I've never been much of an opportunist when it comes to America because quite frankly, there is really very little to be optimistic about. A cursory glance at this nation's history should be more than enough to prove that. The arch of history may or may not bend towards progress but there is no bending a colonial machine designed for slavery and genocide into anything worth redeeming. America, as a concept, is existentially fucked and we need to get over it.
Ironically, in the past, it has actually been this rosy outlook on the American nightmare that has led me to roll my eyes at notions made by comrades on the left that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Not that I've ever held delusions about that foul orange beast being anything south of sociopathic. I just found it hard to believe that a man so bombastically flatulent with his sociopathy could ever pose a bigger threat than men like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama who could sell this same evil as progress to tree huggers at Lilith Fair.
I'm not too big to say that I stand corrected, at least partially. While the Donald's first term was largely a three-ring rodeo fire that did at least as much smoke damage to America's undeserved reputation as it did to its underprivileged people, his second term is clearly something far more satanic in nature and the analogies to the Third Reich feel grossly appropriate. Every day seems to bring another unprecedented breach of the Executive Office into every conceivable facet of American life and the courts that haven't been totally corrupted have been exposed as being completely powerless to stop it.
With that being confessed, I do feel that it is extremely important to point out that the people who made this possible aren't trailer park proud boys or even those mutant millionaires in the Christian Right. Donald Trump was transformed from a charismatically unconfident, soiled rodeo clown into a totally viable Hitler reenactor by the billionaires of Silicon Valley.
All roads lead back to Peter Thiel. The megarich founder of PayPal who invested his early fortune into companies like Palantir and SpaceX which promise to usurp the old gas-powered military industrial complex with something far more technologically dystopian may have very theatrically decided to take a knee during the last two presidential elections, but his influence is all over the second Trump administration.
Elon Musk, who broke records by donating a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump's reelection campaign is one of Thiel's PayPal era dauphins, which is probably why Thiel essentially continues to run DOGE even after rocket boy abandoned ship to tend to the damage done to his fortune by associating openly with their Frankenstein monster. Other known Thiel acolytes now swimming in the MAGA swamp include AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks and Vice President JD Vance, and their investment is paying off hand over fist.
Every major push by the new and improved Trump junta into frighteningly fascist territory is powered by Silicon Valley, from its AI fueled mass deportation regime to its Golden Dome boondoggle. DOGE is scalping our antiquated federal bureaucracy to make room for a singular high-tech police state that only companies like Palantir can provide, and Trump has already passed executive orders requiring all federal agencies to share data on American citizens. This is how Palantir alone has already netted over $900 million dollars in federal government contracts, and these are the men who made MAGA a terrifying success, the members of America's new cyber oligarchy.
However, these are also the same men who had very recently financed the so-called "liberal order" that Trump was elected raging against which unironically is also the very same order that gifted Donald Trump an idiot-proof executive death star and blackened the name of democracy by using it to sling forever wars and globalist trade deals in the process. Elon Musk donated over $100,000 dollars to Barack Obama in 2012 alone and why the fuck not? Obama had already taken George W. Bush's post-9/11 police-warfare state and expanded it into a massive, all-seeing, NSA panopticon with a swarm of drones to defend it from brown children. Who do you think gave Palantir its first government contracts? The same liberal-progressive who built a gulag archipelago of detention camps that Donald Trump would use to cage toddlers.
This is why even though Donald Trump has become an unprecedented threat who needs to be stopped, his mainstream "resistance" funded by neocon Never Trumpers and the neoliberal DNC need to be thrown out with him for making his reign of terror possible by being only marginally less despotic than Orange-Man-Bad while daring to call their proto-fascistic shell game woke.
This has happened before. In fact, this is precisely how the original Hitler ended up in power. As the German Empire disintegrated in the face of massive popular revolts during the wee hours of the First World War, the German Amy's Quartermaster General, Wilhelm Greener, made a deal with the Empire's last Chancellor and head of the German Social Democratic Party, Friedrich Ebert. Provided that Ebert crush the radical leftists amidst his ranks and allow Germany's military strongmen to remain in power, these thugs would allow Ebert to establish a "social democracy" in the form of the Weimar Republic.
A stalwart patriot already notorious for crushing the antiwar elements within his own party, soon-to-be-President Friedrich Ebert snapped up the deal immediately and while Weimar Germany wore the drag of liberty and progress with a constitution and a parliament, the Republic's first president established a dictatorship in all but name only for the last six years of his life. Friedrich Ebert spent most of his reign ruling by decree with the new Weimar constitution's Article 48, which afforded the Reich President the ability to govern without the consent of the Reichstag so long as he did so in the name of national security.
By the time Ebert had finally dropped dead, an increasingly large segment of Germany's population had taken a hard turn back to the right, largely out of disgust for what had been allowed to pass for the left. Seeing at least some of the writing on the wall, the Social Democratic Party decided to endorse an Imperial German Army general named Paul Von Hindenburg to replace Ebert as president in 1932 in order to prevent a victory by an ascendant Adolf Hitler.
Hindenburg wasted little time using the despotic executive powers created by the SPD to make the Third Reich a forgone conclusion. He approved the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties over an obvious false flag attack, he awarded the Weimar executive office even more power with the Enabling Act of 1933, and he appointed Adolf Hitler to the position of Chancellor of Germany from which the Further used the SPD's Article 48 to establish a military dictatorship by totally legal means.
My point here isn't that liberalism or social democracy are synonymous with fascism. My point is that fascism lurks behind every ideology that shelters an untouchable elite and that free people tend to embrace authoritarian solutions to their perceived problems when democracy is reduced to a shroud used to conceal the true source of those problems. If you send Middle American's children off to die in the Middle East in the name of democracy and gut main street in the name of the free market, you can't exactly be shocked when they reject both for any asshole promising to make their empty lives great again by any means necessary.
You also have little right to be shocked when liberal democracy's financiers approve of increasingly despotic measures when the old illusions fail to pacify the growing rage of the masses.
We cannot confront the threat posed by Donald Trump until we confront the fact that, just like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump is the product of a morally bankrupt neoliberal plutocracy that dared to call itself a democracy, and we cannot confront the threat still posed by fascism until we confront the fact that time and time again, this phantom is merely the last stage of every state on the brink of collapse.
I've said it before, and I'll be shot saying it ten more times, anarchism is the only order that affords the full consent of the governed necessary for true democracy to thrive and any form of democracy not administered directly through popular consensus is just another lie for phantoms to hide behind.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* El President by Drugstore featuring Thom Yorke
* John Wayne was a Nazi by MDC
* Toy by Blondshell
* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins
* The Captain by Kasey Chambers
* Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys
* Asshole by the Lumineers
* No Values by Black Flag
* Lexicon Devil by the Germs
* Lady Picture Show by Stone Temple Pilots
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