people literally think hitler is the single end-all-be-all of fascism. bitch didn't even invent it did

if fascism comes to the united states it will be cloaked in a flag of course, but more importantly 80% of this idiot country will confidently declare it isn't because it doesn't come from a bavarian beerhall or some shit. the american people are unintellectual

But I'm the "fucking stupid" one. Okay.

Okay! On to the next problem!

conquest/imperialism

What the FUCK do you think America loves doing exactly?

Militarised citizenry

Somehow forgotten about the literal armed fascist militias? Memory holed those I guess. Even if at large the citizens are not currently militarised they can be at any point mobilised into mass violence and have the weaponry to do so.

Elimination of our government bodies

Don't need to eliminate what doesn't work in the first place. There's no communist opposition the government bodies were built from the ground up to serve fascists so they don't need elimination

Trump isn't facist... America is fascist

This is such a dumb definition we all know fascism is objectively the right wing of social democracy

fascism requires the notion that everyone who isn't part of the master race should be massacred

That's Nazism. Fascism is the Mussolini thing.

brags about not starting any wars

He actually did start a war in Niger the press just didn't report on it

This is what happens when you start with the assumption that the USA doesn't currently show signs of Fascism, and that Fascism must be done to the US.

The Citizenry is currently engaged in a series of events of stochastic terrorism

Congress is entirely undemocratic

The USA does plenty of massacres, while those are mostly outside of the US. What ICE does is within the US. But Non-citizens don't count I guess.

This has exactly the same energy, as the rule nerds who will patiently spend hours explaining that what's happening in Palestine is not a genocide, it's just ethnic cleansing.

This is simply a semantic argument, that is so caught up on legalistic definitions, that it's unable to see the forest for the trees.

It turns out that when fascism takes its mask off in the imperial core 80 years after its "defeat" in Europe, it looks a little different. Material conditions change, Mussolini and Hitler were fighting large communist organizations within their country, the largest left wing organizations in the United States, are hilariously impotent in comparison.

Meanwhile a majority of Republicans, and a large minority of Democrats approve of the idea of putting undocumented workers in literal camps.

That's a lot of words to say you don't know what fascist means, but you want to carry water for them

She's shopping for a spot at Daily Wire

Ok. Fine. I’ll bite. […] I’m the “fucking stupid” one. Okay.

Good meme potential on this one

I think her reasoning is not very strong but as to whether trump or these populist right wingers are "fascists" I'm on samuel moyn's side that they're an entirely new modern terrible thing and that the more rigorous you want to be when comparing them to real historical interwar fascism the less accurate the description becomes.

The mass politics aren't there, neither for them nor for us, neither is the civil militarization, not nearly at the level where it'd actually be relevant. So you're just kinda left with, "they're racist and want to reverse rights", yeah that's called being a conservative and a reactionary, but it's not fascism. And that goes both for trump (who's brand of populism is more like classic american white nativism than a fancy european ideology) and for the surging far-right in europe. The strongest claim one can make is that they're "like" fascists, or they're "neo-fascists" or something, but a 1 to 1 comparison I think loses power the more these parties turn out to not do the most significant things that fascists do, because they can't, you can't conjure up a mass social movement out of the current moment.

The 2 exceptions I make are India, since the BJP's oficial militarized gangs resemble fascist militias way more than anything in europe and north america (but that might just be my ignorance about the country).

And Israel. And I think it says a lot how much money academics, journalists, pundits, "human rights advocates" and center-left activists have made by painting the contemporary right or far-right as fascist, but are COMPLETELY SILENT about the categorization when faced with a real contemporary example.

As to whether it's good that we call all these people fascists now as a political move, if you're one of those "you gotta understand something to fight it" guys then you probably oppose it on that principle but I think after a few years of this political climate you can see how there's good and bad things about it as a strategy.

The good is that it's basically "red-tagging" (when you call every lib a communist) but for conservatives, by labeling people much to the right of where they actually are based on 1 or 2 positions, in theory that brings the overton window and the range of acceptable politics left, and that remains while the accusation has credibility, which is until the political center starts taking positions from the far right (on say migration), because the centrists CAN'T be the fascists.

The bad is that it creates an emergency situation, which might drive some people towards real (not online) leftist militancy (that's what happened to me) but it probably drives far more people into the center, because if "the fascists are coming" and you have hitler on your mind, then you're not gonna bother with radical politics, you should be afraid, and if you're afraid you're gonna want to give power only to people who uphold "democratic" institutions like parliaments, laws and norms, and not all radicals want to uphold those norms for good reason. And we've seen what that entails, it's getting in line "anti-fascitly" behind Biden-Harris, Macron (which is what the NFP still did with their alliance) or Costa (Portugal).

--- US has always been fascist

passed criminal justice reform

I entirely forgot what Trump did. But I'm still pretty darn sure it was pure politics, superficial, and in no meaningful sense "reform".

personally pardoned black inmates

How many people? ~5? And he pardoned some rappers. That was pure politics too.

---

If some net rando gets the details wrong - I don't think anything of it. But politics is her fucking job and it pays her mortgage and her bills. How can anybody be so stupid?

Ninja edit. It's a rhetorical question of course.

How can Ana Kasperian try to champion Trump's criminal justice reform when she uses her platform to rail against bail reform laws and do the same crime fearmongering that they do on MSM? Scratched liberal is scratched.

I mean, if you lean too hard into calling Trump a fascist, you have to start justifying why all the Democratic Party policies are the same as his. If you're trying to be a mainstream pundit, you can't call both parties fascists with little to no sunlight between them, even if it's demonstrably and obviously true.

Ana is a fascist

Killing anyone not of the master race is very much not inherent to fascism, see Italy, but she is at least accidentally right that Trump isn't a fascist. He likes certain superficial allusions to fascism, but I don't think there's any real difference in his mind between Hitler, Xi, and Putin (not unlike many neoliberals), he just thinks "Strong, intelligent man with power over a country" but he's also too cowardly to rock the boat as hard as Hitler did and doesn't really understand any of Hitler's ideology beyond "Aryan good, non-Aryan bad, Jew evil", something that we don't have evidence for him believing beyond the way Aryanism permeates most white American culture.

She does, at least accidentally, have the point that Trump doesn't have a paramilitary or anything like it. He has enabled death squads at the border, but, well, at least as far as I know, we don't have evidence either that they are loyal to him or that they'd be willing to turn their guns on either American civilians or on cops. The people Trump has are a huge mass of car pool cleaning equipment dealers, of whom a fraction of a percent are willing to draw blood or even fire a warning shot in his name. That's not a militia, that's just a somewhat rowdy fan base.

Also he just, like, clearly doesn't have the ambition to smash the mechanisms in place to limit presidential power. He had lots of chance to try that and the most you can really say is he abused what was already there with executive orders, something he is not alone in doing.

She's still an absurd reactionary and the accolades she cites are all equally absurd. For example, he didn't want the liability to his image of starting a new war [nor did he have a pressing reason to start one] and spun it to his convenience.

Trump is just an ordinary liberal but without the civility veneer. People just tend to forget that liberals are fucking horrible.

Without very specific and pedantic characteristics, it's just sparkling tinpot dictatorship.

She is so strange

Like I kinda agree with the premise, but her reasoning is so fucking stupid

Ana Kasparian go on the Rubin Report, it'd be so embarrassing, it'd be so funny

gonna end all my posts from now on with "But I'm the 'fucking stupid' one. Okay."

Ok. Fine. I'll bite.

PUT THE PHONE DOWN