Fascist Word Games and the Birth of an American Dictatorship
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The Pork Reich Makes Its Play
On Monday I watched the Swine Emperor attempt to crash America through the last barrier between a proto-fascist police state and an openly fascist dictatorship, and for the first time I’ve seen in over ten years of writing about fascism, everyone else who isn’t drunk on nazi juice noticed it too. When even Jon Stewart, a man who only months ago insisted it was inappropriate to call the Trump regime “fascist,” is comparing Der Leader to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, I think it’s fair to say folks still in denial have jumped the shark. At this point I’m honestly not sure how much more evidence fair minded people need to see before they understand the Trump regime’s farcical yet terrifying trafficking of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador had no basis in law or public safety, but was rather just a form of highly-effective fascist propaganda; a grand act of nazi theatre designed to inspire white nationalists, terrorize brown people, and shatter the legal checks on the Klepto Kaiser and his Christian Nationalist regime’s power. Let’s just step back and look at what’s gone on here for a moment, shall we?
First the regime declares a gang that nobody ever heard of, with fewer than a thousand members in the United States, a “terrorist organization” that’s working for the government of Venezuela. Their source? “Just trust me bro.” Then Trump says we were at war with that gang, Tren de Aragua, who he says are “invading” the United States, which is only possible because they already told you the gang was working with the government of Venezuela; except crucially, we are not at war with Venezuela. Given that we’re supposedly at war, you’d think there would a lot of evidence of said war right? Nope, it’s “just trust me bro” again. After that, Downmarket Mussolini invokes a law that’s over two hundred years old, that has only been used three times during the most catastrophic *real* wars in our history, and still led to some of the most shameful abuses of human rights the United States has ever committed, to say the administration can “deport” over two hundred people it swears are “gang members” without due process, which it then summarily proceeds to do while filming its blatantly illegal activities for propaganda purposes. While the planes are in the fucking air, a judge orders the government to turn them around, and the regime first pretends it doesn’t understand the order, then refuses to obey it while claiming that because the planes were out of US airspace, the court has no jurisdiction to order them to return to America. Who says you can “deport” someone without due process in direct violation of the Constitution? The regime. Who says these folks are “gang members?” The regime. Who says which gangs are “terrorist” organizations? The regime. Their evidence? You guessed it, “just trust me bro.”
Oh, I’m not even close to done yet. Soon after the flights landed, we discovered that these folks aren’t being deported, but rather trafficked for life to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador at a cost of six million dollars to the US government. You can quibble with my definitions if you like, but when you kidnap someone and ship them into permanent confinement, and money changes hands, that’s human trafficking by any definition I’m aware of. Furthermore, we also discover that most of the men the regime targeted have no criminal record, and don’t appear to be in a gang at all; their “crime” appears to be that they were suspiciously brown, foreign men, who had a tattoo of any kind. Would it matter either way? Not really, being in a gang isn’t illegal and even someone with a criminal conviction has a right to due process if they’re being “deported,” but it speaks to the general unreliability of “just trust me bro” when it comes to the Trump regime. For some reason, a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court would ultimately agree that the Klepto Kaiser has the legal authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in response to an invasion that doesn’t exist, but they disagreed with the Trump regime’s argument that this invalidates the need for due process. Nobody said anything about the legality of shipping innocent human beings into permanent confinement in a foreign concentration camp, however.
Okay so we’ve got a war that doesn’t exist, “gang members” that aren’t in a gang, and human trafficking. Surely that’s as crass as this fascist government will get right? Lol, of course not. While all of this is going on, the Trump administration flies US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noam, to El Salvador so she can pose in front of hundreds of caged prisoners in the slave labor prison, CECOT, while bragging about what a bang up job the Trump administration is doing to keep America safer, and apparently whiter. Eventually we find out that one of the men shipped to what amounts to a life sentence in a notorious torture prison, isn’t from Venezuela, had a court order not to be deported to El Salvador, and by the regime’s own admission was sent to CECOT by mistake. The regime’s response? It suspends the lawyer who admitted they made a mistake, smears the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as an MS13 gang leader based on a single accusation years ago that ICE refused to even defend in court, and denies the government has the ability to bring anyone back once they’ve shipped them to the prison in El Salvador. When the judge, James Boasberg, says that’s preposterous, the Trump regime immediately calls for his impeachment.
Now, I want to pause here for a moment to ask if you noticed the rhetorical slip and slide we’re riding on at this point in our story? Remember that fake war that supposedly justified and legalized all this fascist bullshit in the first place? Well Abrego Garcia isn’t Venezuelan, and even if he were in MS13, that gang is Salvadoran; plus while the regime has declared that MS13 is a terrorist organization, for “reasons,” it hasn’t declared that organization to be in league with Maduro or the government of Venezuela. So I guess that means we’re also being invaded by El Salvador? Our stanch ally who is kindly taking our money to house brown people we don’t like in a concentration camp infamous for torture; that El Salvador? So why exactly is any of this “legal” again; even based on the regime’s own lies and propaganda? Apparently, because noted fascist hate-goblin Stephen Miller, who is not a judge, says it is.
