#OXFORD UNIVERSITY: NAZI DEATH CULT

[allisstupidnow]

Hipster Nazis

It’s interesting, somehow, reading about these nazi millionaire eugenicists white-supremacist at the same time as the Boaventura scandal is unfolding. Someone was told not to report being assaulted because Boaventura was so important for the cause…and…like, really? Even if you accept that kind of logic. Really? Some old college professor? When you have every billionaire, and most millionaires, on earth actively supporting nazi ideology with all of their wealth. What the fuck good is he? The structures here, and the insular cult-like worlds created by these men is frightening, and absolutely not surprising. This is academics.   

[octaviasdread]

any girls! dark academia movie recs? i really struggle to find anything not about a group of boys (as much as I love them)

SO MANY!!! This is probably a far more detailed answer than you were expecting but this is a popular question and I want to keep a list for myself and others.

Feel free to add to it/give opinions. I've tried to give a tw for anything I can remember

Girls! Dark Academia Movies/TV Shows

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

1950s Women’s college

Art professor! Julia Roberts

She’s legit the female Mr Keating of the art & college world

Feminism vs. Tradition

Maggie Gyllenhall x Ginnifer Goodwin; their characters were more than friends. Fight me.

Does not end how you expect

Strike!/All I Wanna Do/The Hairy Bird (1998)

MY FAVOURITE!!!

Free on YouTube under one of its various names

Comedy

1960s all girls boarding school

Young Kirsten Dunst

Group of girls plot to sabotage a merger with a boys school less prestigious than their own

Secret attic clubhouse meetings of the D.A.R aka Daughters of the American Ravioli (eaten cold, ew)

girls get political & advocate for their rights using ANY elaborate and chaotic scheme

TW: eating disorder, vomiting & creepy male teacher but the girls plot against him too

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

based on a short book I read for uni by Muriel Spark

1930s girls school in Edinburgh

Scottish teacher! Maggie Smith, controversial with a focus on romantic ideals

Spoiler alert, the liberal teacher is actually a fascist

Her group of fave students has cult- vibes and it’s fascinating

Picnic at Hanging Rock

1970s movie or 2018 mini series

Never watched either but I plan to

Wild Child (2008)

00s romcom every UK teen girl loves

Emma Roberts as the spoiled rich American teenager sent to a strict English boarding school

Plots to get herself expelled but oh no she’s making friends with the girls who help her

And the headmistress has a hot son, and he’s nice??? Double oh no

ICONIC SCENES

Everything! Goes! Wrong!

omg she burns the school down

Feel good, comfort, nostalgia

St Trinians (2007)

English girls boarding school

The kids are all criminals, no joke

So are the teachers

CHAOTIC

gay awakening for british girls

Art heist pulled off by school girls

Government tries to shut them down but oh no, the education minister & the headmistress are ex-lovers

Colin Firth x Rupert Everett in drag

Superior cast: Jodie Whittaker, Gemma Arterton, Juno Temple, Stephen Fry, Colin Firth, etc...

embodies the phrase 'problematic fave'

St Trinians 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009)

Mystery, pirate ancestors, hidden treasure

omg Shakespeare was a woman

girls disguised as boys to infiltrate and rob the posh boys school

Villain! David Tennant in that ICONIC boat scene

Teen girls vs. ancient misogynist brotherhood

like the first film but MORE chaotic and BETTER!???

The Falling (2014)

1960s all girls school

best friends! but its unrequited love

Agoraphobic + distant mother aka mommy issues

Sudden death and the school suppresses/ignores the students grief, sparking mass hysteria & a fainting epidemic in the girls

Cast: Maisie Williams (GoT) & Florence Pugh (Little Women) & Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders)

TW: teen pregnancy, death, vomiting, underage s*x, sibling inc*st, past s*xual assault

READ THE PLOT SUMMARY FIRST

The Book Thief (2013)

Based on an amazing book by Markus Zusak

set in 1940s Nazi Germany

Daughter of a communist whose family were taken by the Nazis/died is fostered by an older couple who teach her to read & she paints a dictionary on the basement walls

Coming of age story about a compulsive book thief. No joke, this kid steals books from banned book burnings and breaks into the mayor's library through the window

Family hides the Jewish son of an old friend in their basement and he helps her to start writing about her experiences in the war

TW: death, bombings, WW2 anti-semitism

Mary Shelley (2017)

Overall good & roughly biographical

Pretty costumes and aesthetic

Modern feminist take on Mary Shelly in her own time period

So many INACCURACIES for the drama so don’t take it as truth

Percy Shelley slander and not all of it is justified

Cast: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, and Maisie Williams

The Secret Garden (1993)

Based on a fave childhood book

1901 colonial India & Yorkshire, England

Orphaned, spoilt & neglected girl sent to live with her reclusive Uncle in the English countryside

Gothic elements, mysteries, secret doors/passages/locked gardens

local boy with a flock of animals, magic, kids chanting around a fire and all around immaculate vibes

Happy ending!!!

Hidden Figures (2016)

African-American women as mathematicians for NASA

1960s space project

Women balancing a career and family obligations

Deals with racial & gender discrimination

Loosely based on the lives of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan who worked for NASA as engineers & mathematicians

Anne of Green Gables (1985) & sequel (1987)

Adaptation L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’ books

Canada (late 1890s/early 1900s)

Highly imaginative & bookworm orphan is adopted by a reclusive elderly brother and sister duo

Small town & school years comedic drama

Unrequited Enemies -> Friends -> lovers

Inspiring new woman teacher

Girls re-enact Tennyson’s poem and nearly drown for the aesthetic™

Dramatic poetry reading with INTENSE 👀eye contact👀

Writer! Anne & English teacher! Anne dealing with unruly girls school antics

Collette (2018)

biographical drama on french writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette

Victorian & Edwardian era France

More talented than her husband so she ghostwrites for him

Fight for creative ownership of her wildly successful novels

Affairs with a woman called Georgie and also with Missy, born female but masculine presenting

Cast: Keira Knightly, Dominic West, Eleanor Tomlinson (Poldark)

Enola Holmes (2020)

Netflix book adaptation

Younger sister of Sherlock Holmes

Victorian era! feminism/suffragettes

Mother-daughter focus

Mystery, adventure, secret codes, teens running away & escaping from (and eventually fighting) assassins

Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, Fiona Shaw, Millie Bobby Brown

Ginger & Rosa (2012)

1960s England

best friends since literal birth navigating troubled teen years

poet & anti-nuclear activist! Ginger

off the rails but also catholic! Rosa

Shout out to Mark & Mark the gay godfathers we all want

family troubles 

TW: older man has an affair with a 17 yr old

Testament of Youth (2014)

based on WW1 memoir by Vera Brittain

young woman (writer & poetry lover) escapes traditional family & goes to study at Oxford University

abandons to become a war nurse

romance, tragedy and war trauma

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Kit Harrington (GoT), Taron Edgerton (Rocketman), Colin Morgan (Merlin)

Little Women (2019)

Writer! Jo & Artist! Amy

Mother/daughter focus and sister dynamics

the March sisters’ theatre club is *chefs kiss*

champagne problems edits of Jo x Laurie are a mood

Ambivalent ending perfectly captures Louisa May Alcott’s dilemma with the book the movie is based on

set in 1860s America

ALL STAR CAST and a Greta Gerwig masterpeice

Lady Bird (2017)

coming of age in early 2002/2003 Sacramento, California

all girls catholic school

writer! Christine aka Lady Bird wants to get outta town and start her life again at college 'in a city with culture'

Mother/daughter dynamics - so realistic!

I live for that Jesus car stunt & the nun's reaction

school theatre program

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Timothee Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein

Another Greta Gerwig gem

Beguiled (2017)

Virginia, civil war era

Girls school with only five students and two teachers left

Find an injured Union army soldier & bring him inside

Women & teenagers want his attention (v. problematic) before uniting against him

(tbh you'll either love it, hate it, or watch once & forget it)

Sofia Coppola film so its very feminine gaze

TW: violence, death, underage

Legally Blonde (2001)

No questions will be taken

Elle Woods was the blue print

TV series:

House of Anubis (2011-2013)

I know it’s a kids/young teen show but I still unironically love it

ANCIENT EGYPT!!!!

