My senior year at Emory, I added a second major. I had taken more than the required sociology classes, so I decided to double major in political science. I wanted to better understand the history of fascism, but also the geopolitical events of the day. So I signed up for Professor Juan del Aguila’s Latin American Politics class and Professor Thomas Remington’s Soviet Foreign Policy class (where President Carter was a regular guest lecturer). I also enrolled in a semester-long course called The Philosophy of Marxism, taught by a wonderful Catholic priest named Professor Thomas Flynn. I tried to integrate all this with my sociology background into my senior honors thesis, a Marxist analysis of the Irish conflict.
Emory in the 1980s was a vibrant place. Between classes, frequent protests over apartheid, CIA recruitment, and whatever Ronald Reagan was doing that week, and keeping up with the abundance of live music, there was a small fracture on campus. As a kid from a Georgia Klan town, Emory opened me up to a multiplicity of progressive approaches to politics, culture, and sexuality. But there was dissent in the liberal utopia. A conservative group called Students for America, founded by Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, began showing up in classrooms. Their goal was to out “liberal” college professors. They weren’t very effective. As it turns out, the truth is liberal.
But forty years ago, I already knew what this was. Having studied the rise of Hitler, I knew that college campuses were the first targets of the Third Reich. In April 1933, the Nazis passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It effectively forced universities to fire faculty who were leftist, Jewish, and/or anti-fascist. Among those let go was Albert Einstein. After that, students in the Hitler Youth and the National Socialist German Students’ League would report professors who made “un-German” statements or who were critical of the Reich. The students forced the firing of more faculty, often threatening them with violence. A climate of fear overtook German universities as Nazis purged them of any hint of “leftist indoctrination.” Many professors fled Germany, and others ended up in concentration camps.
At Emory in 1985, we joked that the Students for America were the Reagan Youth, following history’s fascist playbook. Little did we know what was to come.
The far right has long waged a war on higher education funding. Fascists need a docile, uneducated populace, not cohorts of college grads who have read Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon. Professors were in the crosshairs of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare in the 1950s. More recently, laws and executive orders have been passed to restrict university funding and curriculum around LGBTQ and race issues. In 2021, when I was teaching my Race and Ethnicity class at the University of Oregon, I announced on the first day, “This class is based on Critical Race Theory. Tell me if you have a problem with that.” Fortunately, Oregon still protects academic freedom, but I was told I would be watched by conservative students. It was clear that universities were nervous about pressure from the right. (That same year, Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, was denied tenure at UNC–Chapel Hill because of pressure from conservative donors.)
Things began to shift after the election of Trump last November. Right-wing social media influencers began to encourage conservative students to out liberal professors and try to get them fired, as the Hitler Youth had done 90 years earlier. Far-right group Turning Point USA published their online “Professor Watchlist” (which includes some of my favorite academics, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Robin Kelley). It should be noted that the front-page of their website features a “professor” who appears to be Jewish. Right-wing pundits and online influencers attacked history professor Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, and tried to have him removed from his position at Boston University. Hopefully academic unions are tracking complaints from conservative students. I’m guessing they have spiked.
When I was a tenured full professor at Portland State University, I felt ten feet tall and bulletproof. But this is a new era, and I am in a new position. As I focus on my consulting work, I’ve had the great privilege to adjunct at our local community college, and I’ve had a front-row seat for the shift. I have great respect for all my students, no matter their political leanings. Sociology classes are kind of group therapy. We’re all working it out in real time. But some of the young white men—the demographic that broke for Trump—have been given permission by our anti-education president to disrupt that sacred space. They are more likely to push back against discussions of patriarchy and white supremacy. It pops up in class, in course evaluations, and in online reviews, often as snide comments. Since I was in their exact shoes all those years ago (as a conservative white teenager), I desperately want to reach them. But I’m also deathly afraid of them. I’ve studied the history and know what they can do.
Fortunately, I’ve got a union and an administration that defends faculty freedom. But it feels like a dark cloud is coming to campuses across the country. And we have been here before. Buckle up.
From The Blazak Report on Substack, August 21, 2025.
August 21, 2025
Usually my time machine fantasies involve things like going back to 1965 to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium, or to 1415 to see if the Battle of Agincourt was anything like Shakespeare and all those movies depicted. These days I’m trying to leap ahead 100 years to see how 2025 turned out. Will 2125 be a new feudal era, another Dark Ages, where elite technocrats hold the all wealth and power and the rest of us are just miserable renters? Or will we have chopped the heads off the authoritarians and preserved democracy for another century?
