American Fascism: Why Trump's base turned into a religious cult that will blindly follow him off a cliff, and how to break the spell.

American Fascism is absolutely brilliant and the most accurate explanation of political reality that I read during Trump’s presidency. It is frightening but clarifying and very inspiring.
Michael Marciano, Bureau Chief, Connecticut Law Tribune

Dear Republican,

if all the lies Fox News tells you about liberals were actually true, I’d hate liberals too. Who wouldn’t?

But that’s the thing: virtually nothing you are being told about liberals is actually true. It’s propaganda, designed to demonize liberals.

FORMER FOX NEWS ANALYST CALLS NETWORK A “DESTRUCTIVE PROPAGANDA MACHINE”

For 10 years, Ralph Peters regularly appeared on Fox News to offer military analysis and insight as one of the cable network’s reliably conservative commenters. But he quit in March in disgust.

Mr. Peters, who announced his departure in a blistering farewell note to his colleagues, followed up on Wednesday with another searing attack, saying that the network was “doing a great, grave disservice to our country.”

The retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army spoke on CNN in his first television interview since his departure. “With the rise of Donald Trump, Fox did become a destructive propaganda machine,” Mr. Peters said. “And I don’t do propaganda for anyone.”
-New York Times

HOW FOX NEWS EVOLVED INTO A PROPAGANDA OPERATION

A media scholar on the dangerous evolution of Fox News.

Fox News has always been a partisan news network. But people are increasingly questioning whether it has crossed a line in the Trump era and become an outright propaganda operation.

A recent piece by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer is the latest to pose this question. Back in 2017, the New Republic’s Alex Shephard floated a similar argument, writing that “Donald Trump is treating Fox News like state TV.”

Even Bret Baier, a lead anchor at Fox News, addressed the claims in a 2018 interview with the New Yorker, saying it “pains” him to hear that the cable news channel has become “state TV” for the Trump administration.”
-Vox

Bill Maher keeps asking the guests on his show: “Why is the D for Democrat so toxic in red states?”

Most liberals honestly have no idea why you Trump voters hate liberals so much.

This is why:

You’re being lied to, to make you hate liberals.

HOW THE RIGHT WING CONVINCES ITSELF THAT LIBERALS ARE EVIL

Since the 1950s, the conservative movement has justified bad behavior—including supporting Donald Trump—by persuading itself that the left is worse.

If you spend any time consuming right-wing media in America, you quickly learn the following: Liberals are responsible for racism, slavery, and the Ku Klux Klan. They admire Mussolini and Hitler, and modern liberalism is little different from fascism or, even worse, communism. The mainstream media and academia cannot be trusted because of the pervasive, totalitarian nature of liberal culture.

This did not begin with Donald Trump. The modern Republican Party may be particularly apt to push conspiracy theories to rationalize its complicity with a staggeringly corrupt administration, but this is an extension of, not a break from, a much longer history.

One of the binding agents holding the conservative coalition together over the course of the past half century has been an opposition to liberalism, socialism, and global communism built on the suspicion, sometimes made explicit, that there’s no real difference among them.”
-Washington Monthly

Be honest: you can barely tolerate me even using the word liberal so many times in a few sentences, because to you it’s such a toxic word. Liberals repulse you. They are barely even human, and definitely un-American, right? You think liberals are everything that is wrong with America. Liberals are wrong, bad and evil. Evil demons.

TRUMP’S SPIRITUAL ADVISER PRAYS TO STOP “DEMONIC NETWORKS” ALIGNED AGAINST HIM

Paula White suggested the president was “anointed” by God as America’s defender when she delivered an opening prayer at Trump’s reelection rally.

White’s reference to demonic forces falls in line with how many evangelical Christians understand the world. They believe that there is a supernatural dimension to life and that in that realm, there is an ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil. As part of that fight, some Christians believe that prayer is needed to shield people from satanic forces.”
-Huffington Post

America would be a much better place without liberals, right?

That extremely negative emotional response in your head was created by malicious propaganda lies you have been fed about liberals.

Here’s a short list of true facts Fox News doesn’t want you to know. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Hitler and the Nazis were not liberals, not lefties, not socialists, and not democrats.

Hitler and his Nazi minions were right-wing Christian conservative nationalists who hated liberals for the same reasons you hate liberals.

I know what you’re thinking: “That’s fucking crazy talk! That can’t possibly be true! This guy is a deranged libtard!”

Well, I have news for you: it’s absolutely 100% true. And I can easily prove it to you in this short book, if you give me 5 minutes.

Yeah, they used the word “socialist” in their name. But that was just smart marketing, to mislead voters. It was false advertising, plain and simple. It’s like when you think your cereal contains chocolate, because it’s called Chocolate Cereal right on the box, but then in small print on the back it says “Does not contain any actual chocolate.”

WERE THE NAZIS SOCIALISTS? NO.

“Hitler allied himself with leaders of German conservative and nationalist movements, and in January 1933 German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed him chancellor. Hitler’s Third Reich had been born, and it was entirely fascist in character. Within two months Hitler achieved full dictatorial power through the Enabling Act.

In April 1933 communists, socialists, democrats, and Jews were purged from the German civil service, and trade unions were outlawed the following month. That July Hitler banned all political parties other than his own, and prominent members of the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps.“
-Encyclopedia Britannica

NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS

“In 1933–1939, before the onset of war, most prisoners consisted of German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of ‘asocial’ or socially ‘deviant’ behavior by the Germans.”
-Wikipedia

The fact that you, 80 years later, still think the Nazis were socialists, shows how well that mislabeling trick works. It’s a pretty common marketing trick actually, that’s still being used today. Especially in politics.