Modern day with Victorian era links to treasure hunters & Egyptian research expeditions (stealing from tombs)

Chosen one plot lines, curses, kidnapping, mysteries, secret tunnels under the school, elixir of life

Teens have investigate & protect themselves cus oh no the TEACHERS are involved in some shady stuff

new American kid at British boarding school is the actual premise not just a fanfic au

Nostalgic, light-hearted, funny, and kinda cheesy but I will accept no criticism

The Alienist (2018 -now)

Mid 1890s, New York

Woman’s private detective agency (Season 2)

Serial killer mystery

Woman secretary turns detective and teams up with a criminal psychiatrist and a newspaper editor to solve crime

TW: violence, child pr*stit*tion

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Luke Evans, Daniel Bruhl

The Queen’s Gambit (2020)

Woman chess prodigy

1950s & 1960s

TW: drug & alcohol abuse

Gentleman Jack (2019 - now)

Based on the diaries of Anne Lister

Victorian Yorkshire, England

Upper-class lesbians

Confident, suit wearing! Anne Lister x shy! Ann Walker

Business woman! Anne running the family mines

Cast: Suranne Jones (Doctor Foster) & Sophie Rundle (Peaky Blinders)

TW: violence

Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)

bubbly/ambitious single mom + intelligent daughter

bookworm! Rory Gilmore gets into a prestigious private school and then an Ivy League college

Small town drama is comedic gold

Fast dialogue packed with pop culture and literary references

Comforting & nostalgic

TEAM JESS

Anne with an E (2017-2019)

Loose adaptation of L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’ books

they completely change the plot lines but it’s still very good content!

Orphan girl with trauma and a love of books/poetry is adopted by an elderly brother & sister duo, bringing light and fresh ideas to a rural community

Feminism, girls writing club, lgbtq safe spaces, girls eduction, black/indigenous representation

Miss Stacy as THAT inspiring teacher

Aunt Josephine’s lavish gay parties have my heart

TW: creepy male teacher tries to marry a student, racial discrimination, indigenous assimilation school

Victoria (2016-2019)

Adaption of Queen Victoria’s life

Victoria navigating her political, royal, and personal life

Albert’s involvement with The Great Exhibition, 1851 (on cultural + industrial innovations)

Alfred Paget x Edward Drummond is exquisite

Gorgeous costumes and aesthetics

TW: bury your gays trope

Derry Girls (2018-now)

1990s Northern Ireland during the troubles

Comedy, episodes 20-25 mins long

English boy sent to an all girls Catholic school with his cousin

✨Dead Poets Society parody episode ✨with a free-spirited female teacher

Sister Michael, the sarcastic nun who hates her job & reads the exorcist for giggles

Wee anxious lesbian! Clare Devlin (plus her friends wearing rainbow pins)

Badass with bad ideas! Michelle Mallon

Main Character! Erin Quinn

Lovable weirdo who would fight a polar bear! Orla McCool

Wee English fella & honorary Derry girl! James Maguire

Dickinson (2019-now)

Loose adaption of the poet Emily Dickinson’s life

Set in 19th century Massachusetts, US

Historical drama with modern dialogue & music that works SEAMLESSLY

gives a great understanding of Emily Dickinson’s poems

💕Vintage gays! Emily x Sue💕

Theatre club, writing, poetry, dressing as men to sneak into lectures, love letters, teen drama, feminism, and an underground abolitionist journal as a brief side plot in season 2

Wiz Khalifa plays death in a horse drawn carriage

TW: opium use

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017-2019)

Based on great childhood books

Bookworm! brother, Inventor! sister, and baby sister with sharp teeth

Mystery, secret organisations, orphaned siblings figuring things out & fending for themselves against the villain after their fortune

Adults either cartoon evil, comedically incompetent, or SPIES

Boarding school, library owner, scientific researcher, and theatre episodes

Ambiguous time period which is really fun to try and pin point

Killing Eve (2018-now)

Classic detective who has homoerotic tension with the assassin she is tracking down

British Detective! Eve Polastri figures out the notorious assassin MI5 are investigating is a woman, is fired & then put on a secret MI6 case with a small team

Assassin! Villanelle, a psychopath with a tragic past and a mastery of both accents & fashion

Woman MI6 boss! Carolyn Martens, head of Russian section

Travel Europe following Villanelle’s killings and escaping the assassins sent by Villanelle’s organisation

‘You’re supposed to be my enemy and moral opposite but omg you’re the only one smart enough to get me and why am I obsessed with you????'

🚨 GO IN FOR A KISS AND THEN STAB YOUR ENEMY 🚨

Cable Girls/Las chicas del cable (2017-2020)

Spanish drama set in 1920s Madrid

Four young women at a telecommunications company form a group of friends and help navigate the difficult situations they are all in

Secret identities, dangerous pasts, murder, crime, lgbtq couple & throuple, trans man character, feminism/suffragists

girls commit crimes for humanitarian reasons and cover! it! up!

UNDERRATED SHOW!!!!

Gorgeous costumes and set

Haven’t finished it yet and I’m catching up

TW: abuse, violence, death

Outlander (2014 - now)

haven’t watched yet but plan to

Woman time travels to Scotland, 1743

Rebel highlanders, pirates, British colonies, American revolutionary war

Time jumps between 18th & 20th century

[melias-cimitiere]

MINORITY REPORT

People who are interested in being honest, true to themselves and to others, eager to learn truth about things (scientific, historical, etc) and acquire knowledge, please keep reading. Everyone else, carry on with your daily activities; this article will clearly not impact on you in any positive way.

There has been a growing concern during the last few years that people have a tendency to “save the tree and burn the forest”; this is a mentality of gross generalizations, over-simplistic attitudes towards right and wrong, and superficial ideological bubbles that do not take into account reality. When historical truth is no longer convenient, when people forget the right use of words and terms and come up with the trendy, politically correct speech while disregarding the established definitions, then watch out: Big Brother is about (the 1984 George Orwell concept).

Minorities’ rights

There is a large number of people who tend to be sympathetic towards any groups, just because they are labelled as a minority. Instead of examining what they stand for and who they truly are (given a historical perspective), they moralize on their behalf and fiercely try to protect them, with a simplistic and gullible attitude. Let’s try and ask some basic questions:

Are their rights more/less important than anyone else’s?

We should be talking about human rights, and not minorities’ rights. If these groups are human groups, then they have some rights; these rights are protected by United Nations and various Constitutions, and political assemblies worldwide, and any proven violation is condemned. Why should any human group have more (or less) rights than any other group?

Are the minorities always correct?

Of course not. Whoever believes this tends to be extremely naïve. For example, amidst the minorities hide some rather loathsome groups (or individuals), such as Nazis, KKK, international terrorists (like Isil/Isis/Daesh, Al-Qaeda etc). And what about the minority groups of suicide cults, slavery rings, drug-dealers, “black market” merchants (of weapons, substances, toxins, organs etc)? What about serial killers or pedophiles? As you can see, membership in a minority group doesn’t automatically make you correct in all things. 

Issue of historical guilt

What is trendy or fashionable doesn’t make it necessarily better or right. Nowadays it is not trendy or fashionable to expose certain historical facts because certain groups feel discomfort. This is not new; in fact, it has been an issue with history and with science since the very beginning. When Galileo showed the Earth is round and spins around itself, it caused certain “waves”; people even demanded his death. We still have the Flat Earth Society despite scientific evidence of the contrary. With regards to history and warfare, you will not find any parties that are not guilty. In fact, nearly every nation in the world has committed atrocities, vandalism, slavery, aggressive occupation and its army/warriors raping innocent victims etc. In the history of Mankind there are very few true innocents. 

If we do not acknowledge such occurrences as inherent in human nature and as potential threats for everyone, we are doomed to repeat them in the future. Fascism and Nazism is not only a German thing; Slavery isn’t just a “white thing”; Colonialism isn’t just a British thing. We need to address the issues, recognize and study what makes these happen, and confront them. We must all stand united against this, and not devolve into group mentality and us against the others. We need to challenge our own mindset and free ourselves from pre-conceived ideas. Minorities get overly sensitive when people criticize certain behaviors or the past. And yet, how can one hope to be free from prejudice, when one refuses to see the truth, opting to be part of the herd? 

What is Racism?

“Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.”

“The belief that different races possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another.”

[Oxford Dictionary]

“policies, behaviours, rules, etc. that result in a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race”.

