The Coming Electoral Storm

So here is some of the latest evidence that the United States now for the third quadrennial bourgeois electoral extravaganza in a row given put up a fascist maniac representing a fascist party atop its presidential ticket.

There’s a not-so-subtle departure in Donald “They’re Eating the Cats and Dogs” Trump and his fascist running mate JD “Cat Lady” Vance’s targeting of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio – a targeting that has led to the closing of schools and public buildings because of bombing and shooting threats and to the fascist Proud Boys marching on the town. The departure here is the targeting not just of “illegal” immigrants but now fully legal immigrants – “legals” who, by the way, are well understood by locals across the red-blue spectrum to be contributing to an America town’s economy and community.

(I think here of all the hard-working and fully “legal” Sudanese and Congolese people families I’ve worked and gardened alongside in Iowa City over the last decade.)

That along with the vile and animalizing accusation that these legal immigrants are killing and eating their neighbor’s house pets is a sign of the virulent and potentially genocidal racism that lurks behind the legalistic cloak of “legal” versus “illegal” people and behind what the Nazi scum Trump and Vance mean when they say, “real American.” That “real American” is a white male who stands proudly atop strict social hierarchies and oppression structures of race and gender, guns and whips in hand. This “true American” keeps his wife barefoot and pregnant and consigns his mother and mother-in-law and childless aunts and sisters to helpmate child-care and related domestic duties until death. (In a chilling echo of The Handmaid’s Tale, the widely read novel depicting a dystopian fascist future, Vance has made clear his belief that women’s only real function in society is to bear and raise children and tend to their homes along with women who have either “failed” to have children or are now past childbearing age.)

Springfield way is a snapshot of much of America if and when our ruling class and its political system including the dismal Dems let Trump back in the White House – as may very well happen.

Also worth noting in the wild Springfield drama is Vance’s candid statement to CNN that he is ready to “create stories” – that is to create overnight racist urban legends like the ridiculous pet-eating charge – to advance the Reich-most US major party’s arch-nativist terror.

Speaking of departures, we’ve known forever that the Hitler fan Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is, like all good fascists, anti-Semitic. But Trump recently went into new territory by basically saying that if he loses the next election “despite everything I’ve done for Israel” it will largely the fault of Jews.

“In my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss, if I’m at 40 percent,” Trump said a “Fighting Antisemitism” event called Israeli American Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson. After the event, Trump said this as keynote speaker at the Adelson-funded Israeli American Conference:

“If I don’t win this election — and Jewish people would have a lot to do with that, 60 percent are voting for the enemy — Israel will cease to exist in two years…If I do win, Israel will be safe and secure, and we’ll stop the toxic poison of antisemitism.”

By “the enemy,” he means the capitalist-imperialist Democratic Party, who he likes to call “communist” and “Marxist.”

There are four terrible things going with these Adelson-sponsored comments. One, he’s homogenizing an entire ethnic group, showing no sense of its own internal complexity and the fact that its historical voting behavior reflects a mix of considerations of which the defense of Israel is only one. He’s identifying Jewishness with lockstep support for the genocidal fascist apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing state of Isreal I should add that some of the harshest critics of the state of Israel I’ve met over the last year are young Jewish college students. And never mind that his “enemy” the Democratic Party under Biden and Harris has been strongly behind Israel as it has carried out a genocide in Gaza over the last eleven plus months.

Third, in classic fascist fashion, Donald “Let the Oath Keepers March on the US Capitol with AR-15s” Trump is calling the not-so leftmost US capitalist-imperialist party, the Democrats, “the enemy.” The hated enemy. That’s domestic war language. What do you do with hated enemies? You crush them by any and all means necessary. You send them running for their lives, leaving the country.

Fourth, Donald “Vengeance” Trump is setting Jewish people in general up for retribution after the election whether or not he prevails but perhaps most especially if he doesn’t.

Fifth, the orange fascist maniac is signaling a chilling connection to the classic European 20^th Century fascism of Hitler and his gang by targeting the Third Reich’s top ethnocultural enemy, Jews, who Hitler and his Nazi Party damn nearly completely exterminated in Europe between 1941 and 1945. Never forget that he gave drive by thumbs-up to Proud Boys who wore t-shirts saying “6MWE” while rampaging in Washington DC after the 2020 elections. “6MWE” is short for “Six Millions Killed in the Nazi Holocaust Wasn’t Enough.”

