Nina-Bytes: Accelerator

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

After the fascist coup attempt on January 6th, 2021, I wrote that the removing Donald Trump from the White House would by no means end the rise of American fascism, or the powder keg of violence that goes along with it. I further warned that a policy of ignoring, legitimating, and appeasing fascists would likely fuel that rise, and bring with it violence acts of reactionary stochastic terrorism. Needless to say, this turned out to be a very unpopular opinion in some (then) rather surprising portions of the online "left" community. 

Unfortunately for us all, as of last Friday those warnings are now distinctly less abstract; a fascist conspiracy theorist broke into the Pelosi home and attacked the Speaker of the House's husband with a hammer. The assailant, a 42 year old fascist Gryoper into just about every right wing conspiracy you could imagine, reportedly attempted to tie Paul Pelosi up with the intention of waiting until his wife Nancy came home. You can read more about this clear act of political violence in this Oct 29th, 2022 summary over on the Guardian:

Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, in hospital with skull fracture after attack

While I certainly don't want to minimize the severity of an 82 year old man's violent assault with a hammer, what's important to our larger discussion about fascism is the fact that the current Democrat Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi was the target of the attack. And despite the protestations of conspiratorial fascist propagandists, it sure does seem political:

"It was reported by CNN that the suspect intended to tie the victim up “until Nancy got home” and that he had posted rightwing and conspiracy theories online, including content promoting the lie that Donald Trump was deprived of victory in the 2020 election because of voter fraud."

There will of course be those, even in the mainstream "centrist" media who insist that this is a crime story, or that the primary issue here is the attacker's mental health. These arguments however ring hollow once you understand that triggering violence from unstable individuals among a faceless reactionary mass is precisely how stochastic terrorism is designed to work. It certainly doesn't take a genius to connect calls for Pelosi's public execution by a fascist GOP Congresswoman, to a disturbed ultra-reactionary conspiracy theorist's attempts to do just that. Even liberal media minions too cowardly to describe this as fascism in writing, fully concede that the result was utterly predictable. And as this October 29th Guardian article by Joan E. Greve ominously predicts, the fascist political violence has only just begun:

Attack on Pelosi’s husband heightens fears of increasing US political violence

Although it remains utterly inexplicable to me that "liberal" media outlets still refuse to use the word "fascist" to describe right wing political violence in the Pig Empire, even after Joe Biden's "semi-fascist" speech, the overall sentiment here is correct. The mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, eliminationist propaganda, and reactionary ideas in the Pig Empire has lead to a drastic rise in political violence; and that violence is by no means from "both sides" as our author makes clear:

"The US Capitol police has reported an overall rise in the number of threats against members of Congress since the deadly January 6 insurrection last year.

According to USCP data, officers tracked 9,625 threats and directions of interest (meaning concerning actions or statements) against members of Congress in 2021, compared with 3,939 such instances in 2017. The House sergeant at arms has responded to this worrisome trend by giving lawmakers up to $10,000 to upgrade security at their homes.

Although both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have faced a number of threats in recent months, the increase is not evenly distributed along the political spectrum. According to a study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, rightwing extremists have committed about 75% of the 450 political murders that occurred in the US over the past decade, compared with 4% attributed to leftwing extremists."

 

Look folks, I'm certainly not trying to be an alarmist. But when everyday people find ourselves watching a trans pogrom in progress, organized voter intimidation parties, and actual "lone wolf" assassination attempts on high profile liberal politicians, it's fair to say we're now talking about a fascist sprint, and not a fascist creep. Furthermore it's increasingly difficult to place much faith in a liberal establishment too disinterested, or too afraid, to materially challenge fascist violence; even when it targets one or more of their own kind. Instead they hide behind weasel words, punch left, and continue to arm up a police state that increasingly looks like it will soon belong to the fascists the police themselves already support.

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

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. 