Also:

“harmful or unfair things that people say, do, or think based on the belief that their own race makes them more intelligent, good, moral, etc. than people of other races”.

[Cambridge University]

So as you can see, racism doesn’t have to do with minorities specifically. Minority groups can also be racist to majority groups, or some nations/people claim to be superior or “God’s chosen” while this is blatantly racist and, by definition, a harmful and unfair behavior. On a final note, just because certain groups have been persecuted historically, this doesn’t justify them to persecute others while claiming to be victims of racism, as this would be hypocrisy.

What is Discrimination? How is it different to Prejudice?

1. “The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, sex, or disability.”

2. “Recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another”.

Usually people tend to forget the second definition, and over time, discrimination becomes something negative. What about, “a discriminative mind is a mark of wisdom?” Should you not pick and choose according to preference? Are all things the same? Obviously not. Prejudice, on the other hand, is always negative. It is wrong in so many ways to be prejudiced against people of any group; this doesn’t just apply to minorities. However, that doesn’t mean that a person cannot choose what he/she prefers. Preference is an act of freedom. 

Some groups seem to imply that if a person says that he/she is heterosexual, that it means that they are homophobic. I hate prejudice; I support equal rights. I also fully support the second definition of discrimination; I do this all the time. I choose what I like to eat, where to hang out and who to have sex with. I have specific gender preferences; my choices don’t make me phobic of the other minority groups (another wrong use of the word phobic, meaning fear of something. Not wanting to have sex with specific types of peoples doesn’t mean I fear them, it simply means that I don’t like it and I prefer something else). I also choose what to read, what to reject, what kinds of music or movies to watch and so on. I’m sure you do all that too. So remember to use the words correctly.

What is antisemitism?

Semitic groups have been known to spread to a vast region in the Eastern Mediterranean all the way down to the Persian Gulf. Examples are: the Canaanites, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Chaldeans that settled the Mesopotamian South where the Euphrates empties into the Gulf (from the tribe Kaldu – a Semitic tribe from the Amorites), the Jebusites, the Jewish tribes, the Arameans, and many more. So to pick just one of them and say it is the only Semitic group is doing disservice to the rest and is also appropriating people’s ethnic background. 

Also, just because several of these groups were historically persecuted (Jews, Palestinians, small minorities in Iraq and Syria, etc) doesn’t give them immunity from blame when they are the ones committing crimes of racism or persecution. It has become a common thing in certain places from the Levant that one cannot bring about anything in discussion relating history or politics, from fear of offending their sensibilities. This has to stop. People should be freely discussing their opinions, and with the right evidence, they should be able to accept new data. Believing that people from minorities have indemnity from scrutiny is a naïve and socially dangerous stance.

Stereotyping and Reverse Pendulum Mentality

Protect battered mothers / women (but not battered fathers / men?)

Protect raped females (but what about raped males?)

Protect a specific group of a certain ethnic background while turning a blind eye towards other groups of different backgrounds whose rights are violated.

A child goes first (but what about elderly, mentally ill etc which are categories often neglected?)

Homophobic is a bad thing (and not heterophobic?)

A group or groups of different gender definitions must be protected (but shouldn’t all people’s choices on this matter be protected, no matter what?)

It is common, when society realizes that the rights of a certain minority have been violated (ie in the case of persecution, slavery, racist hostility and even killings because of that like the pogroms against Jews and other races), that society goes overboard and through overprotecting, refuse even the slightest of blame, even in documented cases. And yet, there have been plenty of people belonging to minority groups who were guilty of various crimes, including slavery, discrimination or collaborating with the enemy (and all these have been documented also). Minorities can easily become oppressors and they have done so, from ancient to modern times, as any student of history can testify.

Politically correct

We need to see some definitions of this; in the past, I used to pay a lot of notice and try to accommodate to that standard. Not so much now, and I will explain why.

“The avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.” [Oxford dictionary]

“Conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated” [Merriam-Webster]

“Someone who is politically correct believes that language and actions that could be offensive to others, especially those relating to sex and race, should be avoided.” [Cambridge University]

So look again the above definitions and note the words ‘perceived’ in the first, ‘conforming to a belief’ in the second, and ‘believes’ in the third. All these are subjective, thus arbitrary. If one wishes to be well-behaved, then by all means, one should take into account the sensibilities of others over various issues. However, in matters of spirituality, philosophy, history or science, one should care more about the objective truth and less about how people feel about certain aspects of the truth.

     Examples include some of the following:

How many people died in a genocide (numbers differ according to which side you ask);

Is a certain behavior sign/symptom of mental illness (again, the psychiatrists will often tell a different story compared to members of various groups);

Are all people equal? (This often gets mistranslated as an inflammatory comment, aiming to annoy others meaning that they don’t deserve equal opportunities and rights. I am talking about people being equal in skills, IQ, innate abilities etc. Anyone who believes they are equal, must believe in that the humans are a race of robots coming from the same factory and production line.)

Thought Police vs Right to Free Speech

Seeking to prevent possible injustices before they even occur… seems pro-active and good, doesn’t it? Has anyone watched the film, Minority Report? If no, watch it. What about, Fahrenheit 451? Another excellent film (a bit old but a masterpiece). Do you believe in freedom? Can you say what you think without fear? Ask yourself if you should double-guess yourself every time you need to say or write something. People around you are a varied lot; many will not agree with what you say or do. Should you be made to feel intimidated by that? I don’t think so. You have a right to believe what you want and also your freedom of speech is safeguarded by the constitution.

Cultural Appropriation

A touchy subject for a lot of people. “Closed religions”? Kabbalah, deities, voodoo, Hindu beliefs, Native Indian spirit animals etc… the list goes on and on. Are we serious here? I mean, who makes these things up? Wake up people! There is NO closed religion. If a spiritual person or a person with respect approaches a concept or a deity/spirit and that deity/spirit accepts them, then it’s not up to the people to judge badly and condemn this approach! I can (and do) use whatever I want; my judgement is all I need, and that makes me a free man. Please, do not bend to such criticism; learn to think for yourselves. Learn, and experience things directly, if possible. You are born Free, like me. Do not bend to slave mentalities.

Constitutional Rights

Lastly, a bit of the obvious. Surely you are aware that any constitution of a country where there’s democracy and not a totalitarian regime safeguards certain freedoms. One of them is the right to think, speak, write and believe freely. Read up on your rights! Don’t take for granted what other people want you to believe; research yourself and then put them in their place. Protect those rights. People died to establish and to protect them in the past; now you got the ball, it’s your call.

[quakerjoe]

