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Below I paraphrase thirteen dumb things I’ve been hearing and reading from liberal- and left-identified people and briefly explain why they should stop saying and posting this stuff:
1. “We survived the first Trump administration so we’ll get through a second one just fine.” Oh, okay. Hundreds of thousands of US Americans did not in fact survive the first Trump administration thanks in no small part to Donald “Shoot Clorox” Trump’s insane pandemo-fascist response to Covid-19 and to Trump’s assault on basic public health rules and procedures. The incoming second fascist Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump regime is arriving with considerably more power over government, media, and politics than the first version. Its Hitler-channeling operatives are planning vicious, many-sided attacks on public health, democracy, women, reproductive freedom, immigrants, civil rights, human rights, livable ecology, science, workers, education, intellectual freedom, and basic human decency. They have a detailed and elaborate plan for the Christian white fascist takeover and makeover of US society and government. The scale and scope of this fascist offensive, backed by a cabal of absurdly wealthy and powerful oligarchs, is far beyond what Republi-fascists dreamed of in 2016-17. And let’s not forget the Trump-crafted Christian fascist Supreme Court’s granting of open-ended arch-authoritarian legal immunity to Donald “Why Can’t We Shoot Them in the Legs?” Trump (who Noam Chomsky described in January of 2020 as “the most dangerous criminal in human history”) for any past or future crimes he has committed or will commit as part of his real or supposed “official duties” as president. (I call that July 1, 2024 decision the Supremes’ “Reichstag Fire Ruling.”).
2. “It’s going to be a tough four years.” The person who says or writes/posts this is essentially announcing even before the tangerine-tinted tyrant is re-inaugurated that we are not going to remove these lethal Republi-fascist lunatics from power before January 20, 2029. Seriously? So we are just going to let the sick Trump-Vance-Alito-Johnson-
3. “Half the country voted for Trump.” I keep hearing this from folks who say it to justify their do-nothing hopelessness. It’s not true. It is terrible that more than 77 million Americans voted put a malignant fascist sociopath back in the White House but Trump’s popular tally was just 29 percent of the US voting age population. Trump did not win a majority of the popular vote. “Half the country” did not vote for the Orange Assface of Amerikan Fascism (OAAF). Trump received votes from between a quarter and a third of the nation’s adults.
4. “I’ve stopped paying any attention to current events now that Trump is coming back. It’s too disgusting. I’m done with the news.” Please. I’m hearing this a lot lately. Yes, the endless news about Donald “They’re Eating the Pets” Trump and his deranged party and backers is revolting, depressing, enraging, sickening, etc. It’s nauseating that they are coming back into power. But losing all interest in the society, policy, and politics of our time is reckless and irresponsible. People who close their eyes to their nation’s crimes become complicit in those crimes. Choosing ignorance about current events is morally problematic.
5. “Trump’s far-right talk is just empty political campaign rhetoric. He won’t act on any of it. Keep calm.” Trump’s minimizers have been saying this from the beginning of the Trump political phenomenon in 2015. Call it Trump Fascism Denial Syndrome (TFDS). It’s bullshit. Please review the mind-boggling multiplicity of fascistic horrors and crimes under the first Trump presidency in my most recent book’s third chapter, titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21.” Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump has shown again and again that he means what he says. The incoming version of Trumpism in power is starting with far more elaborate and empowered plans for much worse criimiality.
6. “I’m too exhausted by US politics and Trump. I’ve got to step away.” I hear this again and again from people whose definition of being exhaustively engaged in politics is watching CNN and especially MSNBC and going into a voting booth for three minutes once every two or four years. Wow, you watched a bunch of centrist and liberal bourgeois news and commentary and voted for the Republi-Nazi-appeasing capitalist-imperialists Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris and now you’re just too pooped to get serious about resisting American fascism? Give me a break.
7. “I can’t join your resistance because I’ve to got to focus on myself first. You can’t help anybody else out unless you take care of yourself first.” I’ve heard this again and again from white middle-class Americans who are quite comfortable and privileged compared to the people most immediately targeted by the fascist Trump forces. Neither I nor anyone I know is telling them to stop meditating, stop eating healthy food, or stop getting exercise, but there’s a false dichotomy here between self and other, a failure to understand that nothing is better for oneself than joining with others in opposition to oppression and the destruction of the environment. It’s hard to stay healthy amidst the destruction of livable ecology and public health, which Donald “Drill, Baby Drill” promises to accelerate. Morally and “spiritually” as well as materially, standing aside to “take care of myself” while Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump and his Christian Fascist cabal release convicted putschists from prison, prosecute political enemies, and deploy the US military to round up immigrants, “end inner city crime,” crush protests, and invade Mexico and/or Greenland.
