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Are we now in full blown fascist totalitarianism?

EMERGENCY: Trump ORDERS GOP to CANCEL ELECTIONS
Donald Trump has publicly ordered Republican governors and state legislatures to cancel their elections, even if those elections are active, to redraw voting maps in favor of the Republicans. Louisiana has already complied.
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Yeah, this is quite something. What'd be nice is the redistricting happens across the country where it is "allowed". It is taken to court and the State Courts tell the legislatures to fuck off and ungerrymander all the districts.

It is a fantasy, but it would be a nice ironic finish to this.
 
HE WOULD NEVER DO THAT!

Keeps doing the things they claimed he'd never do.
 
July 6: A group of prominent conservative organizations has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny license renewal requests from the eight local television stations owned and operated by ABC, accusing the network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting the Chinese communist party. The petitions come after the commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, took the nearly unprecedented step of requiring the network, a frequent recipient of attacks from Donald Trump, to apply several years early to maintain its ability to broadcast in markets around the country.
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www.theguardian.com

Conservative fight against license renewals for ABC stations heats up

Prominent organizations accuse network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting Chinese communist party
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
ZiprHead said:
July 6: A group of prominent conservative organizations has petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deny license renewal requests from the eight local television stations owned and operated by ABC, accusing the network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting the Chinese communist party. The petitions come after the commission, led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, took the nearly unprecedented step of requiring the network, a frequent recipient of attacks from Donald Trump, to apply several years early to maintain its ability to broadcast in markets around the country.
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www.theguardian.com

Conservative fight against license renewals for ABC stations heats up

Prominent organizations accuse network of political, racial and sexual bias and supporting Chinese communist party
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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OFFS!!
 
unapologetic said:
More supression of alternative naritives:
The battle over Stars and Stripes
(fixed link)
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I used to read Stars and Stripes newspaper. It was good for comparing like articles to USA Today, the other widely available newspaper on military bases.
It’s better to present objective news via the Stars and Stripes format than leaving military personnel to the wilds of the internet.
 
Don2 (Don1 Revised) said:
Let's review the original claim. Allegedly, fascism requires meeting this criterion:
  • Glorification of masculinity & obedience (softness = sin)

I disagree that the glorification of masculinity is a necessary requirement for a regime to be fascist. However, I do agree that a strong virtue of obedience must exist within the circle of power, and this logically follows from a strongman leader taking over the government. The continuation of such a system necessitates that non-obedience is framed as sinful or at least a virtue-compromise.

Non-compliance can sometimes be construed as "soft," for instance, when compassion is valued as a higher virtue than obedience, leading to a refusal to follow orders. However, this is not the only form of disobedience. Disloyalty to Trump can also stem from an appeal to a higher order of "rule of law." As he breaks down institutions, we see that even certain conservatives have been politically targeted, facing "lawfare" and being made enemies of the state. These actions—the elimination of political enemies—are fascist tendencies that continue to move the government along a spectrum of fascism.

Now, all this said, Dr Z was wise to completely skip the latter part of the criterion he posted because meeting the obedience requirement is all too obvious. On the other hand, the argument that the MAGA movement and Trump Administration does not glorify masculinity (even if it is not a direct requirement of fascism) is quite poor.

We can clearly observe the glorification of a specific, narrow masculinity in these features of the movement and/or Administration:
  • An ideological attack on trans women, which reinforces a binary gender view.
  • An explicit appeal to restore gender hierarchy, where the traditional role dictates that women are subservient to men.
  • Orders to create a "warrior ethos" that appeals broadly to MAGA beyond the specific military realm, prioritizing a "hard" national character.
  • Forcing military women to meet male standards, symbolically re-centering the male physique as the national ideal of strength.

This list is not exhaustive, and additional features of the MAGA movement include:
  • The MAGA movement's soft endorsement of paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys explicitly links the political establishment to an active cult of violence, obedience, and hyper-masculinity.
  • Rhetoric casting immigrants, "The Deep State," or liberals as "threats" that only a "strong man" can defeat is a classic trope of hegemonic masculinity used to justify male dominance and strength. To that point, the leader has publicly complained that violent ICE agents have not been violent enough.
  • MAGA rhetoric constantly weaponizes terms like "weak," "soft," "cuck," and "beta." This is a direct framing of softness as a political and moral failing, which is the modern iteration of "softness = sin."
These elements alone prove the point several times over.

Dr Z's ultimate response is to admit masculinity is present but then to add arbitrary, unnecessary requirements. The extreme promotion of masculinity was already a sketchy requirement for fascism that he contributed himself. He has now arbitrarily modified his own arbitrarily chosen rule by inserting an unnecessarily narrow definition.

The above data clearly demonstrate that MAGA is not a "healthy" and "progressive" "pushback against postmodern gender roles." If it is a pushback at all—a dubious claim, since it largely grew out of movements that never relinquished ideas about gender hierarchy—it is an extreme, aggressive movement.