There’s no guarantee that the United States lasts another five years, let alone a hundred. I’ve seen plenty of nations come and go in my life and Trump and his handlers are dismantling democracy so fast, I don’t have much faith that we will have free and fair elections in 2026. If Texas is any indicator, Trump and the GOP (now Guardians of Pedophiles) are setting up the apparatus of permanent rule.
But there’s a “but” there that I will get to in a minute.
There’s a lot of hand wringing at the moment around these three questions:
Are we in a dictatorship? It certainly feels like it. Trump is busy destroying the checks and balances of our constitutional democracy, there are troops on the street, and he is attempting an Orwellian rewrite of American history. But there are almost 900 federal judges who can gum up Trump’s plans and over 3 million federal workers who can throw in plenty of monkey wrenches. While the mainstream media has capitulated as much as congressional Republicans, the internet is still wide open and the journalists of social media are doing the hard work of covering fascism in real time.
Are we in a civil war? Not yet. If the National Guard starts firing on civilians, probably. But polls show the vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump and his tactics, including the Gestapo-like sweeps of immigrants. We are not “brother vs. brother” in the 1861 sense. Yet. There’s a former Marine and current ICE protestor who told me that we shouldn’t “look right or left, but up.” He talks to conservatives (and ICE agents when they detain him) about joining this fight. More and more people are leaving MAGA as they figure out that Trump is only serving his billionaire oligarchs.
Is it time for revolution? This is a tough one. The people of 2125 may ask why Americans in 2025 didn’t stop the authoritarian takeover when they had the chance. (We love to ask the same question of 1933 Germany.) We know the heavy hand of the state is already upon us. Just look at how the entire Department of Justice was mobilized to mete out swift justice to the lawyer who threw a Subway sandwich at a federal agent. People throwing rocks at ICE vehicles are being quickly arrested. And the NRA is strangely silent.
I want to believe this can be resolved with a massive nonviolent uprising, but there may be a growing voice that advocates for offing the king and his corrupt court. The nightly battles at the Portland ICE building seem like rehearsals for storming the Bastille.
So here’s the “but.” We don’t have the advantage of 2125’s perspective. If there’s one thing I learned from Joe Strummer it’s that the future is unwritten. A whole bunch of things could happen. Donald Trump and JD Vance/Peter Thiel could drop dead (please, sweet Jesus, do us this solid), and America could wake up to the great harm done. The GOP could decide to take back its soul (led by the ghost of John McCain). The Democratic Party could get it’s shit together, focus on tariff-inducing inflation, health care, and making sure our elections are fair, and we, as a democratic nation, could burst Trump’s narcissistic bubble.
So, yes, it’s time for revolution, but it doesn’t have to be a violent one. Once MAGA feels the hit of the “big beautiful bill,” the ranks of the resistance will swell. It’s already happening. The protests at the Heritage Foundation, the Epstein scandal, the closing of rural hospitals, direct actions confronting returning members of Congress, and the fact that Sesame Street has been foreclosed on by Donald Grump will bring in Americans ready to fight and shut the machine down. This is just the beginning of our resistance.
There’s still more of us than them.
“The people have the power to redeem the work of fools.” – Patti Smith
NOTE: This piece was originally provided to paid subscribers to The Blazak Report on Substack.
August 11, 2025
Unpacking the impact of traumatic events on our brains is an adolescent science. We’re just beginning to understand the ways acute and chronic trauma affects how the parts of the brain work. Much of what we do know is because of the courageous sharing of war veterans. This journey of understanding is detailed in the highly readable book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by V.A. doctor Bessel van der Kolk. But the short version is that trauma can freeze the brain in the fight/flight/freeze mode. Our amygdala hijacks our prefrontal cortex and we are forever on the battlefield.
Fortunately, we’ve also learned that people can heal their deepest traumas. Once PTSD officially became a diagnosis in 1980, treatment plans followed. But the hard truth remains that it is next to impossible for trauma to heal when there are new attacks coming in. An open wound will never heal when it is constantly being picked at. And that brings us to the trauma of Trump.
So much of our nation’s history has been a piss-poor attempt to heal the scars of the past. The Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020 was a desperate plea to heal the racial wounding by American police. We clearly diagnosed the problem and began implementing treatment in the form of meaningful reforms and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion as American values. And then in 2025, it went all off the rails.
