Fascism Watch for 11 September 2023: the Raw Naked Quest for Power and Dominance edition

Canadian Tories are, right on schedule (as in, five or six years later) joining in on whatever international authoritarianism still seems to be hot today. In this case, it’s moving against queers, joining in on bathroom bans, locker room bans, trans health care bans, and so on. They’re also jumping feet-first into vaccine denialism. Canadians, please, I beg you, take this seriously; this fascism wave, like the last one, is international and yes, they mean it. Americans, keep an eye on this if your fascist genocide escape plan includes Canada.

Vivek Ramaswamy lies and says the 14th amendment doesn’t say what it actually says, is “contested,” and that he’d mass deport American citizens born of immigrant parents. This is an example of fascism, but his whole role in this monstrous production is to be Worst Man, so there you are.

She Posted About Making Shakshuka on a Lazy Saturday. Then She Got Death Threats, writes Rolling Stone. It’s the fascist right attacking her for not being a tradwife raising children, and it’s because M4tt W4lsh sicced his misogynist army on her. All of this is always about controlling women and dictating what a woman can be – which for them means pregnant and property.

And along the way, I’ve been talking about Project 2025, and now DAME Magazine is on it, talking about its plans to eliminate trans people and re-criminialise queer people in general. The goal is making all of us illegal again, and this is their blueprint.

As ABC news reports, they think even expressing support for LGBT people should be illegal, just like it is in Russia – which just added another layer of “trans people are even more extra illegal now” because there’s no end to it until it’s just death camps, at which point they move to the next target – and they’re working to make it so in Florida.

Remember, these are the steps they’re repeating here, having been used successfully in Russia by Putin. These are the de facto steps glossed over in Project 2025:

1. Declare all mentions of LGBT people, starting with those most easily targeted, to be inherently “sexual” material. This has been American fundamentalist policy for decades.
2. Use this to declare any and all visibility of LGBT people, being “inherently sexual material,” off-limits to “children.” Start with bans in schools and libraries. This is where we are now.
3. Expand the “child-friendly-only” domain one step at a time, until it includes literally everywhere.
4. LGBT people are now de facto illegal in most locations, under threat of being charged with the corruption of children. Prosecutors who refuse to act against the laws will be charged with crimes themselves; this part is explicitly stated in Project 2025.
5. When we protest, declare that by doing so we are seeking to corrupt your kids and are “sexual groomers of children,” exposing “your kids” to “sexual material” of the “worst” kind.
6. Which flips immediately into “all LGBT people are paedophiles” – again, back to longstanding American fundamentalist Christian policy for decades – which you use to…
7. …make LGBT people illegal and to be imprisoned upon discovery, if not killed.

Which is where we are now in Russia, and where the American fundamentalist movement has wanted to take us for decades. And now the whole party is in, since they control the party. Again, this is Project 2025’s plan for queers, and your kind of queer is not an exception.

Now. What next?

Years ago, I talked about how the GOP was giving the Proud Boys a tryout as an official violent militia wing. That didn’t quite work out, but Raw Story is of the opinion that they are an unofficial military wing, much as the KKK was for Southern Democrats in the 1920s and 1930s. For a lot of the GOP, this is absolutely true.

Heads up on a terminology change: the GOP know being anti-abortion-rights is hurting them, so they’re trying to figure out how to rebrand it without changing anything. One of the terms being floated around is “pro-baby,” so be on the watch for that and know what it means.

Just as Republican Florida moved to hide Republican official activities last year, Republican Arkansas is now doing the same thing in a special session, particularly to hide Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders travel and meetings – even retroactively and on state money. Remember, they want to rule you, not govern, and transparency makes that harder.

I’m not excerpting, but this is exactly the kind of horror I’d expect out of a “Conservative Christian” upbringing mixed with internet fame: Christian influencer’s arrest points to Religious Right’s history of ‘oppression and cruelty.’ I’d link to the NPR version but they’re going with the “smiling happy blond white mother” picture for the person who did things to her kids that I’m not going to type out here but they involved malnutrition and duct tape, so fuck you NPR. Run her mug shot or don’t run anything.

The Green Party’s 2008 presidential candidate is all-in on Putinism and heavy, heavy anti-Semitism, declaring resistance to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine a “war on Russia” and saying the most important question you have to ask in every situation is “how Jewish” is it. So if you had any illusions about the Greens here being anything but authoritarian assholes, get over it.

Only one Musk note this issue, and that’s a group of lawyers putting out an argument to regulators that Twitter is not suitable to be anyone’s bank at all, in particular due to their complicity with Saudi spying and the crushing of 6000 dissidents they outed to the Saudi government.

I wish I thought that’d do anything, but good on ’em for reminding everyone about the facts.

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Anybody know the proper way to test a high-voltage self-discharging capacitor?

HEY INTERNET!

Anybody know the proper way to test a high-voltage self-discharging capacitor?

(Don’t say Mr. Carlson’s, it’s a fine device but it doesn’t test caps like this. Will it show a leak? Yes. That’s by design.)

With a regular meter it tests in range and it’s correctly self-discharging but all that’s at meter voltage which is not exactly this thing’s operating range.

(It’s from a cabinet-fit microwave. Everything works except the magnetron doesn’t actually do anything. I hear the relay click but no zappy. So it’s probably that. But I’m not willing to replace that part because that involves breaking microwave radiation containment shields and I don’t have a microwave detector and I’m not buying one for one (1) microwave repair.)

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