#Fox and Fascists

[democracyunderground]

[contemplatingoutlander]

Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.

Robert Paxton thought the label was overused. But now he’s alarmed by what he sees in global politics — including Trumpism.

When the foremost historian on fascism, Robert Paxton, who has been reluctant in the past to apply that label to Trump, finally admits that Trump IS a fascist it's time to pay attention.

This is a gift🎁link so you can read the entire article. Below are some excerpts.

Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.” When an editor at Newsweek reached out to Paxton, he decided to publicly declare a change of mind. In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.” [...] This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” Paxton said. “It’s the real thing. It really is.” [emphasis added]

Remember, fascism typically involves a cult of personality. Hitler was wildly popular with ordinary Germans.

It's no coincidence that Trump is so obsessed with the numbers at his rallies.

[charlesoberonn]

[buttacake80]

This guy compares CNN's coverage to Fox News. CNN showed the salute. Fox News edited out.

[antifainternational]

Is Tucker Carlson a fascist? Jason Stanley makes the case.

[varpusvaras]

Regarding the last line challenge, also writing Breha, Fox and Bail discuss politics and ethics is really one of the most fun I've had in a while and I am sorry for the fact that 90 percent of the Soulmate Marks AU is going to be dialogue but I'm just VIBING

[spiltcandycoatedpunkblood]

just so you know how normal the UK is, left wing climate change activists and anti-monarchy protesters are getting jail time and beaten for simply holding up banners and being considered disruptive whilst right wing bullshitters against shit like ULEZ (literally about having areas that are specifically for ultra low emissions so we, y'know, don't constantly have to breathe in fucking car fumes and other pollutants because some fucking people actually bizarrely want to???) and road safety limits EVEN FUCKING RIGHT NEAR SCHOOLS are driving basically massive vehicles through the streets and are not considered a disruptive protest

[thewackygiant]

Tucker Carlson fired from Fox News today

[democracyunderground]

STEVE BANNON will be released days before election day

[commiepinkofag]

from snowflakes to ukranie… or how to ‘legitimize’ fascism/fascists…

whether or not ukraine's foreign ministry spokesman oleg nikolenko’s invitation is supported by the ukrainian government, the framing of this article & inclusion of fellow-fascist tucker carlson with fox news is fucked up.

…

unsurprisingly, mass media continues to use twitter as a source for ‘news' to churn out press releases for right-wing/pro-war/corporate interests…

instead of those fun posts solely comprised of strings of obvious twitter embeds, tweets will now be fully integrated into articles as sources — without a minimal transparency of visually indicating musk’s blue paid subscriber designation.

…

onion-layers of a clusterfuck…

…

[dwaginfodder]

Now that we've gotten the ending to the March of the Machines story, I'm deeply curious about someone we didn't see over the course of this set: Glissa. (Spoilers for every part of MoM story under the cut)

We got hints of Glissa during the ONE story, in both Lukka's side story and her own Legends blurb. She's been Vorinclex's voice, following the same "Only the strong will survive"-type motive, organizing the Vicious Swarm while he revels in his ideal purity of strength. They're shown actively fighting in Lukka's story, and appear to be evenly matched. That she didn't appear in any of Elesh Norn's grand summonings of the praetors or the gathering of the compleat planeswalkers is a little suspect to me. She has been shown to be ambitious; that's where the black in her current color identity comes from, not just her reanimation at Phyrexia's talons.

But now the Praetors are (as far as we know, more or less) dead, and Phyrexia is isolated from the rest of the multiverse.

What better time is there for her to continue to gather her strength and place herself at the top of the Phyrexian food chain? Sure, the other Steel Thanes are still presumed to be alive (minus Geth, who was assimilated into Vishgraaz), but otherwise few Phyrexians of note are likely to be able (or willing) to challenge her.

A friend in the Gladiator discord mentioned the possibility of Glissa finding Vorinclex's head, still conscious, and happily finishing him herself as the new strongest creature in the Vicious Swarm. This set me the fuck off and now I wanna write about it but I'm already working on Liliana Strixhaven fanfic and if I add more to my load I might explode. But she's an interesting enough character to me I could end up going off anyway, either from her POV or casting like, Ixhel and the other more independant, freethinking Phyrexians as our protagonists and having Glissa as the rising villainess.

Also I really wanna explore the potential significance of the Sunslayer title in Phyrexian society.

[thegetdownrebooter]

i'm sorry but mencken dumping roman for crying at his father's funeral is funny af.

[varpusvaras]

I have no idea where I am going with this, and this is not going to be a long post, but the thought just kinda came into my head last night and I need to write it somewhere.

There is a really weird...I don't know if dissonance is the right word, but a really weird something going on with who is given the time to have redeeming traits and who is not, especially in TCW. Like I know that Anakin is the main character of the prequel era, and I know that it is more than natural to focus on him, but the show just lacks in how it cares about anyone else, and who is allowed to have more of them shown and who the audience is allowed to have the time to care about. Like, Anakin is, of course, given the time to have his good and bad traits shown, he is allowed to be redeemed by this framing of the story, and people will write whole essays in his defense.