Donald Trump is the abusive husband, standing at the door, threatening his immigrant wife with violence if she leaves. Or if she stays.
There are so many groups who are suffering residual trauma from Trump 2.0.
First women. Trump’s Supreme Court rolled back women’s reproductive rights in his first term. While out of office he had to face a jury of his peers for one of his many sexual assaults and America still elected the “Grab ‘em by the pussy” rapist. His war on women has only ramped up in his second term, shored up by a cast of misogynists, like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who belongs to a church that thinks women should not have the right to vote. The gang of Epstein pedophiles roams free, protected by the GOP. How can girls and women feel safe knowing the federal government has been taken over by incels?
Next immigrants. So much for the pledge for Trump just going after the “worst of the worst.” Children with cancer, nursing mothers, and any brown person within ICE’s reach has been grabbed by masked goons and sent to disgusting internment camps or Central American gulags. Legal residents, asylum seekers, dreamers, veterans, and, yes, citizens have been caught up in ICE’s “one-shade-of-not-white fits all” mass deportation plan, as Stephen Miller screams for more. The anxiety of my students, some DACA, some from mixed-status families, some just Hispanic, is palpable. Many immigrants are refugees from violent police states like El Salvador and Syria, carrying massive trauma loads of their own, hoping to find peace and safety in the United States. And now masked men with guns are smashing their car windows and ripping them away from their families.
Veterans are also on this list. We got the memo after the Vietnam War that we need to take better care of our veterans, recognizing the scars of service run deep and long. What was derided as “shell shock,” is now viewed as the very real journey of living with PTSD. Tom Cruise movies aside, we had a national call for healing in a rare example of bipartisanship. Right or left, we all agree that we need to do everything possible to support our veterans. Since January, the cuts by Pvt. Bonespurs and his fellow civilian Elon Musk have devastated struggling vets. They include $30 billion from disability benefits and $1.6 trillion in health care cuts for vets over the next ten years. Most recently, Trump is denying early retirement for transgender members of the Air Force. Why? Because he can. It should be noted that not a single member of the Trump family has served in the military. Not one. He has referred to them as “suckers and losers.” Their wound has been ripped back open by a rich brat from Queens.
We could go on and on. Trans people because of his childish “there are only two genders” executive orders. Native Americans because of his war on tribal sovereignty. Protestors because MAGA officials have promised to use lethal force against them and “put them in trauma.” And all queer people and people of color because of his undoing of decades of progress by ending federally funded DEI programs. And there are so many more. I have a Latina green card holder in my life and she recently told me that she “low grade hates white people” because they are completely oblivious to the stress she must endure every waking hour living in Trump’s America. I totally get it. I mean, wouldn’t you?
Trump and his MAGA masters are driving America into a new Dark Ages. The last Dark Ages was centuries of the most brutal torture. More than princes and princesses, it was random drawing and quartering. The amount of new trauma that’s coming our way while Trump and his goons golf on New Epstein Island may not be survivable. And that’s their goal, because the traumatized are less likely to fight back.
My parents met in a bowling alley. A lot of my generational peers’ parents met in bowling alleys. Those days are long gone. As sociologist Robert Putnam detailed in his 2000 classic, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, nobody joins clubs anymore and our happiness has suffered for it. We are a nation of miserable loners. No wonder people identify with Trump.
A land of 340 million people staring at their phones does not make for a vibrant democracy. COVID was the nail in the coffin of civic engagement. We were locked down with Netflix and we liked it. Why build community when you can binge Love Island? Why prioritize democracy when you can doom scroll. And now you can share your alienation with your AI girlfriend.
All this loneliness is catnip to fascism. Where we got endorphins from meeting people at parties and pubs, we now get it from likes and algorithms. Fascism will walk in while we’re on TikTok, and be just another 60 second reel.
Let’s hope for a countertrend. And the countertrend is actually pretty cool.
As a college student, I probably over-romanticized the mythology of revolutions and protests being born in cafés and coffeehouses, but there is some truth to those stories. Rejecting British tea, the political discussions in the American colonies moved to coffeehouses. The Green Dragon tavern and coffeehouse, built in 1701 in Boston, became known as the “headquarters of the revolution” after Paul Revere bought it 1764 to give the Sons of Liberty a meeting place.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his 1989 book, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, refers to places like the The Green Dragon as “third spaces.” First place is home and second place is work. Third spaces are the community gathering spots where we have regular interactions with our neighbors. They include bars and barbershops, cafés and churches, local stores and hair salons. Anyplace people hang out. In the new 2025 edition, Oldenburg’s coauthor Karen Christensen argues that third places are the answer to political polarization and climate resilience. It’s like that Sesame Street song, who are the people in your neighborhood?
