https://paulstreet.substack.com/p/no-fascism-to-see-here?r=nsdhl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Dear readers: current events have once again interrupted my originally promised 3- or 4-part series on US political fascisation, which is starting to feel a bit like recapitulation of earlier posts. I will next week do a (promised) piece on the tension between the fascist project and capitalists’ desire for profitable stability. I hope also to review the Jeff Sharlet book mentioned at the end of the present essay.
“Nothing to See Here”
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“For better or worse,” Gabor Mate writes in his book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, “we humans have a genius for getting used to things, especially when the changes are incremental. The newfangled verb ‘to normalize’ refers to the mechanism by which something previously aberrant becomes normal enough that it passes beneath our radar. On a societal level, then, ‘normal’ often means ‘nothing to see here’: all systems are functioning as they should, no further inquiry needed.”
So it is with the growth of the political pathology that is fascism in the United States. It has creeped along slowly but surely within the not-so democratic sinews and cells of the American political order since the late 1970s if at a significantly escalated pace since Barack Obama’s first Black presidency tipped millions of white folks into a revanchist frenzy. It gathered force incrementally “beneath [most Americans’] radar” for many years before Charlottesville, Donald Trump’s bizarre Bible-holding moment in Lafayette Square, and the January 6 Capitol Riot – an openly fascistic physical assault on the US Capitol meant to cancel the peaceful transfer of power, undo an election, and install Herr Donald as something akin to a dictator.
The basic ideological and narrative elements of the pathology (please my April 20th Substack on all that) had already taken hold of the Republican – really now Republi-fascist – Party well before the Capitol Riot. They were in place to no small degree before Trump became president and then congealed and metastasized like never before during his presidency, when the usual pattern of far-right militia formation declining when Republicans hold the White House was reversed. The real if sloppy fascist 2021-21 putsch attempt should have surprised nobody who had paid serious attention to Trump during his 2015-16 presidential campaign and his prior years in advance. The Trumpenstein telegraphed it from the start, making it clear that he would NOT accept removal through mere elections and that he would NOT be trying to win a second term in the previously normal fashion – by advancing policies that enough voters supported for him to prevail through a peaceful re-election.
January 6 produced a second moment in which it became briefly possible for at least a small portion of mainstream media personnel to acknowledge the Amerikaner fascism standing right in front of them and the nation. The first such moment had occurred when Trump responded to the George Floyd Rebellion with calls to deploy US military to crush peaceful social and racial justice protest.
But the acknowledgement has mostly faded since January 6th, only briefly interrupted when Joe Biden in September of last year told elite donors that “the MAGA Republicans” have a world view “like semi-fascism.” The squeamishness of “the F-word” persists even as Donald “I Will be Your Retribution” Trump and his election-denying white nationalist party and supporters have been demonstrating again and again that there’s nothing “semi” about their fascism – something I’ve been documenting on Substack since last September and at CounterPunch since and before the ascendency of Joe “At Least I’m Not Trump” Biden.
The dominant corporate pacification media’s talking heads, pundits, and reporters continue to dysfunctionally normalize and cloak the radically racist, sexist, inegalitarian, atavistic, brutish, anti-intellectual, paranoid-style, and authoritarian pathology that is 21st Century Amerikaner fascism by deceptively labeling it “conservative” and “populist.” As in “there’s another election coming up pitting the [unmentionably capitalist-imperialist and conservative] liberal Democratic Party against the [unmentionably radical and fascist] conservative Republican Party. It’s democracy in action, same as it ever was.”
“All systems are functioning as they should. Nothing much to see here.” Pay no attention to the deepening authoritarian menace that has spread its tentacles across the neoliberal nation. Never mind that’s what left of democracy in the sick bourgeois Superpower – the world’s leading mass incarceration state that has experienced more than 170 mass shootings so far this year – is on its last legs thanks to the cringing capitalist-imperialist captivity of both of its two dominant parties, the right-tilted Minority Rule nature of its key governing and political institutions, and the fact that one of those two reigning parties has gone from parliamentary and constitutional rule of law republicanism to authoritarian and maximalist Christian white nationalism, also known as fascism.
Below I examine a clear case of this insipid normalization – a front page New York Times report on FOX/Fatherland News’ recent firing of the leading Amerikaner fascist ideologue Tucker Carlson, the onetime co-founder and chief editor of the neofascist website The Daily Caller.
F*#ker Carlson’s Top Fascist Hits
If any current media-politics personality besides Donald Trump and Steve Bannon deserves to be explicitly and daily called out as a fascist, it is F*#ker Carlson (to use revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian’s colorful name for him), who has used his time in mass media to:
· Call women “primitive.”
· Minimize the brutality of statutory rape.
· Claim that the desire to procreate has been “subverted” by birth control and abortion.
· Claim that criminal white supremacy and right-wing domestic terrorism “doesn’t exist.”
· Defend and promote fascist Russian president Vladimir Putin, fascist Hungarian head of state Viktor Orban, and fascist US president and ex-president (and future president?) and putschist Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump.
· Promote fascist Great Replacement Theory, which the Southern Poverty Law Center accurately describes as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.”
