I don’t think people in the United States are taking the warnings about Trump’s inherent fascist tendencies seriously enough. Why would you hand over power to someone you believe is a fascist? Democracy? They don’t have a democracy over there. They have a plutocracy. And that was true even before Elon Musk bought Trump the election.
Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author, political activist, and considered the world’s leading intellectual, stated in a 2013 interview that the United States is “no longer a functioning democracy, we’re really a plutocracy.” And that was several years before Trump won the White House!
- “The Psychopath Epidemic“, Cameron Reilly (2020)
I’m reading Michael Mann’s book “Fascists“. That’s Michael Mann the sociologist, not the director of HEAT. One of the defining characteristics of fascism in the twentieth century was their use of a paramilitary.
Since fascists did offer plausible solutions to modern social problems, they got mass electoral support and intense emotional commitment from militants. Of course, like most political activists, fascists were diverse and opportunistic.
Michael Mann – Fascists
So I’m keeping an eye on news stories about American militias, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Earlier this year, they seemed to be recruiting again, according to WIRED.
I’m amused that people who support Trump seem to be convinced that everyone who criticises him suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome“, when I think they are the ones who are obviously delusional (if not deranged). His supporters claim that people from his first administration that have since tried to warn everyone about his fascist tendencies have an axe to grind.
What axe did Mark Milley, the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have, apart from being disgusted with Trump?
After federal officers and police had used tear gas and other riot control tactics to disperse protestors, during the protests in Washington, D.C., following the murder of George Floyd, saying that he felt “sick” and was “fucking done with this shit” to Esper. Then after Jan 6, he became concerned Trump was preparing to stage a coup, said “this is a Reichstag moment”, and told his associates “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns”, referring to Trump’s false statements about electoral fraud as “the gospel of the Führer”. Milley called Trump a “fascist to the core”.
Mark Milley, WiKIPEDIA
John Kelly, former Chief of Staff, called Trump a “fascist” and criticized his authoritarian tendencies.
James Mattis, former Secretary of Defense, said Trump makes a “mockery of our constitution”.
John Bolton, former National Security Adviser, labeled Trump “unfit to be president”.
Some quotes from Bob Woodward, “Fear – Trump in the White House”:
Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser in the White House. Cohn and Porter worked together to derail what they believed were Trump’s most impulsive and dangerous orders. “It’s not what we did for the country, ” Cohn said privately. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”
The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.
A senior White House official who spoke contemporaneously with participants in the meeting recorded this summary: “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”
As Staff Secretary, Rob Porter briefed Trump on decision memos and other important presidential documents. In alliance with Gary Cohn, he attempted to block Trump’ s most dangerous economic and foreign policy impulses. Porter told an associate, “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.”
Let’s not forget the Trump / Epstein relationship:
Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier who was friends with Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew, committed suicide in prison under mysterious circumstances. Until 2019, he had managed to avoid much time in jail despite multiple charges of sex trafficking of underage girls going back to 2005 and even a guilty plea in 2008. U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta approved a lenient plea deal for Epstein regarding a case involving prostitution with a fourteen-year-old girl. A decade later, when Acosta was interviewing with Donald Trump’s transition team, he allegedly said he had been told to “back off” Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence.” Acosta went on to become Trump’s Labor Secretary — but resigned when the story about his 2008 deal with Epstein became public.
“The Psychopath Epidemic“, Cameron Reilly (2020)
CODING ADVENTURES
I impressed myself this week by writing a couple of Python scripts that will create custom news reports for me every day. I used Claude to write them. They will take a list of stocks, either from the weekly buy list that I generate for QAV, or from my portfolios, create RSS feeds for them in Google News Alerts, then download the news items in those feeds. Once it’s downloaded the latest news, it parses it through OpenAI’s API, which removes duplicate stories from different news outlets, then prioritises the news articles based on a list of criteria I’ve given it, ranking the stories from 10/10 (very high importance) to 1/10 (very low importance), then give me a report which I can post to QAV. Here’s an example from today. I wrote this because I’d missed a couple of important events for stocks in my portfolios in recent weeks. I hold over 100 stocks and it’s hard to trawl through all of the news every day.
The key here is that it took me a while to even conceive of the idea of writing a script to do all this for me. The “roll your own” mentality isn’t fully installed in my head yet. But I think within a few years we’ll all get used to having AI just build custom “apps” for us, although we probably won’t even think of them as apps, just “functions”. “Do this for me”. That’ll happen when AI Agents are integrated with our devices and our personal information.