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

Nina-Bytes: Rigging America In The Open

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

Inside Steve Bannon’s ‘disturbing’ quest to radically rewrite the US constitution

Recently on Twitter, I devoted a few pithy words to mentioning that fascists in American society were "tapping every possible route to power that they can and hoping one hits." I know this because I've been writing about these efforts to override what passes for our "liberal democracy" for several years now; whether they occur by legalist means, or through highly illegal acts of terror and politicized violence. Given this, I think that it's probably saying something when I note that this October 19th, 2022 article by Ed Pilkington over in The Guardian made my blood run cold. 

While I strongly advise you to read the entire article, "the too long didn't read" here is that noted fascist strategist Steve Bannon is using his trash fire podcast to push a highly-plausible right wing conspiracy to re-write the constitution pretty much any way they please. The tactic involves using a thirty-four state conservative majority, to hold a Constitutional Convention. Given that this is a fascist movement that is currently denying the results of the last Presidential election, attempting to rig elections going forward, and organizing a pogrom against trans people, all out in the open, that prospect should be quite concerning to you. As the piece itself makes clear:

 

"Mark Meckler, a founder of the Tea Party who now leads one of the largest groups advocating for the tactic, the Convention of States Action (Cosa), spelled out some of the prime objectives on Bannon’s show. “We need to say constitutionally, ‘No, the federal government cannot be involved in education, or healthcare, or energy, or the environment’,” he said.

Meckler went on to divulge the anti-democratic nature of the state convention movement when he said a main aim was to prevent progressive policies being advanced through presidential elections. “The problem is, any time the administration swings back to Democrat – or radical progressive, or Marxist which is what they are – we are going to lose the gains. So you do the structural fix.”

The “structural fix” involves Republican state legislatures pushing conservative amendments to America’s foundational document. By cementing the policies into the US constitution, they would become largely immune to electoral challenge."

 

So how plausible is this really? Well this is where things get terrifying because we're talking about an extremely well-funded project with support across the broader mainstream right; this isn't one of Bannon's fascist fantasies, this project is on the wish list of powerful lobby groups and billionaires like the Mercer family and groups run by Leonard Leo. Furthermore, and as this article makes clear - these guys are making progress:

 

"Under Article V, 34 states would have to call for a constitutional convention to reach the two-thirds requirement. Cosa has so far succeeded in getting 19 states to sign up, with a further six in active consideration.

ALEC, which sets a narrower remit for a convention focused on its balanced budget amendment, has gone further with 28 states on board.

Either way, there is a shortfall. To address it, constitutional convention leaders have invented increasingly exotic mathematical formulas for attaining the magic number, 34."

 

Please keep in mind that due to aggressive gerrymandering and a concerted effort to control state legislatures by the Republican Party, the GOP currently controls thirty-one states and only needs thirty-four; even if not all of those state legislatures are currently on board with this plan, there's nothing to suggest that will remain true as the GOP continues to slide further into open fascist politics. Once that happens, all bets are off; and that's even setting aside the fact that a GOP Congress could simply decide to fudge the numbers.

All of which leaves only one obvious question; is it still "ridiculous" to call political movement actively working to eliminate democratic rights and permanently lock the destruction of all life on Earth into the constitution on behalf of fossil fuel capital, fascist? Asking for about seven billion friends who aren't part of the capitalist ruling class.

 

 

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

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. 

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

Nina-Bytes: Climate Crisis, Capitalism, and Culpability

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. This post is archival and originally appeared on October 5th, 2021 over on our Facebook page.

World's richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam

I don't know about you, but I'm getting mighty damn tired of hearing excuses about why "we" can't collectively come together to prevent climate catastrophe; and I'm especially getting tired of hearing it from bougie ruling class muppets who're inarguably a massive part of the problem.

You can chant "we're all on this Earth together" like a mantra if you want, but the numbers don't lie. Rich people are overwhelmingly using more of our shared resources, and releasing more carbon than the entire labor class. Poor people and indigenous farmers aren't killing the planet; seventy one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 come from just one hundred corporations. And we know who the owners and controllers of those corporations are! Hell the one of the largest polluters on Earth is the United States military; does that sound like a "we" problem to you?