· Absurdly claimed that that the fascist January 6 Capitol Rioters were “peaceful protesters” after deceptively editing security footage given to him by Republi-fascist House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to utterly whitewash the bloody January 6th rampage. (“Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection—in fact, it demolishes that claim,” Carlson falsely told millions of viewers.)
· Knowingly advanced the false Trump and Trumpist claim – the classically Fascist Big Lie – that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
· Called for insurrection after Trump was recently indicted, advocating violence and telling people to stockpile AR-15s while referring to the indictment as a “political purge” being conducted by the “radical left.”
· Let Trump engage in uninterrupted hate- and lie-filled rantings, calling the maniacal wannabe fascist strongman “sensible and wise” after Trump was indicted by a grand jury on 34 felony counts.
· Broadcast his show from the fascist nation of Hungary, holding up Hungary’s white nationalist president Viktor “Make Hungary Great Again” Orban as a US political role model.
· Celebrated newly elected Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a neo-fascist.
· Absurdly called Biden’s modest “semi-fascism” comment “a declaration of war against half the country”
· Absurdly claimed that Transgender people “hate Christians” and that “transgenderism is the most dangerous extremist movement in the US” – a remarkably Orwellian comment given the Carlson-fueled white supremacist militia movement’s continued menacing presence and growth.
F*#ker Carlson is a leading 21st Century Amerikaner fascist.
“A Source of Repeated Controversies”
But that’s not how New York Times reporters Jeremy Peters, Katie Robertson, and Michael Grynbaum describe him in their account of his departure from FOX. “Tucker Carlson, a Source of Repeated Controversies, is Out at Fox News,” their article is titled.
Peters, Robertson, and Grynbaum (hereafter “PRG”) call the nation’s leading fascist ideologue “one of the most influential voices on the American right in recent years with his blustery, inflammatory monologues on immigrants, Black civil rights activists, vaccines and national identity.” They see him as someone with great power in “the larger conservative media world.”
Carlson’s nightly fascist Hate Hour became what PRG downplay as “a must-watch for conservatives during the [fascist] presidency of Donald J. Trump, an ideological ally and occasional confidant whose rise as a political force was fueled by the same populist, culture war grievances that made Mr. Carlson a star.”
“Few other conservative commentators anywhere,” PRG write, “had both the relationship with Mr. Trump and the ability to sway his thinking, even if only fleetingly, and the power to speak directly to the anxieties of the former president’s followers.”
“Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Carlson,” PRG write, “helped push far-right positions on issues like border policy and race relations into the Republican mainstream…”
Carlson, PRG say, “borrow[ed] some of his central themes from the white nationalist and far-right web and polish[ed] them up for a more mainstream audience.”
Note the key words: “conservative,” “populist,” and “culture war.” The closest PRG can come to the reality – Amerikaner fascism – is to say “far-right” and “white nationalist,” and here the suggestion is that he was just “borrowing” from the Internet when in fact he was joining Trump in leading and driving from the airwaves and the Internet.
That’s called dancing around the real pathology – the out and out 21st Century US fascism that Refuse Fascism has been denouncing and trying to get masses to take on in the streets, public squares, and the broader political and intellectual culture for six and half years now.
The title of the article is as bad if not worse than the content, as is suggested in the following dead-on reflection from Times reader and online commenter Mickey Stebb:
“ ‘Repeated Controversies.’ Can the MSM stop normalizing far-right, fascist, white supremacist toxins as ‘controversy’ and other weak terms? How much the press bends over backwards to accommodate a force that has been slowly dragging the nation down to the darkness is a crime. The truth is that Fox and it's best performers are a malignancy on the nation and one of the main causes of the descent into the madness of Trump and Jan 6. You either fight a cancer or you let the patient die. Choose, NYTimes.”
That is very well said. “Controversies,” like the monumentally false and recurrently disproven claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Right. “Controversies” like whether Covid-19 vaccines really work. Like whether violent white supremacism is a problem in the US. Like if January 6th was a violent attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Like if the malignant ogre Trump should be installed as the nation’s maximalist leader for life. Like if US children and young adults should be allowed to learn and read about the past and ongoing US-American history of racial oppression (including Black chattel slavery and Jim Crow), sexism, genocide, sexism/patriarchy, imperialism, and LGBT-phobia. Right. Sure. Please. How about “controversies” like if the Earth is flat or if people who commit adultery should be burned at the stake?
“Can the MSM stop normalizing far-right, fascist, white supremacist toxins as ‘controversy’ and other weak terms?” Good question. I doubt it. (For the real shit, much better than the “MSM,” please tune in regularly to the Refuse Fascism podcast. And keep reading The Paul Street Report.)
No Great Liberal Victory
Many of the 1272 reader comments attached to the Times report online are unduly celebratory about FOX’s firing of Carlson, as if it is some kind of great liberal Democratic victory. That is naïve. FOX issued no apology for inflicting Carlson’s mass mind-poisoning fascist vitriol on the nation for fourteen years. It will fill his former Hate Hour slot with some other noxious revanchist who will play to FOX viewers’ virulent racism, sexism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, conspiratorialism, and LGBT-loathing. FOX did not get rid of Carlson because of his political ideology. It dumped him because he helped cost them a bunch of money in the recent Dominion company lawsuit, because the lawsuit dug up shocking new revelations about Carlson’s toxic workplace conduct and contempt for FOX ownership and management (and for Trump), and to send the message that no individual is bigger than the corporation. Carlson will continue to do grave damage to the nation’s political culture somewhere new and lucrative for him. He is not going to disappear from the reigning deadly hate-o-sphere anytime soon.
