by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
It’s sad, but true: fascism has come to the United States. It’s a particularly insidious, creeping version of it, but it’s here nonetheless. And there is no respite to be seen in the foreseeable future. This is it, folks, and it’s only going to get worse — far worse.
There’s just no scenario I can think of where this doesn’t get a lot worse before it gets better. Trump is a master at media manipulation and because of Constitutional rot, its pretty clear that at best we can expect a draw in the 2018 Congressional mid-terms and there’s just not going to be what we hope anytime soon: some sort of end to all of this.
This is a marathon, not a sprint, in other words.
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What I mean by that is we have to triage the different urgent problems the Trump Administration has concocted. Right now, I would suggest the fate of the roughly 2,000 immigrant children taken from their families is of utmost importance. But that’s simply because of the young lives at stake. There are so many other horrible things taking place, that we need to focus on. We need to accept that the American Republic is in grave danger that that Magaism is to blame.
It goes without saying that Magaism, which I’ve begun to equate with Nazism, is misogyny, racism and bigotry. But let’s address, for the moment, the parts that are directly connected to the “Prosecution Imitative” that lead to the forcible separation of undocumented children from their families.
I speak, of course, of the racism and bigotry. The reason why this is so significant is it’s the only way to explain why Magaists are so ardent in their determination to essentially discredit the very idea that removing children from their parents at the border is an issue at all.
The frightening thing about all of this is Magaist honestly are so wrapped up in “securing the border” or the fact that the imagine of the child on the cover of Time Magazine wasn’t exactly what it purported to be that they can’t take time to feel any basic human empathy or compassion for the children involved.
It’s a chilling thing all around. If that doesn’t evoke some mental connection to Nazi Germany, I don’t honestly know what will. I find it difficult to wrap my mind around the thought processes of someone who hears the cries for help of young children on the border and isn’t moved. That they rhetorically bob and weave, and would rather quibble about the broader border problem or this or that thing Obama may have done in the past.
How we got to this point is rather curious. That on an ideological level Magaists and their collaborators would simply see brown people coming across the border as an issue of “securing borders” as opposed to something you would try to find as compassionate a way as possible to solve is a real perplexing issue for me on the face of it.
Throw into the mix systemic Constitutional rot caused by perfect storm of economics, politics, demographics and general fucked-up-ed-ness and it’s clear all of this could have been predicted. And, as I understand it, it was by at least one sociologist. Trump and Maga was inevitable, it’s just we’re stuck with the specific quirks of Trump’s own-the-moment style. Trump doesn’t have any ideology to speak of, which leads me to worry that it won’t be Trump that’s our final jump into the boiling waters of American fascism, but his immediate successor.
Trump is just to unfocused and incompetent, I feel, to get the job done. But someone smarter and younger but equally charismatic, could definitely get the job done. Really, the only thing stopping this nightmare scenario from happening is whatever American spirit that might exist that makes my nation unique among those of the world. I used to believe in American exceptionalism, but that faith is being sorely tested.
I would like to believe that the darkest timeline won’t be fully realized and we’ll finally pull out of our decent into actual fascism, but I’m not so sure anymore. There’s a good chance this time the bad guys really will win and there’s not much we can do about it.
We might scream at the top of our lungs every chance we get, but because of reverse polarization, the case could be made that that only helps the opposition. All of this is difficult for me to process without getting really, really angry. But anyway, all I can say at this point is, like, keep the faith or something.
We’ll need it.