It's overwhelmingly the capitalist class that's causing the problem, and it's the capitalist class whose lust for endless and immediate profits that's preventing us from taking the steps necessary to save our planet, and with it potentially all life on Earth. The rich have already pillaged our collective future for filthy lucre, and now they (and their in pocket politicians) are refusing to pay for the ensuing fallout; a fallout that may well kill us all. 

This is absolutely not a "we" crisis, and we sure as sh*t aren't all in this together.

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

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Article Analysis: Two Examples of False Balance and Protecting Fascism in the Media (Re-Post)

 

Editor's note: as I mentioned in a recent post, Facebook's fascist-enabling decision to ban anarchist and antifascist pages has put me in the awkward position of having to transfer all of my unique content to another website; including older, archived material. These two article analysis journals (both concerning fascist U.S. immigration policy) were originally published in the fall of 2019 and are presented here with only minor formatting alterations.

Cuccinelli Wants Power To Reveal Personal Information Of Refugees Accused Of Crimes

Today's article analysis features an incredible important Buzzfeed news story that is sadly still a prime example of mainstream media framing a discussion in favor of establishment power - even when that establishment is a bunch of rabid white supremacists driving the country towards something quite akin to Mussolini's Italy, if not Nazi Germany itself.

The first half of this article is a mumble jumble of alphabet soup call signs in which Ken Cuccinelli is allowed to frame his plan to "unilaterally publicize personal information about asylees, refugees, and their family members in the US who are being prosecuted for certain crimes" as an issue of "law and order."

Only once you get halfway down the page does Buzzfeed provide an expert opinion by John Sandweg (Obama era former US Immigration and Customs Enforcement head) on what the real motivation is for this brazen and objectively fascist grab at power: 

“This is 100% about the media. This memo is in the guise of a public safety matter, but it’s really to publicize cases where asylum seekers were arrested or prosecuted for a criminal offense,” he said, after being told about the memo. “They are trying to undermine faith in the asylum and refugee system to suggest it is a public safety threat and the data does not support that.”

Look folks, they don't call it "creeping fascism" for no reason and there is a clear historical record of what happens when a society allows itself to constantly accept "just a little bit more fascism" in the name of "peace, order and profit." As I've argued time and time again elsewhere, treating these incidents in isolation while failing to register the bigger picture because it's too horrible is a pretty good way to end up on the back of truck headed for "Happy Patriot Labor Camp 17" in the not so distant future.

This story of course must be examined in the context of Trump's objectively white nationalist government, that government's war on brown migrants and the long and shameful bipartisan U.S. history of locking poor brown people in cages because they crossed an imaginary line to escape war and neofeudalism our society has imposed on them.

Furthermore, this news must also be considered in relation to the Trump administration's already existing policy of allowing ICE to publish a weekly list of "immigrant crimes" to demonize migrants in the eyes of the average American voter. I'm certainly not the only one to note the haunting echoes of Der Stürmer in this policy or Cuccinelli's terrifying grasp at power here (see below) but you'd be hard pressed to find any mention of it in the article Buzzfeed just presented.

I think at this point it would be wise for Americans to remember that Nazi Germany and the horrifying "Final Solution" didn't come about overnight - it took more than a decade of grooming by the reactionary German right in all levels of society to sculpt the kind of nation that would embrace the death camps. Along the way there were thousands of little but horrifying stories, so many that they could not all be remembered, about the creeping rise of antisemitic fascism. What we have learned since then, but seemingly forgotten at the worst hour in our collective history is that fascism doesn't care who it hates, it just needs someone to hate. There will always been another other, another leftist threat, another treachery to the good volk who must be protected for the honor of the fatherland.