Americans’ attitudes about fascism have always been based on the assumption that fascism, as occurred in Germany when Hitler came to power, “can’t happen here,” that we love our freedom so much we would never give in to an authoritarian populist regime. We never stopped to consider what might happen if Americans’ conception of freedom became so twisted that it came to embody the “freedom” to deprive other people of their freedoms, while preserving your own. Fascism is not just a historical relic. It remains a living and breathing phenomenon that, for the generations since World War II, had only maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right. Its constant enterprise, during all those years, was to return white supremacism to the mainstream, restore its previous legitimacy, and restore its own power within the nation’s political system. With Trump as its champion, it has finally succeeded. It’s important, first, to understand just what fascism is and what it is not. The word “fascist” has been so carelessly and readily applied as a shorthand way to demonize one’s political opposition that the word has become almost useless: used to meaning anything, it has almost come to mean nothing. One commonly, and wrongly, cited definition of fascism is attributed to Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” According to the investigative reporter John Foster “Chip” Berlet, Mussolini never said nor wrote such a thing. And neither did the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, to whom it is also often attributed. “When Mussolini wrote about corporatism,” Berlet writes, “he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds.” The terms “corporatism” and “corporate” meant an entirely different thing in 1920s Italy than they mean today: “corporations” were not individual businesses, but rather were sectors of the economy, divided into corporate groups, managed and coordinated by the government. “Corporatism,” Berlet says, “meant formally ‘incorporating’ divergent interests under the state, which would resolve their differences through regulatory mechanisms.” In fact, says Berlet, this supposed definition of fascism directly contradicts many of the things that Mussolini actually did write about the nature of fascism. Another thing that fascism decidedly is not is what the right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg says it is: a kind of socialism and therefore “properly understood as a phenomenon of the left.” This notion is such a travesty of the idea of fascism that it functionally negates its meaning. George Orwell wrote that “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite.” Not only did Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, published in 2009, become a New York Times bestseller, but its thesis became widely accepted on the American right among Patriots and Tea Partiers in the years leading up to Trump’s ascension, who eagerly accused President Obama and liberal Democrats of being the real fascists. Historians of fascism were scathing in their assessment. For example, Robert O. Paxton, an American political scientist who is professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of seminal studies of fascism, wrote: “Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice.” In reality, fascism is a much more complex phenomenon than Goldberg’s or the “corporate state” definition would have it. Historians have for years struggled to nail down its essential features, partly because, as Paxton notes, fascism in the 1920s “drew on both right and left, and tried to transcend that bitter division in a purified, invigorated, expansionist national community.” In the postwar years of the 1950s and ’60s, political scientists and historians tried to define it primarily by assembling a list of traits common to historical fascists. The problem with this approach was that as historians examined the record more closely, they grasped that fascism was constantly acquiring and shedding one or another of these traits. It was a protean, shape-shifting phenomenon, and a simple list of traits failed to capture this dynamic quality. In response, some scholars, notably Roger Griffin, a modern historian and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University in England, have attempted to distill fascism into a singular quality, an underlying principle that remained constant all throughout its various permutations. Griffin ultimately zeroed in on what he called “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a revolutionary movement based on the belief that a nation can be restored to glory via a process of phoenix-like rebirth by activating, or creating, national myths of original greatness (“palingenesis” is the doctrine of continual rebirth). Griffin explains fascism further as a “modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths.” While Griffin’s approach is extraordinarily useful and insightful, it still fails to fully explain the dynamic nature of fascism. Robert Paxton’s 2005 book The Anatomy of Fascism, widely considered to be a definitive text on the subject, attempted to tackle that aspect of the phenomenon. His definition of fascism is placed in the context of the reality of its behavior: that is, fascism cannot be explained solely by its ideology; it is also identified and explained by what it does. By examining the historical record, Paxton has been able to describe its constantly mutating nature as occurring in five identifiable stages: 1. Intellectual exploration. Disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor. 2. Rooting. A fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage. 3. Arrival to power. Conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite the movement to share power. 4. Exercise of power. The movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates. 5. Radicalization or entropy. The state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did fascist Italy. Paxton explains that “each national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy … not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity.” He also examines the underlying principles that fueled the rise of fascism, and determines that there are nine “mobilizing passions” that have fed the fires of fascist movements wherever they have arisen: 1. A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions 2. The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it 3. The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group’s enemies, both internal and external 4. Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences 5. The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary 6. The need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny 7. The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason 8. The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success 9. The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess in a Darwinian struggle. This last “passion” was explored as an essential aspect of Nazism by the Norwegian social scientist and philosopher Harald Ofstad, whose interviews with former Nazis led him to write Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values—And Our Own (English translation, 1989). It described the logical extension of that Darwinian struggle against the “lesser” that pervades so much fascist literature: the deep-seated hatred and contempt in which all persons deemed “weaker”—ethnically, racially, medically, genetically, or otherwise—are held, and the desire to eliminate them entirely that it fuels. Paxton ultimately summed this all up in a single paragraph: “Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Fascism is both a complex and a simple phenomenon. In one sense, it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s made up of a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence and importance rise and fall according to the often fast-changing stages of development it goes through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human id upon the rest of humankind. Throughout history, it has only ever achieved real power when it was able to coalesce its many contentious and often warring factions under the banner of a unifying charismatic leader. The lack of such a figure at those periods when fascist tendencies were ascendant in the United States is one of the primary reasons historians believed that fascism never could obtain the “political space” required for obtaining power in the United States: “It can’t happen here.” That’s where Donald Trump comes in. Fascist elements and tendencies have always been part of the nation’s political DNA, even though many Americans cannot admit this. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of European fascism were borrowed from America, particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested in the form of genocidal violence toward indigenous peoples and racial and ethnic segregation. Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans; for the segregationist Jim Crow regime in the South, on which the Nazis modeled the Nuremberg Race Laws; and for the deployment of mob violence by the Ku Klux Klan, which was the inspiration for the murderous street thuggery of the German Brownshirts and the Italian Black-shirts. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German American who was a confidant of Hitler’s for a time, Hitler was “passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan … He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own.” And it was. Despite these tendencies, the United States had never yet given way to fascism at the national level. No doubt this, in the second half of the twentieth century at least, was due to horror at what ultimately transpired under the Hitler regime—namely, the Holocaust. We were appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism, because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced in Europe. We didn’t make the connection with our own piles of corpses, until the civil rights movement finally redressed our own national wrongs. However, that was a different generation, one that grew up in the shadow of World War II and experienced not only McCarthyism but also the civil rights struggle. Today, it is not uncommon to see Nazi regalia treated as a kind of fashion statement and outrageous genocidal racial sentiments tossed about like popcorn, dismissed as a kind of naughtiness. White nationalism and supremacism, nativism, misogyny, conspiracism, sexual paranoia, and xenophobic hatred, once embodied in German National Socialism, have experienced a revival in twenty-first-century America in the form of the alt-right and Patriot-militia movements. Relatively early in the campaign, a flood of observers began using the word “fascist” to describe Trump’s campaign. Not all of these concerns were coming from the left: in November 2015, a number of conservatives began sounding the alarm as well, especially in response to Trump’s vows to crack down on Muslim immigrants. “Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” the conservative pundit Max Boot, a Marco Rubio campaign adviser, tweeted in November 2015, after Trump had retweeted a graphic from #WhiteGenocide. Steve Deace, a Ted Cruz supporter and conservative Iowa radio host, tweeted in November 2015, “If Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump every conservative in the country would call it what it is—creeping fascism.” Even the staid, Republican-owned Seattle Times used the term to describe Trump in a November 2015 editorial: “There is a bottom line, and it’s simple: Trump’s campaign message reflects a kind of creeping fascism. It needs to be rejected.” Of course liberals, too, were alarmed: the historian Rick Perlstein, in a Washington Spectator piece titled “Donald Trump and the F Word,” explored the question of Trump’s fascist tendencies in depth, concluding that although Trump himself might not be a fascist, the phenomenon he was empowering was troublingly close to meeting Paxton’s condition of fascism at the power-acquisition stage. Trump was tapping into a wellspring of discontent: “If he’s just giving the people what they want, consider the people,” he wrote. “Consider what they want.” There is little doubt that there is a significant resemblance between Trump’s ascendance and that of previous fascist figures in history beyond Hitler, including Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Miklos Horthy, partly because the politics he engenders indeed fill out so many of the key components that collectively create genuine fascism, as we’ve come to understand it through deep historical scholarship. A careful examination of Trump’s campaign and post-election messages in light of Paxton’s definition reveals a raft of fascist traits: 1. Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign —the one that first catapulted him to the forefront in the race, in the polls, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow, and subsequent proposed program, to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (he used the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. The language he used to justify such plans— labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists”—is classic rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire group of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. Trump’s appeal ultimately is about forming a “purer” community, and it has been relentless and expansive: When an audience member asked him at a town-hall-style appearance when and how he was going to “get rid of all the Muslims,” he responded that “we’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.” He also claimed that if elected, he would send back all the refugees from Syria who had arrived in the United States: “If I win, they’re going back,” he told one of his approval-roaring campaign crowds. He told an interviewer that the Black Lives Matter movement was “looking for trouble” and later suggested that maybe a Black Lives Matter protester should have been “roughed up.” 2. Palingenetic ultranationalism, after race-baiting and ethnic fearmongering, is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming, “Make America Great Again.” Trump amplifies the slogan this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.” That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis: the promise of the phoenix-like rebirth of a nation from the ashes of its “golden age.” 3. Trump’s deep contempt for both liberalism and establishment conservatism allows him to go over the heads of established political alignments. The conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has noted, “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are … He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.” 4. Trump exploits a feeling of victimization, constantly proclaiming that America is in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world, and contends that this has occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians. 5. He himself embodies the concept of a lone male leader who considers himself a man of destiny. His refusal to acknowledge the lack of factual basis of many of his comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event. 6. Trump’s contempt for weakness was manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of John McCain as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his onstage mockery of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who has a disability. This list is thought-provoking—and it is meant to be thought-provoking—but as part of our exercise in examining the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy. For example, fascists have, in the past, always relied upon an independent, movement-driven paramilitary force capable of intimidating their opponents with various types of thuggery. In Italy these were the Blackshirts; Hitler imitated the Italian units with the formation of the Brownshirts, the Storm Division. Trump has no such paramilitary force at his disposal. Members of various white-supremacist organizations and bona fide paramilitary organizations such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percent movement are avid Trump backers. Trump has never made known any desire to form an alliance with or to make use of such groups. However, via wink-wink nudge-nudge cues Trump has on occasion encouraged or failed to condemn spontaneous violence by some of his supporters against both protesters at rallies and groups they consider undesirable, such as when “enthusiastic supporters” committed anti-Latino hate crimes. Encouraging extralegal vigilante violence can be classified as a fascistic response. Yet a serious fascist would have called upon not just the crowd to respond with violence, but also his paramilitary allies to respond with retaliatory strikes. Trump didn’t do that. Another perhaps more basic reason that Trump cannot be categorized as a true fascist is that he is not an ideologue who acts out of a rigid adherence to a consistent worldview, as do all real fascists. Trump’s only real ideology is worship of himself, “the Donald.” He will do and say just about anything that appeals to any receptive segment of the American body politic to attract their support. One segment of the body could be called the nation’s id—groups that live on paranoia and hatred regarding those different from themselves and also the political establishment. There’s no question that these supporters brought a visceral energy to the limited universe of the GOP primary, though I don’t know anyone who, in 2015, expected that such a campaign could survive the oxygen and exposure of a general election. Those observers, including me, were all proved wrong. Few observers had any clue how successfully the Alt-America worldview could become in muscling its way into the national spotlight. However, the reason why Trump has never yet called upon the shock troops of a paramilitary wing for support, and why he has attempted to keep an arm’s-length distance from the overtly racist white nationalists and neo-Nazis who have become some of his most enthusiastic backers, is simple: he isn’t really one of them. What he is, says Chip Berlet, is a classic right-wing nativist populist demagogue: “His ideology and rhetoric are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party, or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism.” Trump himself is not a fascist primarily because he lacks any kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology, nor has he agitated for a totalitarian one-party state. What he represents instead is a sort of gut-level reactionism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism. But that does not mean that the movement he has unleashed is not potentially dangerously proto-fascist, nor that he is not dangerous to American democracy. Indeed, he has now proved to be more dangerous than an outright fascist, because such a figure would be far less appealing and far less likely to succeed in the current milieu. What Trump has succeeded in doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, has been to make the large and growing number of proto-fascist groups in America larger and more vicious. In other words he is simultaneously responding to and creating the conditions that could easily lead to the genuine growth of fascism. The journalist Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–1945 (1955), describes how these changes happen not overnight, but incrementally: “You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty … “Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” We lose our humanity incrementally, in small acts of meanness. The Nazis’ regime ultimately embodied the ascension of demonic inhumanity, but they didn’t get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies. And this has been happening to America—in particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party—for a very long time. Donald Trump represents the culmination of a trend that really began in the 1990s. That was when we first saw the popular rise of eliminationist hate talk. It was first heard in Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 declaration of a “culture war”; it was then wielded with thoughtless glee and great regularity by an increasingly rabid set of right-wing pundits led by Rush Limbaugh; then it was deeply codified by a new generation of talking heads who have subsequently marched across the sound stages at Fox News. It surfaced particularly with the birth of the Tea Party, which became perhaps the single most significant manifestation of right-wing populism in the nation’s history, certainly since the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Trump aligned himself very early with the Tea Party elements, remarking in 2011, “I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party.” And indeed he does—in particular, its obeisance to the captains of industry and their untrammeled right to make profits at the expense of everyone else. Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they, too, can someday become rich and famous—because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It’s all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot. The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. One might be inclined to dismiss it as a kind of “sucker populism.” But that would be to overlook the reasons for its appeal, which run much deeper, and are really in many ways more a product of people’s attraction to an authoritarian system. Those psychological needs often are a product of the levels of general public fear, much more so than of economic well-being or other factors. That fear is generated by a large number of factors, including the spread of unfiltered social media, as well as the rapid decline in basic journalistic standards of factuality in the larger mainstream media, as well as the mainstream media’s increasing propensity to promote information that, producers say, reflects what people want to see rather than what responsible journalistic ethics would consider more important: what they need to know. That’s how Alt-America became so powerful a political force. This right-wing populism, largely lurking on the periphery and gradually building an audience, was whipped into life by Ron Paul’s and Sarah Palin’s 2008 candidacies, and then became fully manifest as a national movement in short order with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. Not only was the Tea Party an overtly right-wing populist movement, it soon became a major conduit for a revival of the populist Patriot-militia movement. Many of these “Tea Party Patriots” are now Oath Keepers and Three Percenters whose members widely supported Trump’s candidacy, and are now vowing to defend his presidency with their own arms. Most of these extremists are only one step removed, ideologically speaking, from the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists of the racist right, and both of those segments of the right lean heavily on nativist and authoritarian rhetoric. It’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism—they are closely related. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist. Thus, Donald Trump may not be a fascist, but with his vicious brand of right-wing populism he is not just empowering the latent fascist elements in America, he is leading his followers merrily down a path that leads directly to fascism. If the final result is fascism, the distinction between right-wing populism and fascism is not really significant except in understanding how it happened in the first place. The United States, thanks to Trump, has now reached a fork in the road where it must choose down which path its future lies—with democracy and its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism (if history serves as a example, the fascistic populists will eventually overwhelm their plutocrat sponsors). Trump may not be a fascist, but he is an authoritarian who, intentionally or not, is empowering the existing proto-fascist elements in American society; even more dangerously, his alt-right–Tea Party brand of right-wing populism is helping these groups grow their ranks and their potential to recruit new members by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making thuggery seem normal and inevitable. And that is a serious problem. How can you talk with a diehard Alt-American if you are a dedicated mainstream liberal? Many Americans confronted that question over their family Thanksgiving tables a couple of weeks after the election. The conversations often did not turn out well. But it is no longer a question we can pretend away, perhaps by choosing to stay away from those tables altogether. The American radical right is a real force with real power—both political and cultural—and it is no longer alarmist to point that out. Nor is it a problem that we can hope to attack head-on through blunt political force, though without question the barrage of attacks on Americans’ civil rights that very likely now await us in the coming years will require our most vocal opposition. It will be incumbent upon this political opposition to be totally dedicated to the principles of nonviolent resistance. During the anti-Trump protests that immediately followed his election, the liberal mainstream media characterized a handful of violent incidents as riots. That undermines the aims of the anti-Trump protest. Fascist movements have a long-documented history of converting any violence they encounter after having provoked it into a justification for further violence that far outpaces anything that the opposing left might be capable of mustering. The rise of the radical right is a symptom of problems more deep-seated than the purely political level. Fascism, at its base, is fueled by hate and the pure objectification of an utter lack of empathy for other human beings. Thus, the negation of this negative emotion is not love, but empathy. Confronting fascism—as J. K. Rowling suggests with a theme running through her popular “Harry Potter” series of children’s books—means first embracing humanity, both ours and theirs; from that embrace we can make the personal choices that define what kind of people we are. We need to