Opinion | This is how fascism comes to America

The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well. Make sense of the news fast with our daily newsletter ArrowRight But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology.

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How Far Down the Road Towards Fascism Has America Gone?

While there’s apparently “nothing to see here” when it comes to conservative media outlets and even, in many ways, mainstream media, it’s worth asking the question: “How far down the road toward authoritarian oligarchy, or even outright fascism, have we gone?”

The post How Far Down the Road Towards Fascism Has America Gone? – by Thom Hartmann – The Hartmann Report appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Colonialism is built on the rubble of a false idea of ancient Rome | Aeon Essays

At the dawn of the 20th century, Italian patriots were struggling to overcome a profound inferiority complex. Ever since 1861, when Giuseppe Garibaldi unified the country’s disparate regions into a nation-state, politicians and intellectuals had been anticipating the arrival of a glorious new era. Decades on, however, the economic, diplomatic and cultural results were wanting.

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Dylan Riley: What Is Trump?. New Left Review 114, November-December 2018.

The pitfalls of bad historical analogizing laid bare in ubiquitous attempts to pin a ‘fascist’ label on the 45th president. Instead, Riley argues, Trump is better grasped as an incoherent amalgam of Weberian forms of rule-ramshackle patrimonialism, weak charisma-operating like a foreign body inserted into America’s capitalist-bureaucratic state.

The post Corey Robin via Facebook alerted me to this great essay on “the Trump as fascist thesis” appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Madeleine Albright Warns: Don’t Let Fascism Go ‘Unnoticed Until It’s Too Late’

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright describes herself as an “optimist who worries a lot.” And lately, it seems, there has been much to worry about. Albright’s new book, Fascism: A Warning, starts by describing how Hitler and Mussolini came to power in the 20th century, then warns about today’s authoritarian rulers in Eastern Europe, North Korea, Turkey and Russia.

The post Madeleine Albright Warns: Don’t Let Fascism Go ‘Unnoticed Until It’s Too Late’ : NPR appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Are ‘Antifa’ and the ‘Alt-Right’ Equally Violent?

In the hours and days following the deadly “Unite the Right” rally on 12 August 2017, President Donald Trump laid the blame for the violence that took the lives of three people in Charlottesville, Virginia on “many sides.”

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How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler

smithsonian.com How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society?

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Trial Balloon for a Coup?

The theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why it happened the way it did.

Yonatan Zunger’s earlier article…

What “Things Going Wrong” Can Look Like

On a recent post I made about how President Trump marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of my readers asked a good, but hard, question: Why did this regime single out some particular groups (e.g., Muslims, Latinos, Black, and Trans people) as their main targets, and not others?

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Trump just ordered government scientists to hide facts from the public

He also immediately suspended all EPA contracts and grants.

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Pope Francis warns against populism, citing Hitler

Pope Francis on Saturday warned against populism, saying it could lead to the election of “saviours” like Adolf Hitler. In an hour-long interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais conducted as Donald Trump was being sworn in as US president, the pontiff also condemned the idea of using walls and barbed wire to keep out foreigners, among them refugees and migrants.

Pope Francis:

“Crises provoke fear, alarm. In my opinion, the most obvious example of European populism is Germany in 1933… A people that was immersed in a crisis, that looked for its identity until this charismatic leader came and promised to give their identity back, and he gave them a distorted identity, and we all know what happened,…

…In times of crisis, we lack judgment, and that is a constant reference for me… That is why I always try to say: talk among yourselves, talk to one another,”

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National Park Service Banned From Tweeting After Anti-Trump Retweets

The National Park service retweeted some sick Donald Trump burns, noting how, uh, lightly attended his inauguration was compared to Barack Obama’s in 2009. But now, the NPS has been ordered by its Washington support office to “immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice,” according to an internal email obtained by Gizmodo.

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Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history?

The post Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism | Open Culture appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Again that is Irish Senator, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, calling Donald Trump a Fascist. Don’t agree? Try looking into some of these links.

A final response to the “Tell me why Trump is a fascist”. * /r/EnoughTrumpSpam

EDIT** If you are here from Tumblr I actually made a much longer list about all the reasons why Trump is terrible on there that I’m linking…

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Analysis //Thanks to Trump, we can better understand how Hitler was possible – U.S. Election 2016

American articles have ascribed the term “Lügenpresse,” recently hurled at reporters in some Donald Trump rallies, to the Nazi era. That’s partially accurate. The derogatory German term for ” lying press ” was already being widely used by German Catholics a century before the Nazis came to power to describe their opponents in the liberal and democratic newspapers.

The post Thanks to Trump, we can better understand how Hitler was possible – U.S. Election 2016 – Haaretz – Israel News | Haaretz.com appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.