If you aren't starting to see enough terrifying parallels here to actively name the beast, then I hate to tell you that you're already well along the path to being a "good German."

- nina illingworth

Trump administration to expand DNA collection at border and give data to FBI

One of the more frustrating aspects about analyzing the fascist creep in "Trump's America" and how it's covered by a largely complicit, but still fully politicized corporate media is learning to walk the line of truth and accountability; to avoid having to choose between absolving a fascist society for the obvious fascist consequences of its open embrace of fascist ideology and absolving a clearly fascist leader and his clearly fascist administration for making things demonstrably worse because "well it's always been like this."

I mention this because in today's article analysis we're looking at a brief October 3rd, 2019 update in the Guardian about the Trump administration's (still theoretical) proposal to "expand the collection of DNA from migrants who cross US borders, and to include the information in a vast criminal database operated by the FBI." 

Now the first thing most people are going to notice about this description is the word "expand" which implies that the U.S. government is currently collecting DNA records on migrants. If you read the whole article however you'll discover that this is at best marginally true; the government currently does rapid DNA testing to detect adults "falsely posing as parents" of migrant children at the border between the United States and Mexico. Although on the surface this discrepancy might seem fairly minor (after all, it is covered in the article) the ultimate effect here is both extremely dangerous for society at large and openly advantageous to architects of the fascist creep slowly strangling the entire "West" as we speak. 

In The Guardian's defense, they are one of the few major outlets that reports on the bipartisan nature of America's nightmare fascist immigration policies but the idea that cataloguing the bio-metric data on millions of migrants and turning it over to the FBI for criminal enforcement purposes has any real relation to a genetic paternity test used to identify potential child trafficking victims at the border crosses the line from "fair minded" and into an objectively "false balance."

In light of the fact that almost all of the undocumented migrants who pass through the southern border are Mexican, Central American and South American, what the Trump administration is proposing here is nothing short of a high-tech version of an ethno-nationalist or Nazi watch list; a necessary precursor to apartheid, mass deportations or open ethnic cleansing. While The Guardian does not make the effort to connect these dots, they do point out that this proposed plan fits in neatly with the Trump administration's attempt to associate migrants with criminal behavior and that such a genetic record would provide identifying information about the families of migrants, regardless of their individual citizenship status. The fact that turning the list over to the FBI happens to help generate the narrative that brown migrants are dangerous criminals is really just icing on the cake however; this DNA list makes the dystopian, police-state possibilities of Bush Administration's objectively racist and Islamophobic "no fly list" look like joke by comparison.

This policy is not an expansion; it's new (DHS secretary Janet Napolitano refused to do it in 2010), terrifying and when combined with the fact that we *already* have concentration camps housing people whose only crime is crossing an imaginary line to escape U.S. sponsored violence, poverty and environmental destruction, this proposal is a rather obvious sign of America's descent into open fascism - a topic the Guardian doesn't even remotely address in this article.

Look, I'll be the first person to tell you that the Democratic Party of the past half-century has been just as brutal, repressive and xenophobic towards brown migrants along the southern American border, as their sh*thead Republican counterparts. We didn't get here overnight. Trump didn't make undocumented migrants a class of people it was okay to violently persecute and lock up for profit. Downmarket Mussolini's administration didn't even build the concentrations camps that Trump's fascist lapdog Stephen Miller is using to create space for the "white ethno-state" of his dreams. Healthy societies don't elect fascists and America has spent a very long time embracing the principles a man like Trump embodies with every monstrous action he undertakes.

But in our quest to recognize that it is important that we still understand that Trump is crashing our society through barriers and taboos that exist for a reason - he might not have battered the gates down, but he's happily steering the nation towards something that looks eerily more like Nazi Germany every single day. 

If you forget that simple truth, you end up writing articles that accidentally leave out the important part of the story and strongly suggest that one of the most terrifying potential policy decisions in the history of U.S. immigration enforcement is merely an "expansion" of policies we already have. 

Articles like this one.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”