Third places are vital to democracy to several reasons. Putnam argues these places create social capital among community members, building trust which is key to democratic action. Taverns and barbershops encourage free expression and the exchange of ideas. Many a night in my youth I argued theory at cafés until the chairs were on the tables. Third places become places for building social movements. Yeah, Hitler did it in beer halls, but we can hijack Starbucks to fight fascism. Third places are a cure for isolation as we reconnect with fellow travelers. Finally, democracy requires a sense of shared ownership and salons and local shops can help people to care about public life and bond over shared struggles.
In the 1990s, I had a third place I virtually lived in in Atlanta called Café Diem. To say I held court there would be an understatement. But the realization that inhabiting that space and getting to know owners, employees, and regulars was more rewarding than sitting on a couch in front of a TV made it an easy lifestyle choice. Much bohemian joy came from what we lovingly referred to as “Diemland.” Social media has zapped that impulse in the 21st century. We’re zombies.
But the counter-trend is bubbling off screen. Two years ago a group of dads at my daughter’s elementary school started a poker club and it’s become medicine for my soul. Every other Thursday, cards, whiskey, and good conversation. People are re-discovering their local coffeehouses, not as alternative offices, but place just to talk and share the emotions of this insane moment. Churches, mosques, and temples aren’t just for religion anymore. I actually went to a great local church, called Riversgate, to hear people talk about political civility! It was awesome!
So let’s get out of our first place and find a third place. You don’t have to dive in like a crazy person. “Hi everyone! What the fuck are we gonna do about this fucking fascism?” Ease in like you’re a new kid at school. Third places are relaxed. Belly up to the bar and check the vibe. You might talk about a ball game or the history of the establishment long before you bridge political chat. Maybe you’ll just hang out reading a book until somebody asks you what you’re reading. But that’s your place and those are your people. It’s time to get to know them. Democracy might depend on it.
The American Revolution started in a coffee house. And it will again.
A hundred bucks says Donald Trump has never read the U.S. Constitution. Or The Bible. Or a book. His latest blather about running for a third term is either an overt telegraphing that he’s going to pull a Putin and declare himself “President for Life” or it’s another distraction from that fact that he and Musk are crashing the system so they can scoop up the pieces.
Either way, America is screwed.
I’ve written ad nauseam about the elements of the Trump movement that map directly on to the rise of fascism, starting back in 2015. The parallels this time around are even more stark, including hollowing out America’s system of checks and balances (starting with firing inspector generals), alienating our long term allies (Blame Canada?), flaunting the rule of law, especially due process, and the vision of expanding empire. Leave Greenland alone.
In 70 insane days, Trump has transformed the United States from a democracy to an anocracy. Anocracies are hybrids of democracy and authoritarianism. Russia has elections, but they are Putin-controlled cosplay. Trump is playing by Putin’s playbook, step by step, where a democracy is transformed into a dictatorship, with the support of the loyal oligarchs. And when your favorite oligarch is the richest man on the planet it’s that much easier.
The damage Elon Musk is doing to America may be irreparable. The 2400 Americans that Musk fired from the CDC today will have ripple effects across the world, but especially in communities that voted for Trump who require federal support in disease prevention. But, hey, MAGA got to own those liberal scientists! America is unravelling. Our safety net is being shredded. Social security is next. Our national security is already splayed open on the Signal app. The nation collapsing. And it’s not in slow motion.
Trump, his drunk frat boy sycophants, and the crafty billionaires that cleverly steer the President of the United States have a plan, to remake America into Russia, a feudal state where the landed gentry collect the wealth and the rest of us pay the interest on our debt to them. Trump going after DEI, civil rights protections, and vote by mail is all part of the race to autocracy. All that was great about 20th Century America is being erased before our eyes.
But in a moment straight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we’re not dead yet. We still have time to jump off the corpse wagon.