As you can imagine, the Garcia situation did not go over well with the federal judiciary; a judge, Paula Xinis, ordered the Trump administration to “effectuate” the man’s return to the United States and keep the court updated on their progress, the regime made an emergency appeal, and the Supreme Court (which is again, 6-3 fascist high) voted 9-0 to order the regime to “facilitate” the return of Garcia; the quotations around “effectuate” and “facilitate” will become important in a moment, so just bear with me. The regime responds by ignoring the update order, then declares that the return of Abrego Garcia is a matter of foreign policy, and that the president’s absolute control over foreign relations means that no court, not even SCOTUS, can tell Trump he has to bring the man, who again the regime has already admitted they trafficked to a foreign concentration camp by mistake, back to the United States. At this point, all hell breaks loose as even a passive American corporate media complex realized that Der Führer is arguing that he can legally disappear anyone he doesn’t like, in open court records.
A mere two days later, Trump holds a public White House meeting with Nayib Bukele, the fascist president of El Salvador and the man he’s paying six million US dollars for the privilege of disappearing over two-hundred brown people the regime has demonized and lied about to accomplish that goal, and only that goal. Within moments it becomes clear that this meeting itself is also fascist propaganda theatre, as Trump, Bukele, and multiple influential members of the regime’s cabinet play a weird game of Simon Says, while very publicly indicating they intend to ignore the court orders to return Garcia. Trump says it’s Bukele’s decision. Bukele says he has no legal authority to “smuggle a terrorist” into the United States. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio re-asserts the regime’s nonsensical argument that Trump paying a fascist dictator to imprison migrants “deported” from American soil is somehow a pure foreign policy decision that no court in America has jurisdiction over. US Attorney General Pam Bondi repeats the lie that Garcia was a member of MS13 despite the fact that the US government has never proven that in a court of law. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller then encourages journalists to just get over all this fascist bullshit already because the government could still deport Garcia if he was returned. Finally, and this is where the difference between “effectuate” and “facilitate” comes into play, both Miller and Bondi also pretend that actually, the Trump regime won the Garcia ruling in front of SCOTUS, and that all they’re required to do is remove domestic barriers to his return, and maybe provide a plane to pick him up; if and only if El Salvador wants to release him.
As if to put the final nazi cherry on top of this shit-cake, during this meeting both Trump and Bukele openly talk about the US regime’s plans to traffic “home grown” American “criminals” to forever prisons in El Salvador; prisons that, might I remind you, the administration just said they have no power to return people from. So, yes, that’s the President of the United States arguing on live television that he can straight up disappear anyone he likes. Naturally Trump assured us that he’d only send the worst “criminals,” but given that this administration lied about trafficked prisoners being gang members, keeps calling protestors in America “domestic terrorists” (which unlocks all kinds of War on Terror era dictatorial powers for the regime), and just deported a bunch of foreign students legally residing in the United States for petty offenses like speeding tickets, I don’t know why anyone with half a brain would believe him. Just in case you were wondering, absolutely none of this is legal: you cannot deport American citizens, and yet Trump and the regime are asserting the power to do just that. Will the courts stop them? Perhaps the better question here is, can they? After all, the courts ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and yet here we are.
Did you catch all of that? I totally understand if you didn’t because this entire saga has been a sort of Russian nesting doll of fascist lies, fuckery, and games of Simon Says, so don’t feel bad if you have to read this essay a couple of times to truly grasp the scope of enforced fascist “unreality” we’re now living in. Step by step the Christian Nationalist Trump regime has followed a playbook that transforms fascist propaganda into administrative reality, while purposely fracturing the rule of law to liberate itself from judicial oversight. If the United States was a Middle Eastern oil-producing nation full of Muslims, our government would be openly advocating for an invasion to “liberate” the American people and stop “tyranny.” Of course, maybe none of that matters anyway because unless someone stops him, there will be no law in this country except Trump’s word, and no America to save, except what Trump wills America to be. And if that comes to pass, will Americans finally realize that as a society we have sown the seeds of our own destruction? How did we get here in the first place? Well, to answer that question you have to go right back to where we started; the imperial presidency’s absolute authority to “defend” America from foreign adversaries, and the fascist apparatus installed to “keep us safe” during the War on Terror. After all this time, the twin chickens of our modern American exceptionalism, imperialism and anti-terrorism, have come home to roost in the form of our very own fascist dictatorship in progress.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes I guess.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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