Fascism Watch for 3 May 2023: Good Morning

[solarbird]

Florida Republicans have floated a bill requiring that people who blog about Governor DeSantis, his cabinet, and other elected officials including state representatives to file with the state. Is this fascist enough for you yet?

DeSantis’s new board at the New College of Florida – a publicly -funded state institution, I remind everyone – is explicitly saying they will purge the college of ideologically incorrect students and faculty. They’re also planning to aggressively expand the “Don’t Say Gay” bill to bar more discussion of LGBT people (see also), and are threatening Disney in new ways in an attempt to censor the company’s films, television, and… well, whatever they put out. They’re being quite up front about it: get on our side or we will use the power of the state to fuck you up.

Relatedly, rightists and other fash are howling about a new Peter Pan movie in progress at Disney because not all of the characters are white. We Hunted the Mammoth has coverage. The racism may as well be on picket signs now.

This is the Putin plan, by the way. Step at a time, starting at the same place. The intent is obvious.

Texas Republicans have introduced a bill to require mass internet censorship of abortion information. It would require active censorship both by the website operator and internet access providers.

Also in Texas, Republicans have introduced a bill calling for massive tax cuts explicitly only for heterosexual families – the bigger, the better. Same-sex parents are explicitly excluded. So is everyone who has ever been divorced. I’m including this over here for a few reasons, but the biggest is that this is also explicitly copied from Orban policies and law in Hungary; the neo-fascism is, as the original, international. Which would be hilarious if it wasn’t pure evil.

A nazi (allegedly) responsible for a series of (very real) pipe bombings in California has been arrested and charged. He sure does like his nazi crap.

CMS Wire has a hilariously misinformed article claiming that Mastodon, which the author seems to think is a single monolithic company with a single controller, bought Gab and absorbed it and is therefore full of Nazis. This is particularly hilarious that Mastodon as a primary collective/federated entity is the only system so far to successfully use the Nazi bar phenomenon against nazis, successfully siloing them out en masse.

They have a partial correction up with doesn’t actually improve the reality, like, at all. Seriously, not even a little. Here’s a series of toots talking about it.

Finally, this is related to everything: “I’ve been saying this for a few years now, but it’s worth recording here for the record: It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble. Their level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes.“

That’s the beginning of a discussion that’ll be ongoing for a while, I think.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.