Before fascism can fully seize power in a nation, it must first be accepted by the people as a “patriotic” system of governance, representing the will of the majority of the nation. This is why fascists always scapegoat minorities first — delighting the privileged caste — before they acquire enough power to subjugate the entire nation itself.
Greenwald makes the connections: the mainsream corporate media, green-washing by billionairies with their yachts, the pro-state (instead of pro-truth) mainstream corporate meida, the climate crisis and the carbon footprint...and more
All these issues matter: gun control, gay and trans rights, women’s rights (above all to control our own bodies), racism, homelessness, poverty, labor/union rights, police brutality, hunger, health care…the list is long. Yet if we do not have a livable planet all these struggles will be moot.
We need to get all our leaders around the table and force them to say: “No more war!”. That would be the point where dialogue can start.
Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret.
"This week, people who encouraged and even attended the insurrection are now taking their places as leaders in the new House majority — people like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said insurrectionists would have won on January 6th if she had been involved, or Representative Matt Gaetz, who encouraged voters to arm themselves at the polls." Michael Fanone
I’m challenging the premises of the whole system, and I’m saying that, I quote Ralph Nader at some point, who said that the two parties are basically one long clown with two heads that look different. So I’m not saying there are no policy differences between the two major parties in the U.S., but fundamentally, they both serve the same system.
"I mean, the money wasted on these TV and social media ads is just staggering. Not only is it wasted, it’s the same ad, it’s dull, it’s repetitious, it’s not authentic, and it irritates people."
Institutions of learning at all levels in the red states are becoming laboratories for what I [Giroux] term the Nazification of American education, replicating pedagogies of repression that were at work in Germany in the 1930s.
"Fascists achieve power by creating parallel institutions – schools, universities, media platforms and paramilitary forces – and seizing the organs of internal security and the judiciary. They deform the law, including electoral law, to serve their ends. They are rarely in the majority."
"Whatever else is true, the claim with which we are bombarded by the corporate press — the two parties agree on nothing; they are constantly at each other's throats; they have radically different views of the world — is patently untrue, at least when it comes time for the U.S. to join in new wars. Typically, what we see in such situations is what we are seeing now: the establishment wings of both parties are in complete lockstep unity, always breathlessly supporting the new proposed U.S. role in any new war, eager to empty the coffers of the U.S. Treasury and transfer it to the weapons industry while their constituents suffer."
God save us from people who dream big, without the brains to match.