be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, even if we do not agree with them, for our own sake as well as theirs. Harry’s experiences observing young Tom Riddle, the nascent Lord Voldemort, through the magical “Pensieve” gave these stories a surprisingly profound depth of meaning. Empathy as an essential political principle actually comes naturally to progressives as a policy imperative. Certainly the liberal social policies that have created wealthy liberal urban enclaves that were the base of the Democratic Party’s support in the 2016 election reflect that empathetic impulse, in the form of broad social safety nets, supportive urban-oriented programs, high-powered educational systems, and bustling economies. The impulse behind most modern liberal programs has been to raise the standard of living for ordinary people and to defend the civil rights of everyone, especially those who have not enjoyed them for much of the nation’s history. That’s a fairly empathetic agenda. Liberals’ dealings regarding rural and Rust Belt America, however, have over the past forty years largely been characterized by at best benign neglect, in terms of both economic policy and culture: wealthy urbanites do often look down their noses at rural and working-class citizens and consider their concerns and attitudes at best antiquated and at worst backward and stupid. This political disconnect emerges in all kinds of cultural expressions, from movie stereotypes to thoughtless remarks from liberal politicians. Which is perhaps why the conversations around our Thanksgiving tables were so deeply awkward, if not deeply disturbing, in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise election. And yet that is the kind of place where the deeper change that needs to occur in our relationships with each other as Americans can happen. One healing conversation at a time. If Americans of goodwill—including mainstream conservatives who recognize how their movement has been hijacked by radicals—can learn to start talking to each other again, and maybe even pull a few Alt-Americans out of their abyss along the way, then perhaps we can start to genuinely heal our divisions instead of relegating each other into social oblivion and, maybe eventually, civil war. Some kind of cultural or political civil war is clearly already on many minds. The bottom-line issue is really an epistemological one: how is a rational exchange possible when we can’t even agree on what constitutes a fact and factuality? Most liberals (certainly not all) tend to prefer traditional standards of factuality and evidence in which concrete information from reliable sources is accepted as fact, and scientific evidence obtained through peer-reviewed methods is considered the gold standard for presentable evidence in a discussion. Pretty much the opposite is true in Alt-America. Science and scientists are viewed with suspicion as participants in the “conspiracy,” and so their contributions are instantly discarded as worthless, as is the work of any kind of academic in any field, including history and the law. The only sources of information they accept as “factual” are tendentious right-wing propaganda riddled with false facts, wild distortions, and risible conspiracist hyperbole. Fox News—whose mass failures regarding factual accuracy are now the stuff of legend—is considered by Alt-Americans to be the only “balanced and accurate” news source, though even it is viewed with deep suspicion by alt-righters, Patriots, and Alex Jones acolytes. Breaking through that wall is at best difficult, and in the case of dedicated and fanatical Alt- Americans, probably not worth the personal costs in terms of the emotional abuse they like to heap on those with whom they disagree. But finding people who remain within reach—those for whom common decency and respectful discourse and Christian kindness are still important values, even though they may have voted for Trump—may provide an avenue for deeper social change. At some point, there will have to be a discussion about just what is a fact and what isn’t, because that eventually will determine whether or not you can ever come to a rational common ground. But getting there first will take a lot of empathy. The communications expert Sharon Ellison specializes in what she calls “powerful nondefensive communication”; she has developed an effective empathy-driven model that she has shown can be effective in at least breaking down the interpersonal barriers that modern politics have erected, and upon which the radical right thrives. The starting place, she says, is curiosity: "Instead of blasting Trump or insulting the morality or intelligence of his supporters, first, just get curious. You don’t have to agree; you’re simply gathering information and trying to understand where they’re coming from, even if you believe they’re deeply misguided. "Make it a dialogue, not a debate or an inquisition. No matter how true and rational your analysis is, force-feeding it will not go down well. Nor will a premeditated series of sugar-coated questions designed to subtly lead the person to “get it.” The right question, skillfully and non-aggressively posed, could prompt someone to gain unexpected insights, and when they realize something for themselves, they can more easily accept it. "Your questions should be very specific but posed in a non-judgmental way. (Note that I’m calling the questions “specific” rather than “pointed,” which implies that a question is a weapon.)" Ellison cautions against using general, open-ended questions such as whether people can ever learn to get along. Some of us gravitate toward these because they feel softer, but they can wind up serving as an invitation to rant. The key to understanding people who have become drawn into the Alt-America universe is the role that the hero myth plays in framing their worldview. Dedicated Patriots and white nationalists, just like the hate criminals they inspire, genuinely envision themselves as heroes. They are saving the country, or perhaps the white race, or perhaps just their local community. And so anything, anything they might do in that act of defense is excusable, even laudable. This embrace of the heroic is what ultimately poisons us all. The sociologist James Aho has explored this concept of the hero: "The warrior needs an enemy. Without one there is nothing against which to fight, nothing from which to save the world, nothing to give his life meaning. What this means, of course, is that if an enemy is not ontologically present in the nature of things, one must be manufactured. The Nazi needs an international Jewish banker and conspiratorial Mason to serve his purposes of self- aggrandizement, and thus sets about creating one, at least unconsciously. By the same token, the radical Zionist locks himself in perverse symbiosis with his Palestinian “persecutors,” the Communist with his “imperialistic capitalist running dogs,” the capitalist with his Communist “subversives.” Aho goes on to describe how the enemy is constructed as embodying “putrefaction and death,” is experienced “as issuing from the ‘dregs’ of society,” whose “visitation on our borders is tantamount to impending pestilence … The enemy’s presence in our midst is a pathology of the social organism serious enough to require the most far-reaching remedies: quarantine, political excision, or, to use a particularly revealing expression, liquidation and expulsion.” What Aho describes is a dynamic latent in all sectors of American society but finding a virulent expression in right-wing extremism. It is one in which both sides—the heroic exemplars of the far right and their named “enemies,” that is, Jews, civil-rights advocates, and the government— essentially exchange roles in their respective perceptions; the self is always heroic, the other always the enemy. Each sees the other as the demonic enemy, feeding the other’s fears and paranoias in an increasingly threatening spiral that eventually breaks out in the form of real violence. There is, as Aho suggests, a way to escape this dynamic, to break the cycle. And it requires, on the part of those seeking to oppose this kind of extremism, a recognition of their own propensity toward naming the enemy and adopting the self-aggrandizing pose of the hero: "As [the cultural anthropologist] Ernest Becker has convincingly shown, the call to heroism still resonates in modern hearts. However, we are in the habit of either equating heroism with celebrity (“TV Actress Tops List of Students’ Heroes”) or caricaturing the hero as a bluff-and-swagger patriot/soldier making the world safe for, say, Christian democracy. In these ways heroism is portrayed as a rather happy if not entirely risk-free venture that earns one public plaudits. Today we are asked to learn that, in the deepest and truest sense, heroism is really none of these things, but a largely private vocation requiring stamina, discipline, responsibility, and above all courage. Not just the ascetic courage to cleanse our personal lives of what we have been taught is filth, or even less to cleanse society of the alleged carriers of this filth, but, as Jung displayed, the fortitude to release our claim on moral purity and perfection. At a personal and cultural level, I believe this is the only way to transcend the logic of enemies." For all of its logic and love of science, modern liberalism as a social force is weighed down by its most consistent flaw: an overweening belief in its own moral superiority, its heroism, as it were. (Not, of course, that conservatives are any better in this regard; if one factors in the religious right and the “moral values” vote, they are objectively worse.) This tendency becomes especially noticeable in urban liberal societies, which for all their enlightenment and love of tolerance are maddeningly smug, intolerant of the “ignorance” of their rural and “fly-over country” counterparts. It’s not an omnipresent attitude, but it is pervasive enough that others’ perceptions of it are certainly not without basis. There’s a similar stigma attached to religious beliefs as well, especially among more secular liberals, and that in turn has given birth to a predictable counterreaction that is only partially a result of misunderstanding. If we look at the 2016 electoral map, and see all those red rural counties and come to terms with the reasons why none of them ever turn blue, it’s important to come to terms with our own prejudices and our easy willingness to treat our fellow Americans—the ones who are not like us—with contempt and disrespect. Simply beginning the change will require both humility and empathy. That’s not to suggest that we respond to racist or violent provocations with touchy-feely attempts at “reaching out” to the other side; these are always rejected with contempt, or viewed as a sign of weakness. Certainly it does not mean we need to “reach out” to the rural haters and the conspiracy-spewing Patriots. I grew up in rural America, and I’m all too familiar with the bullies and swaggering ignoramuses who hold too much sway in that culture, and whose politics and worldview are now ascendant beyond their wildest imaginings (and they are wild, trust me). There’s really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump. The only thing they understand, in the end, is brute political force: being thrashed at the ballot box, and in the public discourse. So it is vital for liberals, progressives, moderates, and genuine conservatives to link arms in the coming years to fight back against the fascist tide. It will require organizing, and it will require real outreach. And if this coalition wants to succeed, its members will need to break the vicious circular social dynamic that right-wing extremists always create, particularly in rural communities where their bullying style of discourse can stifle honest discourse. To do that, some self-reflection will go a long way. Respecting those from rural areas, those who hold deep religious beliefs, doesn’t force progressives to compromise their own beliefs or standards. It simply means being part of a democracy, which is enriched by its diversity. It means once again empowering the many rural progressives who have lived there all along, fighting the good fight against all odds, because they are the people who are best equipped to have those many dinner-table conversations. Certainly traditional rural values such as communitarianism, common decency, mutual respect, and respect for tradition should have a place among all that diversity that liberals are fond of celebrating. Because until urban progressives learn to accord them that respect, they are doomed to remain trapped in the vicious cycle being fueled on both sides. For liberals and moderates, breaking out may be a matter of survival—especially as the rabid right’s fantasies begin coming to fruition. Alt-America, thanks to Donald Trump, is no longer merely the stuff of these fantasies. It will take the best of us, the most decent part of us—the better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln invoked in his first inaugural address—to prevent right-wing dreams from becoming realities. David Neiwert