For example, North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but you know as well as I do that North Korea is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Same thing with the Nazis.

The Nazis were right-wing nationalists, not left-wing socialists.

NAZIS ARE NOT SOCIALISTS NOR DEMOCRATS DESPITE WHAT ALT-RIGHT MIGHT SAY

The party represented an extreme side of Germany’s right wing, and the key word in its title was not necessarily “socialism,” but rather “national.” During Hitler’s ascension, nationalism was preached and took hold, and excluded anyone who wasn’t fully German or considered superior.

By definition, a political party with Nazi roots or affiliations is not democratic since it would apply to only one race, whereas democracy is meant to apply to all people, not a specific race or ethnicity.”
-Newsweek

You can literally ask any German about the Nazis, and every last German, young or old, left or right, will tell you that the Nazis were right-wing nationalists.

In fact, the term “right-wing radicals” (rechtsradikal) is commonly used in Germany to describe Neo-Nazi skinhead hooligans. Soccer hooligans are nationalists and take international soccer games way too seriously.

It’s pretty bizarre for Germans when totally misinformed Americans falsely claim the Nazis were left-wing socialists.

How could Americans be so completely wrong about history’s most famous villains?

The answer is pretty simple:

No normal person wants to be like history’s greatest villains.

Right-wing propaganda outlets know that, so they disguise themselves.

They don’t want you to know that their ideology is identical to Nazi ideology, because they know that no normal person is going to join an American copy of the German Nazis.

But right-wing Americans aren’t the only ones who have no idea who the Nazis really were. Right-wing Brazilians are just as clueless:

BRAZIL: GERMAN EMBASSY TRIGGERS BIZARRE NAZI AND HOLOCAUST DEBATE

“Brazilians flooded the German Embassy’s Facebook to dispute that Nazis were right wing.”
-Deutsche Welle

Every German knows that Nazis were right-wing extremists and sworn enemies of socialists. Socialists were the first people Nazis put in concentration camps. And after World War 2, every German kid had to learn a famous WW2 poem in school:

It’s gonna be a pretty hard sell to convince anyone who’s not a mentally deranged racist to join the Nazis nowadays. Nobody wants to be the bad guys.

And because the Nazis are so famously evil, their name makes a great insult. Wanna demonize Democrats? Then simply pretend they are like the Nazis.

Never mind that it’s the exact opposite of the truth.

Right-wing nationalists justify their nationalism by claiming that other countries are inferior and hostile. That’s the basis for their anti-immigrant policies.

Like George Orwell wrote in his book 1984, dictators like to pretend that the countries they attack are the bad guys. And when you attack a whole bunch of countries, you have to pretend that they’re all one and the same enemy somehow.

And how do you do that when you claim the whole world is against you? By calling everyone else “globalists.”

Suddenly all other countries on the globe are one and the same evil enemy: the globalists! Booga booga!

But right-wing Americans aren’t the first to call the rest of the world evil globalists. The Nazis came up with that propaganda trick. They claimed Jews were the leaders of a global anti-German conspiracy.

Sound familiar?

Socialists are “globalists” who believe in cosmopolitanism (the exact opposite of nationalism) and a one world government, like the United Nations. Socialists believe that all humans are brothers and sisters, who should work together instead of fighting each other.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
Socrates

The Nazis definitely were not globalists. They were hardcore nationalists and thought the whole world was a globalist anti-German conspiracy, led by evil Jews.

Just like you believe the United Nations is a globalist anti-American conspiracy, led by an evil Jew named George Soros.

SOROS, THE FAR RIGHT’S BOOGEYMAN, IS AGAIN A TARGET

When pipe bombs turned up in the mail of Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats this week, the first recipient — billionaire investor and liberal philanthropist George Soros — quickly fell out of the headlines.

But there’s no chance his many critics and enemies have forgotten him.

White nationalists and others on the political fringes have long cast Soros as the supposed leader of a globalist Jewish plot to undermine white Christian civilization.”
-Associated Press

And, thanks to the antisemitic lies you’re being fed, you seriously believe George Soros was a Nazi sympathizer. That’s the exact opposite of the truth. The truth is, George Soros was a 14-year-old Jewish boy who hid from the Nazis.

GEORGE SOROS WASN’T A NAZI, HE WAS A 14-YEAR-OLD JEW WHO HID FROM THEM

The 87-year-old billionaire has been the subject of smears for nearly 20 years, propagated by message boards and dispersed by Alex Jones, Donald Trump Jr., Roseanne Barr, and others

Of all the conspiracy theories spun around the 87-year-old Jewish billionaire George Soros – that he is the “puppet master” of all liberals, that he owns Black Lives Matter, that he is secretly building a new world order – the most demonstrably insane may be the claim that he was a Nazi.

That is: That the 14-year-old boy who had to hide from his own government during the German occupation of Hungary was a war criminal who sent his own people to gas chambers.

This particular strain of anti-Soros paranoia has festered for years on far-right message boards, but it suddenly metastasised earlier this week when it appeared in Roseanne Barr’s Twitter rant, then spread to the feeds of Donald Trump Jr and tens of thousands beyond.
-The Independent

George Soros is a liberal socialist Jew, and the Nazis hated those people every bit as much as you do.

The first line of the Nazi anthem was: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” which means Germany, Germany above all else.

It was the German version of America first.