In other news about the Republi-fascism that Democrats and mainstream media are loathe to call fascism (yes there are a few brief exceptions), the Reich-most Party is going ahead with running a declared “Black Nazi” who Donald “Execute the Central Park Five” Trump has called “Martin Luther King on steroids” as their North Carolina gubernatorial candidate even after evidence of his “extremism” has been made public. The Reich-most party has sent out Donald “Why Don’t My Generals Follow my Orders Like Hitler’s Did?” Trump’s golf partner Sen. Lindsey Graham to try to get the Republifascist state legislature of Nebraska to undo the state’s practice of splitting up its Electoral College votes by Congressional district. The idea here it to bring Nebraska on board with the winner-take-all norm so that “the enemy” (those “Marxist” Democrats) can’t claim what could be a decisive Elector in Omaha. And the Trumpist Georgia Board of Elections has just voted 3-2 to require a full hand count of the 2024 election in Georgia. This action (a) builds on the lie that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” and (b) is meant to prevent the state’s vote from being certified by the December 25th deadline and to thereby throw the presidential election into the US House, where Trump will certainly win since the House will vote by state delegations, not by members. Under the 1804 12th Amendment, “The candidate with the majority of electoral votes becomes President. If no candidate has a majority, the House of Representatives chooses the President by ballot from the top three candidates. Each state has one vote in the House of Representatives.” (Trying to get things to the House under the 12th was part of criminal far right Trump lawyer John Eastman’s election-cancellation strategy in 2020-21.)

I long ago tired of seeming clairvoyant and being in a position to say “I told you so” about the electability and conduct of US presidents from the messianic militarist Bush 43 though the arch neoliberal imperialist Wall Street Obama44, fascist Trump 45, and Genocide Joe Biden 46. The main legitimate reason to say that “I/we told you so” is not to lord it over others but to suggest that we who saw all this shit happening in advance might want to be listened to by as many people as humanly possible because we seem to know a thing or two about the cores nature of this society and political superstructure, knowledge that is critical to figuring out how to overthrow a capitalist system that is actively working to cancel all prospects for a decent future in ways that I’ve been writing and talking about for many years now.

Here is an interesting dialogue with a reader thinking about the coming electoral clusyterfu*#:

“Hi Paul: Regarding your latest piece at ????????????????????????????????????????????ℎ, ‘Ten True Things Regarding the Election and America:’ Please correct me if I’m wrong, but could it be added to your list what Harris and her supporters have made clear, and that is that Trump is not only unfit to be president, but that his presidency would mean the end of elections and democracy in the U.S.? That being the case, how can they allow him to take office if he wins? We know Trump will never go quietly if he loses. Aren’t the Democrats essentially indicating the same? Haven’t both sides made some degree of post-election conflict all but inevitable? Best, JF.”

My response, too brief to really dig into the topic but hopefully relevant nonetheless:

“Well, the Dems stopping Trump from taking office after a win would require the Dems having their own Stolen Election narrative (and a Trump win will likely be a steal on numerous levels) and having reached out to and won support from the Pentagon, no? I have no idea if the Biden-Harris forces and the Dem campaign are working on these things. They probably ought to be, wild as that sounds. But I don’t think the Dems really have it in them. They can’t properly call the other party fascist even as that party openly exhibits neo-fascist and indeed (classic historical fascist values and agendas. Maybe I’m wrong. And I have no idea where the military is on this.

This is the first US election in my life where it seems like the military is part of the equation of how it shakes out between the two reigning parties. At least never to this degree. Wild times but perhaps not all that surprising. Underlying contradictions come to the fore and shit changes.

And, by the way, what the Dems call the ‘end of democracy’ is really the breaking of the outer shell of what Marxists rightly consider to be bourgeois democracy atop the underlying dictatorship of capital. That dictatorship will remain intact under a consolidated Amerikaner version of fascism in the US and is actively cancelling prospects for a decent human future through its environmental consequences regardless of which our two dominant parties gains or retains the White House.”

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