[delwray-blog]

A SATANIC CULT CONTROLS THE US

The Jewish Conspiracy Is Real

“The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." J. Edgar Hoover

The world is in the malignant grip of a satanic Jewish cult.

People recoil at the suggestion but proof stares us in the face every day.

George W. Bush, President of the "Free World" is a member of "Skull and Bones" a chapter of the Illuminati order. His father, grandfather, and uncle are also members.

In his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep" Bush writes, "My senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society so secret I can't say anything more." In Aug. 2000 he said his "heritage is part of who I am."

Isn't this a conflict of interest?

Hello! Can a man hold any public office, let alone the most important, and belong to a "secret society"? If this society were benign, would it have to be secret?

What a secret society it is! The Illuminati is the hidden hand behind all modern cataclysms, including the French and Russian Revolutions, Communism, the Depression, and Nazism. To affect the course of history only takes money. The people behind the Illuminati have plenty.

It's time we faced reality. Murphy's Law applies to humanity. "If it can go wrong, it will."

It has. The world is ruled by a satanic cult.

THE ILLUMINATI AND THE SKULL & BONES

The Illuminati originates in the Jewish Kabala, Babylonian mystery cults, the Templar’s, Freemasons and assorted interests dedicated to Satan worship and absolute power. On May 1, 1776, Adam Weishaupt, a professor at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, founded "The Order of the Illuminati." Many people believe Weishaupt was sponsored by Prince William of Hesse Casel and his banker Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the wealthiest man in the world.

The Illuminati's goal was to destroy Western Civilization and to erect a new world order ruled by them. Its method was to dissolve all social ties (employer, nation, religion, race, family) by exploiting social discontent and promising a golden age of "human brotherhood." This is now called "globalization."

Attracted by the promise of power and change, people served without realizing who or what they were supporting. Weishaupt urged his followers to "practice the art of counterfeit." New recruits were told the Illuminati expressed the original spirit of Christianity. Weishaupt marveled that even churchmen could be gulled. "Oh! Men, of what cannot you be persuaded?" (Nesta Webster, World Revolution, 1921, p. 27)

The Illuminati had a hand in every so-called "progressive" movement of the past 200 years. Women, said Weishaupt, were to be enlisted with "hints of emancipation." They "can all be led toward change by vanity, curiosity, sensuality,

and inclination." (Webster, 29)

William Huntington, an American who had studied in Germany, founded the "Skull and Bones" (Chapter 322 of the Bavarian Illuminati) at Yale University in 1832. The members wore a death's head on their chests and were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. "The Order" became the preserve of the leading New England families, many wealthy from the Opium trade. These include the Whitney’s, Taft’s, Buckley’s, Lowell’s, Sloan’s, Coffins, and Harriman’s. The Bush family was dependent on these interests.

For over 150 years, "Bones men", have run the world from positions in banking, intelligence, media, law, and government. Members included Presidential handler Averill Harriman, anti-war leader William Sloan Coffin, Time-Life magnate Henry Luce, Truman war secretary Henry Stimson (responsible for dropping the atomic bomb), pseudo-conservative William F. Buckley and many more.

"THE BATTLE IS NOT BETWEEN LEFT AND RIGHT"

In the 1960s British-born Dr. Anthony Sutton was a Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute when he discovered that, in spite of the Cold War, the US was supplying the USSR with its technology, including weapons used against American soldiers in Vietnam. Sutton dug deeper and discovered that Wall Street had sponsored both the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Nazi Germany. The resulting books which are online cost, Dr. Sutton, his academic career.

In 1983, Dr. Sutton received a list of Skull and Bones members and immediately recognized the names of many men who controlled American policy. He published a book entitled "America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones" (1986). He updated and republished this book just before his death last June at age 77. Here are some of his conclusions.

• "The Order" is " a purely American phenomenon with a German origin." Dr. Sutton compares it to the Round Table, Cecil Rhodes' secret society at Oxford also known as "The Group." The American and British entities consist of 20-30 dynastic families each. Jewish banking interests connect them.

"The links between 'The Order' and Britain go through Lazard Freres and the private merchant banks... 'The Group' links to the Jewish equivalent through the Rothschild’s in Britain... 'The Order' in the US links to the Guggenheim, Schiff and Warburg families." (23)

As Dr. Sutton notes, the "Order" had definite anti-Semitic tendencies but by the 1960s, many Jewish names started to appear among the 15 annual inductees. See a list of Skull and Bones members.

• Dr. Sutton believes the "left" versus "right" split is fraudulent and used to control the debate and condition citizens to think along certain lines. Left-wing magazines like the "The Nation" and "The New Republic" and right-wing magazines like "The National Review were "artificially set up." The former were financed by Whitney money while the latter by Buckley. Both are "The Order."

Dr. Sutton states: "Sooner or later people will wake up. First, we have to dump the trap of right and left. This is a Hegelian trap to divide and control. The battle is not between right and left; it is between us and them."

Similarly, in the international field left and right political structures are artificially constructed and collapsed in the drive for one-world synthesis, i.e. authoritarian socialism controlled by monopoly capital.

College textbooks present war and revolution as accidental results of conflicting forces. This is nonsense, says Dr. Sutton. They are created and financed by Wall Street to create a new world order. But you won't read this in history books.

"Our Western history is every bit as distorted, censored and largely useless as that of Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union or Communist China..." (122)

• Dr. Sutton believes The Order has many weaknesses resulting from an inbred gene pool, a shallow power base, and a limited worldview. In any future conflict between the authoritarian state and the individual, he believes opposition will take "a million forms."

"No one is going to create the anti-The Order movement. That would be foolish and unnecessary. It could be infiltrated, bought off, or diverted all too easily. Why play by the rules set by the enemy?

The movement that will topple The Order will be extremely simple and most effective. It will be ten thousand or a million Americans who come to the conclusion that they don't want the State to be boss that they prefer to live under the protection of the Constitution. They will make their own independent decision to thwart The Order and it will take ten thousand or a million forms." (55)

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Bizarre as it sounds our world is the product of a multi-generational satanic conspiracy.

(Believe me, I would give everything I own to be wrong.)

When we compare this disturbing conclusion with the comforting picture purveyed by Illuminati controlled-mass media and education, we experience "cognitive dissonance," or psychological stress. This is usually resolved by evading reality, dismissing it as "conspiracy theory."

One reader, stirring in his sleep, wrote: "You sir, are T-TOTALLY the biggest storyteller I have ever heard. If I ever get really bored I will read some of your concoctions’."

In fact, conspiracy is very plausible. People who control a grossly disproportionate share of the world's wealth will take measures to consolidate their position. They will destabilize the public by inciting a series of wars and other mind-boggling hoaxes (communism, lesbian feminism, multiculturalism). They will subvert faith in a loving God and promote violence and depravity (Satan) instead.

The government-inspired 9-11 atrocity proves a satanic cult controls the US. Bush and his accomplices are criminals, traitors, and impostors. But don't look to the Democrats for salvation. Leading contender Sen. John Kerry is also Skull and Bones (Class of 1966.)

The "War on Terror" is obviously designed to forestall domestic opposition and condition people to further subjugation and new world order. What can we do?

Antony Sutton had it right when he said opposition should be individual in character. It should "take ten thousand or a million forms."

[allisstupidnow]

OXFORD UNIVERSITY: NAZI DEATH CULT

So, Oxford University is publishing a book by a Nazi: Holly Lawford-Smith. So, as if we needed it, more evidence that Oxford University is run by Nazis.

Kinda sad.

