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Nina-Bytes: Order of the Day
Just over five years ago, in the wake of the openly fascist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, I came to an important realization that has shaped much of my work since. Specifically, that America was in the process of an obvious slide into overt fascism; fueled in part by the election of Donald Trump. Of course, I already knew and had repeatedly written that Trump himself was a fascist; but like many of my readers today, I had some faith that the American faux democratic system would contain Trump's personal ideological tendencies. Watching significant portions of the media establishment, and indeed the U.S. government openly embrace and enable the swine emperor's fascist political tactics, utterly shattered that faith within the first six months of Downmarket Mussolini's presidency; and little has happened to restore it since.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this devotion to the fascist cause and Trumpism as a whole, was particularly apparent in federal law enforcement, Amerikkka's odious immigration police, and the larger Department of Homeland Security. While many were content to ignore concentration camps for migrant children, even the mainstream media establishment stood up and took notice when Trump, his fascist Department of Justice, and his pet federal agencies declared war on the city of Portland and started black-bagging leftist activists off the street.
While this shift from the enemy without, to the presumed enemy within represented a clear warning sign on America's road to fascism, our society and its media influencers appear only too happy to forget Portland, and what it can tell us about the Pork Reich's current precarious dance with full fascist control. To avoid repeating that mistake, I'd like to take a look at this November 5th, 2022 article written by Dell Cameron over on Gizmodo:
Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump
As always you should read the whole article, but the short version is pretty straightforward. Facing down the end of his first term, Herr Donald sought to link his three major political enemies, Black Lives Matter protestors, the Democratic Party, and antifascists, together as a single terrorist organization called "Antifa." This was fascist conspiracy nonsense, but doing so would allow the swine emperor to unlock sweeping federal powers (and funds) to persecute his opposition in the lead up to the 2020 election; which he would ultimately lose, and attempt to overturn with a riot. Well as it turns out, Trump tasked the Department of Homeland Security to manufacture evidence to support this authoritarian nonsense; and to the surprise of precisely no one, they complied!
Lead by noted fascist sh*tbag Chad Wolf, DHS proceeded to go full "the Hunt for Osama Bin Laden" on the streets of Portland. Agents were ordered to assume all protesters were "violent antifa anarchists" unless they had specific intelligence proving otherwise. Anti-terrorism dossiers, the so-called DHS "baseball cards" so familiar from the fight against Al-Qaeda, were produced for numerous innocent protestors; including those merely exercising their free speech rights, and folks who weren't even arrested. As the article makes clear, those dossiers remain in government custody and would ultimately make their way far from the warzone Trump manufactured in Portland:
"The dossiers, known as Operational Background Reports, or OBRs, are known colloquially within the agency as “baseball cards,” the report says. The task of creating them was handed, “with little to no guidance on execution,” to the agency’s Current and Emerging Threats Center, an analysis unit whose “actionable intelligence” is distributed widely throughout the government. According to the report, the dossiers would’ve been shared with, among others, the agency’s Field Operations Division, which works closely with House and Senate committee staffers, and the Federal Protection Service, whose core mission is securing some 9,000 federal facilities across the country. The extent to which entities outside the federal government were meant to be involved is unclear; however, the report indicates that DHS state and local partners, which would naturally include law enforcement, but also potentially organizations like National Governors Association, could have also been in the loop."
At one point, these muppets even brought in the Homeland Identities, Targeting and Exploitation Center to try and prove the existence of a vast "antifa" financing network; more or less entirely to satisfy the delusions of a septuagenarian fascist and the white nationalists running his government. Ultimately and unsurprisingly, these efforts lead nowhere, but the plain and obvious truth here is that entire departments of the U.S. federal government happily went along with a fascist conspiracy that criminalized anyone daring to exercise their first amendment rights in Portland, as open enemies of the state. There was almost no pushback from either the foot soldiers in the street, or the ideologically compromised administrators who run these already quite fascist portions of the government.
So why does this matter in the here and now? Tomorrow in America, there is a very good chance that the midterm elections will hand multiple branches of the government back to a wholly-fascist Republican Party still quite enthralled by Donald Trump. With storm clouds gathering, there are many folks in our discourse encouraging you to sleepwalk through the rise of fascism with polite fictions, and wistful lullabies about the strength of our institutions. They say little will change, and that the American political experiment is too strong to succumb to fascists, even if rigged elections hand them power.
Those people are dead wrong. And everything we know about Portland is all you need to prove it.
nina illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst.
You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
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