[I]t it was after Trump started calling for stronger surveillance of Muslim-Americans in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks that a handful of conservatives ventured to call Trump’s rhetoric something much more dangerous: fascism.
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“Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” tweeted Max Boot, a conservative fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is advising Marco Rubio.
“Forced federal registration of US citizens, based on religious identity, is fascism. Period. Nothing else to call it,” Jeb Bush national security adviser John Noonan wrote on Twitter.Conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace, who has endorsed Ted Cruz, also used the “F” word last week: “If Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump every conservative in the country would call it what it is — creeping fascism.”
It’s hard to understand why this has been so difficult to see. On the day he announced his campaign, Trump openly said he believed that undocumented workers are not just criminals (that’s a common refrain among the anti-immigrant right which fatuously chants “they broke the law by coming here”) but violent rapists, killers and gang members. He said he wants to deport millions of people, including American citizens. In fact, he wants to restrict American citizenship to people whose parents are citizens, and thus are guaranteed citizenship by the 14th amendment.For months Trump has been saying that we cannot allow Syrian refugees into the country and promising to send the ones who are already here back. He has indicated a willingness to require American Muslims to register with the government and thinks they should be put under surveillance.
“we’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule… And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago…”Does that add up to fascism? Yeah, pretty much. In his book, “Rush, Newspeak and Fascism” David Neiwert explained that the dictionary definition of the word often leaves out the most important characteristics of the philosophy, which are “its claims to represent the “true character” of the respective national identities among which it arises; and its mythic core of national rebirth — not to mention its corporatist component, its anti-liberalism, its glorification of violence and its contempt for weakness.” If that’s not Donald Trump I don’t know what is.
“This morning they asked me a question. ‘Would you approve waterboarding” Would I approve waterboarding? Yeah. And let me ask you a question? I said, on the other side, they chop off our young people’s heads and they put ’em on a stick. On the other side they build these iron cages and they’ll put 20 people in them and they drop ’em in the ocean for 15 minutes and pull ’em up 15 minutes later. Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I’d approve it, you bet your ass — in a heartbeat.
And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.They’ll say, ‘oh it has no value’, well I know people, very, very important people and they want to be politically correct and I see some people taking on television, ‘well I don’t know if it works’ and they tell me later on, ‘it works, it works, believe me, it works’.
And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing to us.”
“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?”
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“There’s only one thing to do here, folks, and that’s achieve victory over people who have targeted us for loooong, long time, well over 15, 20 years. It’s the only way to deal with this, and that’s why obsessing about a single incident or two of so-called abuse in a prison is nothing more than a giant distraction and could up being something that will really tie our hands and handcuffs us in what the real objective is here, which is the preservation of our way of life and our country.”
The Nazis in #Charlottesville were literally beating people w/ torches, yet no police in riot gear. Hmm, wonder why. pic.twitter.com/wxuGGBEuML— Josh Sánchez (@jnsanchez) August 12, 2017