[allisstupidnow]

Oxford University: Nazi Death Cult

Did you know that Oxford University has a Nazi Death Cult? It’s true. And it’s funded by racist Nazi rich people (like that car company moron). Being in academia is the best way to lose any illusion about academics being “smart”. This philosophy guy here can use big words, but is just stupid (and evil). And Oxford University lets him run a Nazi Cult on their dime. Fucked up swedish nazi. Bald little rat faced asswipe. Imagine “doing philosophizingings” like this little weasel. Imagine. Can you? Privileged asshole shitface wants a pure race, just like the Nazis.

So I guess we learn A) Don’t take the philosophy department at Oxford seriously in any way (if they hire this guy, they are all shitweasels) B) Nazis run Oxford university (only Nazis hire Nazis) C) Academics are mostly stupid. D) This guy is so fucking stupid and confused (and thinks he is hot shit) E) He is also a racist, obviously. F) At Oxford racism is the game. 

Also the supreme court in the US is controlled by billionaire Nazis, so basically the US government is also (for all intents and purposes) Nazi. So they are everywhere, I guess. Fat clown in his black dress sucking off rich people who love Hitler is so stupid wouldn’t even work as a superhero villain character.

[delwray-blog]

Conspiracy Too Monstrous To Conceive

https://www.henrymakow.com/000166.html

June 8, 2003

by Henry Makow Ph.D.

"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists." J. Edgar Hoover

The world is in the malignant grip of a satanic cult. People recoil at the suggestion but proof stares us in the face every day. George W. Bush, President of the "Free World" is a member of "Skull and Bones" a chapter of the Illuminati order. His father, grandfather, and uncle are also members.

In his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep" Bush writes, "My senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society so secret I can't say anything more." In Aug. 2000 he said his "heritage is part of who I am.”

Isn't this a conflict of interest?

Hello! Can a man hold any public office, let alone the most important, and belong to a "secret society"? If this society were benign, would it have to be secret?

What a secret society it is! The Illuminati is the hidden hand behind all modern cataclysms, including the French and Russian Revolutions, Communism, the Depression, and Nazism. To affect the course of history only takes money. The people behind the Illuminati have plenty.

It's time we faced reality. Murphy's Law applies to humanity. "If it can go wrong, it will."

It has. The world is ruled by a satanic cult.

THE ILLUMINATI AND THE SKULL & BONES

The Illuminati originates in the Jewish Kabala, Babylonian mystery cults, the Templar’s, Freemasons and assorted interests dedicated to Satan worship and absolute power. On May 1, 1776, Adam Weishaupt, a professor at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, founded "The Order of the Illuminati." Many people believe Weishaupt was sponsored by Prince William of Hesse Casel and his banker Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the wealthiest man in the world.

The Illuminati's goal was to destroy Western Civilization and to erect a new world order ruled by them. Its method was to dissolve all social ties (employer, nation, religion, race, family) by exploiting social discontent and promising a golden age of "human brotherhood." This is now called "globalization."

Attracted by the promise of power and change, people served without realizing who or what they were supporting. Weishaupt urged his followers to "practice the art of counterfeit." New recruits were told the Illuminati expressed the original spirit of Christianity. Weishaupt marveled that even churchmen could be gulled. "Oh! Men, of what cannot you be persuaded?" (Nesta Webster, World Revolution, 1921, p. 27)

The Illuminati had a hand in every so-called "progressive" movement of the past 200 years. Women, said Weishaupt, were to be enlisted with "hints of emancipation." They "can all be led toward change by vanity, curiosity, sensuality, and inclination." (Webster, 29)

William Huntington, an American who had studied in Germany, founded the "Skull and Bones" (Chapter 322 of the Bavarian Illuminati) at Yale University in 1832. The members wore a death's head on their chests and were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. "The Order" became the preserve of the leading New England families, many wealthy from the Opium trade. These include the Whitney’s, Taft’s, Buckley’s, Lowell’s, Sloan’s, Coffins, and Harriman’s. The Bush family was dependent on these interests.

For over 150 years, "Bones men", have run the world from positions in banking, intelligence, media, law, and government. Members included Presidential handler Averill Harriman, anti-war leader William Sloan Coffin, Time-Life magnate Henry Luce, Truman war secretary Henry Stimson (responsible for dropping the atomic bomb), pseudo-conservative William F. Buckley and many more.

"THE BATTLE IS NOT BETWEEN LEFT AND RIGHT"

In the 1960s British-born Dr. Anthony Sutton was a Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute when he discovered that, in spite of the Cold War, the US was supplying the USSR with its technology, including weapons used against American soldiers in Vietnam. Sutton dug deeper and discovered that Wall Street had sponsored both the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Nazi Germany. The resulting books which are online cost, Dr. Sutton, his academic career.

In 1983, Dr. Sutton received a list of Skull and Bones members and immediately recognized the names of many men who controlled American policy. He published a book entitled "America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones" (1986). He updated and republished this book just before his death last June at age 77. Here are some of his conclusions.

"The Order" is " a purely American phenomenon with a German origin." Dr. Sutton compares it to the Round Table, Cecil Rhodes' secret society at Oxford also known as "The Group." The American and British entities consist of 20-30 dynastic families each. Jewish banking interests connect them.

"The links between 'The Order' and Britain go through Lazard Freres and the private merchant banks... 'The Group' links to the Jewish equivalent through the Rothschild’s in Britain... 'The Order' in the US links to the Guggenheim, Schiff and Warburg families." (23)

As Dr. Sutton notes, the "Order" had definite anti-Semitic tendencies but by the 1960s, many Jewish names started to appear among the 15 annual inductees. 

See the list of Skull and Bones members.

Dr. Sutton believes the "left" versus "right" split is fraudulent and used to control the debate and condition citizens to think along certain lines. Left-wing magazines like the "The Nation" and "The New Republic" and right-wing magazines like "The National Review were "artificially set up." The former were financed by Whitney money while the latter by Buckley. Both are "The Order."

Dr. Sutton states: "Sooner or later people will wake up. First, we have to dump the trap of right and left. This is a Hegelian trap to divide and control. The battle is not between right and left; it is between us and them."

Similarly, in the international field left and right political structures are artificially constructed and collapsed in the drive for one-world synthesis, i.e. authoritarian socialism controlled by monopoly capital.

College textbooks present war and revolution as accidental results of conflicting forces. This is nonsense, says Dr. Sutton. They are created and financed by Wall Street to create a new world order. But you won't read this in history books. "Our Western history is every bit as distorted, censored and largely useless as that of Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union or Communist China..." (122)

Dr. Sutton believes The Order has many weaknesses resulting from an inbred gene pool, a shallow power base, and a limited worldview. In any future conflict between the authoritarian state and the individual, he believes opposition will take "a million forms."

"No one is going to create the anti-The Order movement. That would be foolish and unnecessary. It could be infiltrated, bought off, or diverted all too easily. Why play by the rules set by the enemy?

The movement that will topple The Order will be extremely simple and most effective. It will be ten thousand or a million Americans who come to the conclusion that they don't want the State to be boss that they prefer to live under the protection of the Constitution. They will make their own independent decision to thwart The Order and it will take ten thousand or a million forms." (55)

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Bizarre as it sounds our world is the product of a multi-generational satanic conspiracy. (Believe me, I would give everything I own to be wrong.)

When we compare this disturbing conclusion with the comforting picture purveyed by Illuminati controlled-mass media and education, we experience "cognitive dissonance," or psychological stress. This is usually resolved by evading reality, dismissing it as "conspiracy theory."

One reader, stirring in his sleep, wrote: "You sir, are T-TOTALLY the biggest storyteller I have ever heard. If I ever get really bored I will read some of your concoctions’."

In fact, conspiracy is very plausible. People who control a grossly disproportionate share of the world's wealth will take measures to consolidate their position. They will destabilize the public by inciting a series of wars and other mind-boggling hoaxes (communism, lesbian feminism, multiculturalism). They will subvert faith in a loving God and promote violence and depravity (Satan) instead. 

The government-inspired 9-11 atrocity proves a satanic cult controls the US. Bush and his accomplices are criminals, traitors, and impostors. But don't look to the Democrats for salvation. Leading contender Sen. John Kerry is also Skull and Bones (Class of 1966.)

The "War on Terror" is obviously designed to forestall domestic opposition and condition people to further subjugation and new world order. What can we do?

Antony Sutton had it right when he said opposition should be individual in character. It should "take ten thousand or a million forms."