Welcome to Fascism Watch Catch Up, Part 5: the Gods Help Us edition.
Let’s start with climate. Let’s start with carbon dioxide in particular. Let’s start with the Republican plan to end renewable energy, drill baby drill, and throw as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as possible as soon as possible. Let’s talk rolling coal in response to planetary disaster. Let’s talk the Republican plan for changing the climate as much as possible, Chapter 12 of Project 2025.
If you want a nightmare climate scenario, they’re ready and eager to feed it to you. This isn’t just rolling back Biden and Democratic laws for renewable/zero-carbon energy in the infrastructure and inflation bills, no – though they certainly plan to do that, and start there. But they go much further.
This is banning work against climate change. This is banning additional adoption of renewable energy. This is banning other states from adopting California-style air pollution rules. This is vastly expanding support for fossil fuels and oil and gas usage, funnelling money to oil, gas, and coal companies – most of all natural gas.
This is a plan to burn the world down on their way out, and their intent is to start on Day 1.
They’re already doing this where they can, and remember, there’s no such thing as a “moderate Republican.” Youngkin’s proved that in Virginia, taking the state out of the regional carbon-reduction group the legislature voted to join. (He’s being sued over that, hopefully the claimants will win.)
Project 2025 also plans a massive expansion of nuclear weapon production, by the way. Same chapter.
The American fundamentalist movement is, and has always been, an authoritarian death cult. Now that their culture has captured the Republican Party, it’s an authoritarian death cult too.
We’ve talked about the death cult part; now let’s talk about the authoritarian part.
Republican authoritarianism goes all the way from bodily autonomy up to the highest levels of the government. In their view, everything belongs to Christian cishet white men, and – aheh – fundamentally, anything else is both wrong and specifically invalid, and can and should be taken from you if you make any “wrong” choices.
And let’s start at the bottom: they really, really hate women. That’s not just Republicans, that’s core to the current fascist movement globally, as exemplified not just by incels but by influencers like serial-rapist and would-be woman-enslaver (YES ENSLAVER I DO MEAN THAT LITERALLY AND SO DOES HE) Andr3w T4te, who targets tweenaged boys to influence into similar misogyny and who has a horrifying approval rate amongst those kids. He’s working pretty effectively to create the next generation of violent, vicious misogynists and people are still sleeping on it. Don’t, because he really represents the id of today’s fascist movement.
It of course manifests a little further up in abortion bans. They’re saying outright that they’re going to ban abortion nationally, as everyone who didn’t believe their clear and obvious lies about it being a “states’ rights issue” always understood. And they’re making getting abortions a felony, after decades of swearing they’d never prosecute women – something we also always knew was a lie.
But what are they doing in states, now?
Well, making it illegal for women to use roads. If they’re on their way to an abortion. Limiting travel, something common to most authoritarians and the societies they run.
Pledging to prosecute people in other states, outside their jurisdictions, if they aid someone in their states in getting an abortion in any way – including just providing information.
It’s not that they care about these foetuses. They really, truly, genuinely don’t, and when they throw that line out there, it must be rejected every time. Don’t even pretend to entertain it, because it’s a complete farce of a lie, just like “it’s a state issue” and “we won’t prosecute pregnant women” were farcical lies. (I tend to think that pretending they had any sincerity in any of this is part of how we got here. It was never sincere, ever.)
They same people who talk about foetal rights and a foetus having a “right to life” will fight a lawsuit over a government-abuse-triggered miscarriage by claiming the foetus didn’t have rights.
That’s Texas, by the way. The raw, naked hypocrisy doesn’t bother them, because it feels like impunity, which feels like – and is – power.
What else do they do?
Well, they’ll certainly use the power of the state to indoctrinate. You see that in all the coverage of red states banning teaching of history, of “don’t say gay” in all its many forms, of banning literally maths textbooks over “woke” lessons in maths, and mass purges of books in libraries, particularly books with minority or LGBT characters.
The age-old practice of packing school boards with religious authoritarians has revived, bans on minority and LGBT groups are flying in red states, teachers are being forced to attend musicals about their ideological failures (anyone else looking forward to the Arirang Mass Games?), and what DeSantis has been doing to New College in Florida is Orban-like in its similarly-ideological remaking. I’ve covered acres of this in previous updates – including in this individual catching-up series of posts.
Remember that Moms4Liberty cult newsletter that quoted Hitler on its front page, and with approval? The national organisation is apparently just fine with that:
The national group has remained unapologetic in the face of criticism. At the group’s second summit in Philadelphia co-founder Tiffany Justice defended an Indiana chapter that quoted Adolf Hitler in its newsletter and later apologized.
“One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler. I stand with that mom,” she said to applause.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice
But it’s not just in schools. It never has been. For example, another story I’ve brought up before: the Trump judge requiring Southwest Airlines employees to take religious training courses from the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom. (They don’t think I have the right to exist, btw. Just for the record.) Southwest have naturally appealed, but the Trump judge is doubling down and refusing to issue a stay pending the appeal. Normally, doing so is standard practice, but this is what nothing about any of this is normal means.
To wit: everything is always a raw power grab, using force to dominate and force others to your will. History, tradition, and law mean nothing; what matters is what you get away with. If you aren’t thinking about this movement in that way, you are not thinking about this movement.
In North Carolina, they’re trying to remove a Supreme Court justice – a woman, naturally – for saying racism exists. In Wisconsin, they’re getting ready to impeach a newly-elected Supreme Court justice if she doesn’t recuse herself from a redistrcting case after she said gerrymandering exists in Wisconsin, a state so severely gerrymandered that it takes a 60-40 loss statewide by Republicans to lose control – narrowly – of the legislature. (She has no obligation – or even reason – to do so. It’s just an attempt to overturn another election.) In Florida, DeSantis’s hyper-gerrymander is losing in the courts, and DeSantis himself is removing elected Democratic prosecutors and replacing them with their Republican opponents who lost their elections. In Georgia, a bunch of them are trying to unseat Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney prosecuting Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in that state.
If that doesn’t work, they throw other people out of the legislature, like two of the Tennessee Three (and then when they get re-elected, silence them yet again [see also]), or they change ballot initiative rules and language to break popular initiatives supporting people’s rights.
And if nothing else works, they’ll boycott a legislative session, deny quorum, get disqualified for running for re-election as a result, then sue to be able to run for office again so they can boycott again and keep the state house closed.
And if that doesn’t work, it’s time for terrorism. [See also]
In short, they don’t give a fuck what voters want. To quote Beau of the Fifth Column, they want to rule, not represent. What’s good is what furthers that goal. What’s bad is what blocks it.
Do My Will, Or Die. It’s literally that simple. And it’s the authoritarianism – the fascism – at the very core of the American fundamentalist movement, and now of their inheritors, the Republican Party – and the global fascist revival.
Do My Will, Or Die.
And despite the edition name for this one… I’m afraid the gods aren’t going to help us.
We have to do it ourselves.
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