Postscript: Greenwald, the Trumpenleft, a Former Neighbor, and Me
Here is the single most nauseating response I’ve seen to FOX’s excretion of Carlson, from ex-Substacker Glenn Greenwald, the frequent Carlson guest and former porn-producer who broke into the public eye as the attack dog lawyer of Illinois white supremacist and neo-Nazi leader Matt Hale: "One reason there's so much hatred among left-liberal media types toward Tucker is petty jealously: that goes without saying. They always hate most those who succeed in journalism. But he's also hated by that crowd because he holds up a mirror to the failures of their heroes."
Good grief, could the public fash-fellating be any more "get a room" obsequious? There’s no love for “left-liberal media types here (as any of my regular readers knows), but GG’s comment is pathetic. So fear and hatred of fascism (admittedly most “left-liberal media types” can’t bring themselves to use “the F-word” with proper frequency and seriousness) is really about professional envy?
Greenwald can’t seriously believe that FOX recently fired version of Joseph Goebbels is a "journalist,” can he? (Who knows what a dismal grifter like Greenwald actually thinks? The man is lower than the lowest snails in the lowest snail dens in the lowest parts of the planet. His penchant for applying his tongue to the boots of fascists is truly disgusting.)
It's been darkly amusing to see many on so-called social media express “shock” and “surprise” at seeing left-identified folks (of the sort who have continued to defend Greenwald long after he let his fash-friendly freak flag fly) speaking up for the rich boy fascist Carlson as some kind anti-capitalist peoples’ and working-class hero. Why the astonishment and wonder? I've been screaming from the rooftops ---- well, publishing --- for years about the Trumpenleft, (see this for a 2021 introduction), a term I invented with some help from CounterPunch podcaster Eric Draitser. Please pay some attention, comrades.
These faux-left reptilian sorts have been ubiquitous in some parts of the Internet. I've been catching their white-bro mansplaining hate in my email inbox and social media accounts for so long that I can write their demented posts for them in my sleep.
I hate identitarian standpoint epistemology but in my experience the Trumpenleft folks who just can't handle the notion that the nation is facing a fascist/neo-fascist menace are very disproportionately old white and male. I think some of the odium directed at me from these guys is that they thought I was one of them since I am older, white, and male and wrote two[1], no three books (well actually more if you include indirect references) on what a capitalist-imperialist agent of class rule the nation's first Black president was/is. Well, Venn diagram overlap on some things can be very from total agreement. Sorry, but no, I don't think anti-racism and anti-patriarchy and anti-LGBT-bashing and anti-nativism are inherently bourgeois identity politics. Nope, sorry, acknowledging the truth about where the Republi-fascist Party has gone does not make me (of all people) an apologist for the dismal dollar-drenched Democrats, who I have been calling the party of Hollow Resistance and “inauthentic opposition” for many years. No, the data does not support the notion that the Republi-fascist base is working class and that it can be turned social democratic and “progressive” or “left” of that. Nope, January 6 was not a festive and peaceful working-class party tour. Nope, January 6 maniacs are not being unjustly repressed. Nope, covid-19 and vaccines are not part of a neoliberal globalist conspiracy to enslave humanity. Nope, Trump is not antiwar. And on and on and on with "nope, incorrect, wrong, nonsense…sorry.”
Here is a recollection that may help readers grasp the poisonous impact of Tucker Carlson and how I came up with the term “Trumpenleft” (initially as a joke; it turned out to be a real thing). In the once semi-leftish campus/company town of Iowa City (birthplace of Spider Man), I had a next-door neighbor, a bearded felony-branded badass heavy-metal rocker white-bro who had helped lead a march, talk'n shit to the cops ("I've been to prison"), out to Interstate 80 after Herr Donald was elected ---- a march where people chanted "No Trump, No KKK, no fascist USA." He egged everybody on saying "if you want a revolution, we’ve got to take the interstate!" I was up there with him and some other slightly less provocative folks, helping conduct a brief and somewhat dangerous occupation of the eastbound lines of “America’s Main Street” (I-80).
By early 2018, you'd see this guy planted in front of the Tuckems Hate Hour five nights a week. He was not checking up on the enemy. Not at all. No sir: he was digging it, thinking Carlson's racist and women- and immigrant- and liberal- and left-hating venom was "working class" and "populist." Really, the dude was just into ugly transgression, into getting a rise out the snotty campus town libs now.
I wonder if he went down to Washington DC for January 6th. The fascist base is more complex and includes some more of these kinds of offbeat folks than one might at first think, as is suggested in Jeff Sharlet's new and important book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War – a volume I hope to review in a future Paul Street Report.
Endnote
1. Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008): Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (New York: Routledge, 2010)
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