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January 23 - February 8, 2023
Fascist politics seeks to undermine the credibility of institutions that harbor independent voices of dissent until they can be replaced by media and universities that reject those voices.
for the Nazis, feminism was a Jewish conspiracy to destroy fertility among Aryan women.
In fascist ideology, the function of the education system is to glorify the mythic past, elevating the achievements of members of the nation and obscuring the perspectives and histories of those who do not belong.
The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, and their understanding small; on the other hand, they have a great power of forgetting.
effective propaganda must be confined to very few points which must be brought out in the form of slogans.
When propaganda succeeds at twisting ideals against themselves and universities are undermined and condemned as sources of bias, reality itself is cast into doubt.
Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party.
half a million copies were mass-produced and distributed by Henry Ford, the automaker, by 1925.
Fascist politicians discredit the “liberal media” for censoring discussion of outlandish right-wing conspiracy theories, which suggests mendacious behavior covered up by the veneer of liberal democratic institutions.
The goal of the conspiracies is to cause widespread mistrust and paranoia, justifying drastic measures, such as censoring or shutting down the “liberal” media and imprisoning “enemies of the state.”
Responsible media in a liberal democracy must, in the face of this threat, try to report the truth, and resist the temptation to report on every possible theory, no matter how fantastical, as long as someone advances it.
Fascist politics seeks to destroy the relations of mutual respect between citizens that are the foundation of a healthy liberal democracy, replacing them ultimately with trust in one figure alone, the leader.
democracy cannot flourish on soil poisoned by inequality.
dramatic inequality poses a mortal danger to the shared reality required for a healthy liberal democracy.
Hierarchy is a kind of mass delusion, one readily exploited by fascist politics.
fascist politicians represent the myths that legitimize their hierarchies as immutable facts.
They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.
The Confederacy, like Hitler’s Reich, was built to defend “the aristocratic principle in nature,” the principle of racial hierarchy.
The idea behind liberal democracy is that all of us are equally deserving of the basic goods of society.
Fascist politics feeds off the sense of aggrieved victimization caused by loss of hierarchal status.
Today, white Americans wildly overestimate the extent of U.S. progress toward racial equality over the past fifty years.
Forty-five percent of President Donald Trump’s supporters believe that whites are the most discriminated-against racial group in America;
The exploitation of the feeling of victimization by dominant groups at the prospect of sharing citizenship and power with minorities is a universal element of contemporary international fascist politics.
economic elites have always managed to reproduce themselves despite the ideals of a meritocracy. But that hasn’t stopped men from believing it. It is the American Dream.
“when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery.
Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,
Since fascist politics has, at its basis, the traditional patriarchal family, it is characteristically accompanied by panic about deviations from it.
In the United States at the moment of this writing, we also see a loss of “logical faculties” in the face of a barrage of propaganda connecting immigrant groups to rape.
(A fascist politician has no intention of addressing the root causes of economic hardship.)
Cities have long been treated, in rhetoric and literature, as places of decadence and sin, most particularly, sexual decadence and sin.
“I hated the mixture of races displayed in the capital. I hated the motley collection of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, Croats, and above all that ever-present fungoid growth—Jews and again Jews.”
“attitudes toward immigrants form one of the widest gulfs between U.S. cities and rural communities.”
Fascist ideology rejects pluralism and tolerance. In fascist politics, everyone in the chosen nation shares a religion and a way of life, a set of customs.
Fascist politics targets financial elites, “cosmopolitans,” liberals, and religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. In many countries, these are characteristically urban populations. Cities therefore usefully serve as a proxy target for the classic enemies of fascist politics.
In fascist ideology, in times of crisis and need, the state reserves support for members of the chosen nation, for “us” and not “them.”
a dominant theme emerging from research on white Americans’ attitude toward welfare is that the single largest predictor of white Americans’ attitude toward programs described as “welfare” is their attitude toward the judgment that black people are lazy.
“negative credential”
convict leasing,
In turning the nation’s attention to law and order, the Nixon administration successfully made the case to drop Johnson’s antipoverty programs and job initiatives, focusing instead on punitive crime measures, especially in urban centers populated by African Americans.
studious ignorance of the facts,
Antipathy to labor unions is such a major theme of fascist politics that fascism cannot be fully comprehended without an understanding of it.
Arendt argues that fascism requires the individuals in a society to be “atomized,” that is, to lose their mutual connection across differences.
Labor unions create mutual bonds along lines of class rather than those of race or religion. That is the fundamental reason why labor unions are such a target in fascist ideology.
Fascist politics is most effective under conditions of stark economic inequality. Research shows that a proliferation of labor unions is the best antidote to the development of such conditions.
Fung points out that “countries with high union density have low income inequality (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland), and the high inequality countries also have low union density (U.S., Chile, Mexico, and Turkey).” The number of countries in the study with high inequality and high union density was zero.
When poor white workers lack class identification with poor black workers, they fall back on familiar lines of racial division and resentment.
“Right to work” is an Orwellian name for legislation that attacks workers’ ability to collectively bargain, thereby robbing workers of a voice.
Muse was the head of the Christian American Association, which had been a lobbying organization for oil firms.
Vance Muse
Right-to-work laws were originally advanced in language that mirrored precisely Hitler’s attacks on trade unions in Mein Kampf.