Then let's take someone like Fox (and this is not about fanon or his portrayal in the fanon, this is solely about what is shown on screen), who is given very little screen time, which is natural. He is one of the many, many very minor characters of the show. He gets a lot more than the majority of the clones, he gets to be named on screen and have some semblance of a personality. And we are shown him doing...nothing really bad? 90 percent of the time the things he does on screen are aggressively neutral in the context. Shooting Fives? That can be argued to be a bad thing, but we don't know if he did it because he was ordered to, because he was manipulated or controlled, or because he's just a trigger happy bastard. We don't know.

But still, the overwhelming majority of the fans absolutely detest him like he personally murdered their entire family, kicked their puppy and ate their goldfish raw in front of them. And this is because we are not given even one scene that shows anything else about him, be it good or bad, and the absence of the former is what makes all of his arguably neutral actions look bad. Because if there is nothing good, then it means that everything is bad. Fox isn't the one who turned fascist, but fans of the show still celebrate his murder by the one who did turn fascist.

Then we can take someone like Dogma, who does...you know, things that are again neutral in context. I'm not saying that he is necessarily right, or that others in the Umbara arc are wrong for their actions, but Dogma is someone who was raised in an extremely isolated environment where they were told that they need to obey and are only meant to be soldiers. But the other clones did differently so why didn't Dogma- because they are individuals. The whole show is about them being individuals. People respond to their surroundings and trauma very differently. Dogma got where the others were a little bit later. He, at least, got given the time to do the good thing in the eyes of the audience- and there he goes. Removed from the narrative, never to be mentioned again. Now back to the future fascist who puts his droid above the lives of his men being shown to be also good for seven seasons!

I don't know. Something about this just kinda rubs me the wrong way. I don't know what it is.

Why is Anakin suddenly likeable too cool for school instead of being a a wet scrunkly with anger issues OH because he can't be shown to have the profile of a serial killer because that would make him look bad ohhhhhhhh-

[tomorrowusa]

Tucker Carlson’s fascism is clearly bound up with his ongoing support for Putin’s Russia.

[I]s Putin’s Russia fascist? In Russia, opposition politicians and journalists are regularly imprisoned or murdered. Russia has passed harsh laws against LGBTQ+ communities. Russia’s ideology is based on a militarized Russian nationalism, and its war against Ukraine is quite clearly genocidal in nature. Just as Nazi Germany represented itself as the defender of Christianity and Europe’s classic traditions against an existential threat posed by leftist atheist Jews, Putin represents Russia as the sole defender of the European Christian traditions against similar existential threats, such as “gender ideology”.

Putin’s Russia is the international leader of the global far right, promoting ultra-nationalism, religious traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across the world. If Russia is not fascist, then even Nazi Germany in the 1930s was not fascist. As the historian Timothy Snyder has urged, “we should finally say it”: Russia is fascist.

Just as claims to be isolationists by American inter-war fascists were quite rightly taken to be expressions of support for Nazi ideology, there is good reason to take Carlson’s similar claims not as denunciations of American militarism but as expressions of support for Putinism, which he seems largely to share.

We Americans may not like to admit it, but there were sizeable pro-Hitler groups in the US in the 1930s and early 1940s who called for neutrality in order to help Nazi Germany. The pro-Putin right is an echo of that today.

What about Carlson’s scorn for the media, intellectual, financial and political elite, which he lacerates with regularity on his show? Here too there is little ambiguity. Carlson does not scorn all elites – after all, he himself was making as much as $20m a year from Fox news. He only targets certain elites. In the ideology of American fascism, the elites he targets are associated with liberal democracy and Jewish control.

American fascists have always denounced the media, intellectuals and politicians. Carlson is careful to avoid explicitly antisemitic statements. But his show is the home of anti-Soros conspiracy theories. The antisemitism in his programming is clearly dog-whistled, and Jewish organizations have been among the first to cheer his ousting. Indeed, if Carlson did not regularly denounce media, intellectual, financial and political elites, regular targets of Nazi ideology, the case for calling him an American fascist would be much less clear.

The transphobia of Carlson and many in the GOP has a precedent in Nazi Germany. 

Nazi ideology supported strict gender roles – one of the central targets of the first mass Nazi book burning on 10 May 1933 was Magnus Hirschfeld’s collection of LGBTQ+ literature, the largest in the world and the largest documentation of gender fluidity (Hirschfeld coined the term “transsexual”). Carlson has used his platform to denounce transgender Americans as existential threats to Christianity. Fascists target cosmopolitan ways as existential threats to masculinity – a viewpoint Carlson also clearly shares.

Finally, fascism praises violence against democracy, valorizing violent street mobs attacking democratic processes and institutions as martyrs to the nation. Here too Tucker Carlson fits perfectly into the tradition.

Gender totalitarianism is a major feature of Putin’s Russia. And as for violence, just look at his war crimes and the recruitment of criminal mercenaries for his invasion of Ukraine.

Fascists in the US can’t help but love Putin. And of course that includes Tucker Carlson.

[butchlifeguard]

i hate people on this site yr all looking for puritans where there are none.

[13thpythagoras]

NYT has a bias.

Look what they did in 2016 to Hillary.

NYT is racing to the bottom with conservative owners and push to platform bad faith opinions.