8. “Trump is what America deserves.” I hear that a lot from the jaded crowd. That is a statement of bitter alienation and even hatred that is quite unfair to masses of ordinary people who are simply trying to keep their heads above water, living from paycheck to paycheck in a vicious capitalist society where wealth and power are highly concentrated. Replace “Trump is what America deserves” with “a ruling class and capitalist system that brought this monster Trump back into power deserves to be overthrown and replaced with a revolutionary socialist system that sweeps fascists and capitalists into the dustbin of history.”
9. “The Democrats have to be better, more working class. Bernie was right!” Seriously? It’s 2025, FOR God’s sake. The Dems made their transition to full-on corporate “neoliberalism” and what people who say this call “the abandonment of the working class” during the second half of the recently deceased Jimmy Mujahideen Carter’s imperialist presidency --- half a century ago. Even at its New Deal and Great Society peaks of liberalism and proto-/kinda-social democracy between 1935 and 1965, the Democrats were a ruling class corporate, white supremacist, and imperialist party. As for Sanders, he’s never seriously challenged the American war machine and has spent his national political career Judas Goating progressively inclined Americans up the planks to the right-tilted US electoral killing floors. He couldn’t even properly identify Trump fascist as late as the fall 2020 (not sure he has since). Even his watered-down social democracy, which he has always sold as a “not radical,” is unacceptable to a US ruling class that would never have permitted him to enjoy a remotely successful and two-term presidency if he’d somehow gotten past them into the White House.
10. “Stop criticizing Trump and his party. The Democrats are no different.” This is also stupid. The Democrats cling to US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, such as it is. The Republicans, by contrast, are ready and willing for the most part to crack the outer shell of democracy atop the capitalist class dictatorship. That’s a very rea, far from irrelevant difference. Can you imagine a Democratic Party version of January 6? Of course you can’t. Democrats accept electoral defeats; Republi-fascists don’t. And of course the two dominant capitalist-imperialist parties have different constituencies by race, culture, geography, and more. They are not “the same.” Calling out the Republicans’ fascism does not require embracing the Democrats’ fascism-enabling/-appeasing/-
11. “I’m staying home and quiet because I don’t believe in violence.” Equating protest and resistance with violence is idiotic. This excuse for passivity often amounts at bottom to total surrender since there is always the risk of violent repression when people revolt against oppression. Basically, this statement is a blank check to oppressors: “we won’t resist because somebody might get hurt.” It is actually a form of victim-blaming – as if the people killed while protesting the fascist murder of George Floyd were complicit in their own violent deaths. No they were not. Essentially, this comment, which I have been hearing quite a bit from seemingly decent and caring people, is a case of pacifism gone pathological in ironic service to the violence of the state.
12. “Luigi showed the way.” Seriously? No! Humanity doesn’t need lone wolf assassinations of individual capitalist executives. It needs an actual people’s revolutionary movement for the overthrow of capitalism within and beyond the insurance and medical systems. We need the replacement of the soulless profits system by a new socialist order. Oxfam reasonably calculates that capitalist economic inequality kills 21,300 people per day. On top of that gruesome body count, the growth- and fossil fuel-addicted profits system is cancelling livable ecology, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, and spreading fascism before our very eyes at home and abroad. The revolution required to get past all this madness is not about killing off top corporate managers, however much such actions might seem to reflect and capture righteous and legitimate class anger against capitalist parasites. If the capitalist mode of production and political and ideological superstructure remain intact, the system just grows new capitalists and executives for every one of them that dies naturally or otherwise. (The new CEO of United Health is Sir Andrew Phillip Witty, former CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, the leading British drug firm).
13. “Trump is an anti-imperialist isolationist.”I hear this a lot from my Grayzoned Trumpenleft and Putinleft friends, often coupled with the childish claim that Trump’s base is “the working class.” Nope. He has plans to invade Mexico, take back the Panama Canal, and gobble up Greenland. He was a reckless warmonger as president the first time and will be again. Look for him to increase support for Israel’s genocidal campaigns and to recklessly provoke China. He will not roll back the giant American military empire to any significant degree. America First Trumpism is not isolationist; it's a new flavor of US imperialism.
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