Regarding his assertion:
I'm willing to bet that even the most ardent MAGA man thinks therapy is great and thinks pills might sometimes be necessary.
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This claim sets a misleading, impossible-to-prove standard. While anecdotal, the fact that some ardent followers have resorted to extreme, destructive acts (like the individual who blew himself up to initiate a "Purge") directly contradicts the image of the emotionally self-aware MAGA man who "thinks therapy is great." Moreover, a larger cultural current within the movement attacks medical science and promotes "natural immunity," aiming toward self-reliance and strength—traditional male characteristics. The implicit requirement that a "real" MAGA man must be opposed to pills is a straw man. Even historical fascists like the Nazis and Hitler used medication. This demonstrates how extreme and irrelevant his extra requirements are.

Discussions about Futurism and Dworkin are largely tangents and distractions from the core criterion. Furthermore, requiring that features within modern fascism bear the exact same relationship older fascism had to extinct historical movements is an unnecessary burden. This is, at best, an out-of-context nitpick. The current movement's approach to masculinity is a modern, culturally-specific iteration of that fascist feature. The operative question is whether the appeal to promoting a specific masculinity leads to tighter political control and hierarchy, which it demonstrably does. Any debate beyond that is unnecessarily narrow.
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Recalling this little sub-thread about hyper-masculinity, just wanted to add the recent news that Kegsbreath wants to now check soldiers above a certain age for low testosterone and give them supplements, calling the military the new "high T military." After forcing women to meet male requirements and then giving T to males who may have low T, one wonders exactly how this is _not_ hypermasculine.
 
www.nbcnews.com

Decorated Army vet files $3M claim alleging National Guard assault

Retired Army Capt. Anna King’s legal team said she was targeted due to “her speech, via the prominent signs in her window, criticizing their presence in the District.”
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com
National Guard members shoved a retired Army captain to the pavement in violent retaliation for her opposition to their deployment in Washington, D.C., the decorated soldier said in a multimillion-dollar administrative claim filed this week.


The confrontation unfolded May 8 in front of the home of retired Capt. Anna King, on New York Avenue NW in the district, she said in her claim filed against the Defense Department on Tuesday.


King, 44, was sitting on a bench outside her home at about 7:05 p.m. when “three National Guardsmen walked through the gate and announced they were” apprehending her, though they “did not have a warrant and did not explain the basis for” detaining her, according to the complaint made against the Idaho National Guard.

The guard members “grabbed her arms and back and shoved her toward the concrete patio” before two of them “pressed their weight down on her and cuffed her wrists behind her back, extraordinarily tightly, with plastic handcuffs,” King’s legal team wrote.

“Ms. King repeatedly screamed in pain, but the Guardsmen continued to hold her down and did nothing to help her. One Guardsmen pressed his knee into her back and pulled her arms upward, increasing the pain,” according to the injury claim seeking $3 million.

“A Guardsman squatted on top of Ms. King, holding onto the handcuffs, for about eight minutes, keeping her immobilized, her face against the concrete. As additional National Guardsmen arrived on scene, Ms. King complained that her shoulder hurt and pleaded for the Guard members to loosen the handcuffs, but no one did. She asked why she was being detained but received no response.”

A Metropolitan Police Department officer allegedly told King’s neighbor that night that the former Army captain was a suspect in an assault on a guard member days earlier.

That allegation is “baseless” and no such charges have ever been filed against King, her legal team said.
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Piece of Shit is threatening a $5 billion lawsuit against the Center for American Progress for their report that concluded that Trump's National Guard occupation of Washingon D.C and otner cities has not had a significant impact on crime.

President Trump has opened a new front in his campaign to intimidate political foes, threatening a prominent liberal think tank with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime.

The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment. And while it is unclear how far any suit the president might ultimately file will get in court, it could force the organization to spend money fighting it off and make it even more of a target of his allies and supporters.

...

The president has repeatedly claimed that his administration is the most transparent in American history. But he and his aides have used lawsuits and executive actions to go after law firms, universities and television networks. They have also used criminal tactics such as search warrants and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to pry loose sensitive information from reporters.

Many of these efforts have faltered once they reached court and faced judicial scrutiny. Mr. Brito himself has filed multiple failed suits on behalf of Mr. Trump. Last month, a federal judge in Florida referred Mr. Brito for potential disciplinary proceedings after ruling that a suit he filed for the president against the Internal Revenue Service amounted to an improper exercise in self-dealing.

The Center for American Progress report accused Mr. Trump of seeking to take credit for a nationwide decline in violent crime that began before he returned to the White House. The report determined that there was “no evidence” that the National Guard deployments had affected the crime rate, adding that they were poised to cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if they continued through the end of 2026.
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www.nytimes.com

Trump Threatens Defamation Suit Over National Guard Report, Aiming to Intimidate a Critic

It was the latest example of President Trump’s bid to use the legal system against those who voice unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Defamation????? The lawyer here should be sanction by the courts and then disbarred.

Piece of Shit is so evil.
 
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