no beneficial impact on the federal budget or government “efficiency?”
This video from LegalEagle, below, does an excellent job of summarizing everything we know about Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2026 midterm elections. Let’s not mince words: if elections are no longer held in this country, the United States will cease to be a functional democracy, and will indisputably become a fascist dictatorship—just in time for the nation’s 250th birthday. No one will be able to deny it any longer.
The term “socialist” in National Socialism has caused a lot of confusion. Some have even used this terminology to argue that the National Socialist German Worker’s Party was somehow a “left wing” movement, contrary to the universal opinion of historians. The National Socialists were the opposition to left-wing German parties, including socialists—and especially Communists—who were some of the earliest occupants of the concentration camps.
Many wealthy industrialists backed and financially supported the original fascists. Fritz Thyssen, Günther Quandt, Friedrich Flick, Alfred Krupp, August von Finck, Rudolf August Oetker, Wilhelm Rudolf Mann, and Ferdinand Porsche were just a few of the industrialists who became avid Nazis. There were also overseas admirers like Henry Ford, whose book, The International Jew, was popular in Nazi Germany. Of the claims of “socialism,” Robert Paxton writes:
It turned out in practice that fascists’ anticapitalism was highly selective. Even at their most radical, the socialism that the fascists wanted was a “national socialism”: one that denied only foreign or enemy property rights (including that of internal enemies). They cherished national producers. Above all, it was by offering an effective remedy against socialist revolution that fascism turned out in practice to find a space...(p. 56)
Whenever fascist parties acquired power...they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats. By contrast, they enforced with the utmost violence and thoroughness their threats against socialism…Once in power, fascist regimes banned strikes, dissolved independent labor unions, lowered wage earners’ purchasing power, and showered money on armaments industries, to the immense satisfaction of employers.
Faced with these conflicts between words and actions concerning capitalism, scholars have drawn opposite conclusions. Some, taking the words literally, consider fascism a form of radical anticapitalism. Others, and not only Marxists, take the diametrically opposite position that fascists came to the aid of capitalism in trouble, and propped up by emergency means the existing system of property distribution and social hierarchy. This book takes the position that what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said. (p. 10)
Even in this instance, there are similarities between the original fascist parties and the current administration. There has been a constant parade of business leaders and CEOs paying tribute at the White House. They’ve showered Trump with praise, bestowed him with lavish gifts, joined him at fancy private dinners, donated millions to his “presidential library,” and bought his personal cryptocurrency. We’ve already noted the tech CEOs front and center at the inauguration, and many tech CEOs have become supporters of the current administration like David Sachs, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, who has single-handedly bankrolled the career of the vice-president—and, of course, Musk himself. Billionaire donors swung hard for Republicans in the last election.
Tech CEOs attend Amazon-funded “Melania” screening at White House (Hollywoodreporter.com)
The government has proposed taking stakes in various companies. It has advocated owning patents. More recently, it has designated AI company Anthropic as a supply chain risk due to Anthropic’s insistence on maintaining ethical standards. Businesses have been forced to kowtow to Trump and to avoid offending Republicans, lest the regulatory authority of the government be weaponized against them. This is contrary to the “classical liberalism,” favored by traditional Conservatives where big business is left alone, free from government interference, and the government does not pick favorites. MAGA clearly believes in the merging of business interests and the state, as well as public service for private profit.
The original fascist economic program is often described as “corporatism,” which is a merging of the government and business and the regimentation of society. Fascists advocated private ownership under government control. They were hostile to unions and the labor movement in general, replacing them with state-controlled syndicates. They promoted economic self-sufficiency, sometimes using tariffs to protect domestic industries such as arms manufacturing. This was consistent with their ultranationalist project of national revival. It’s easier to control your citizenry and regiment society when they have fewer connections abroad. Self-sufficiency was pursued as a national goal due to the belligerence of fascist leaders. Often, this involved not only the development of domestic industries, but also the seizing of foreign resources like rare earth elements (Greenland) and oil (Venezuela). Cosmopolitanism values freedom and brotherhood, values which fascists oppose to due to their hierarchical vision of the world.
We need to end it here for length. And I haven’t even mentioned the granting of pardons based on campaign donations, the disclosure of state secrets, the renaming of buildings, tearing down the White House, firing scientists, suppressing vaccines, gutting antitrust enforcement and consumer protection, financial deregulation, cutting taxes for the rich, handicapping renewable energy efforts, removing references to slavery from the nation’s museums, the criminal probe of the Federal Reserve, withholding funds from “blue” states, depriving millions of health care, connections to Christian nationalism, the deployment of the national guard, Trump’s descent into dementia, allegations of child rape, and much, much more, as these are not distinct features of fascism per se. Not even the original fascists were this corrupt, venal, and incompetent.
We’ve made the case over the last several posts that fascist is the most accurate and precise descriptor of the current government of the United States, based on the accepted historical understanding of the term. Next time, we’ll see if it’s not unreasonable to compare them to the original National Socialist German Worker’s Party—better known as the Nazis.
Yes, They're Nazis
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Apr 11
“The hour of retribution will come!” Adolf Hitler, New Year Proclamation, 1944
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