The natives are restless. Protests are growing all over the country, including in red states. Americans are waking up to the threat. Sociologist C. Wright Mills called it the sociological imagination. When you are aware of your values and those values are under threat, the crisis moves you to develop a wider analysis. If you value American democracy, this is a fucking crisis. And the irony is that it will be disaffected Republicans who tip this thing into a national surge against Trumpism. Yeah, Idiocracy requires idiots and there will always be MAGA cultists who will follow their orange god off a cliff, but we can do this without them. We need Reagan Republicans and the ghost of John McCain. (Eighties Me can’t believed I just typed that, but this is an emergency!)
This is go time, America. It’s time for old baby boomers and young Gen Alphas to make noise, monkey wrench, flood the courts, take to the streets, sit in, stand up, and stop this madness. Or there will be a point when we can no longer claim to be free.
Many of us watched the February 28th White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is abject horror. One of our most heralded allies was being attacked by Trump and Vance like a child being berated for breaking a window with a baseball. Then it became clear that it was the set up. An ambush for Trump’s Russian bosses. Vance badgering him to apologize. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend chiding him about not wearing a suit (when few of Trump’s White House chums have). I wanted Zelenskyy to just say to Trump, “Mr. President, are you aligned with America’s ally, Ukraine, or Putin?”
We know what Trump would have said – “I’m not aligned with anybody.”
In that moment, it was clear that America was no longer the leader of the free world. That our allies could no longer rely on us and that we weren’t going to lift a finger to defend democracy. In that moment, Trump gave Putin the green light to obliterate Ukraine. At the United Nations, we voted with Russia (and North Korea) against the condemnation of Russia’s 2022 invasion. The following actions backed that position up, including halting support of military aid to Ukraine, ceasing cyber operations against Russia, mass firings at the CIA and FBI, and Trump asking to end U.S. sanctions against Russia. What more could Vladimir Putin ask for? (I’m sure we’ll find out.)
Trump’s capitulation to Russia and the falling in line of the MAGA cult rings familiar. In the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, there were Americans, including in Congress, that thought the United States sending billions of dollars to our European allies to fight Nazi Germany was a big ol’ waste. Those nations weren’t sufficiently “grateful.” This included after Germany began their brutal blitzkrieg of Great Britain in 1940. They wanted England to at least give us some of their islands in the Caribbean for helping them. But FDR said, F that. We’re all in for freedom.
What launched the American century began in the first global conflict. During the “war to end all wars” (aka WW I), isolationist voices had the day, until it was clear that Britain and France REALLY need our help (and a ton of American merchant ships were being sunk by U-boats). On April 6, 1917, we declared war on Germany and shut that shit down. By November of the following year, the war was over. And the United States was the new hot shot defender of freedom, our perfect hair blowing in the wind. Ever since that moment in 1918, lovers of freedom and democracy knew we were their ride or die. Sure there were some ethical lapses, Central America, Vietnam, but for the most part we were the good guys on the planet.
That ended last Friday. The global realignment, long envisioned my MAGA architects, has jettisoned its long held alliance with Europe, viewed as decadent by Steve Bannon and white nationalists, in favor of an allegiance to authoritarian regimes like Russia. France is “socialist” and Moscow has clean subways. Sure, political dissidents are thrown into Siberian prisons, but Moscow has clean subways. We are now a part of the axis of evil and Trump and his handlers could not be happier.
I often tell the story of the time I was at a meeting at the U.S. embassy in London in 2018. I was there as a part of a government-funded trip to study how the British respond to violent extremism. We just happened to be at the embassy the day President Trump was attending a summit in Helsinki, Finland with the Russian leader. We all watched the press conference where Trump famously said that he trusted Putin’s assertion that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 election, over the evidence presented by his own intelligence agencies. The shock among the career diplomats I was watching with was palpable. They immediately scrambled to craft a response to the fact that the U.S. President and had just publicly chosen loyalty to the biggest dictator on the planet over his own nation.
We don’t know if Putin has some serious kompromat on Trump (perhaps the pee pee tapes are in a vault in the Kremlin) or Trump just really wants to be an authoritarian (or both), but Trump’s mandate is clear. He’s out for himself. He’s never read the Constitution, or The Bible for that matter. I’d lay odds he’s never read a complete book. He’s the transactional president. If it serves him and the sycophants that kiss his ass, he will throw Americans and their security under the bus. He will wage war on our allies, like Canada and Mexico, and sing the praises of dictators like Turkey’s Erdoğan and Hungary’s Orbán. Whatever fluffs his fragile ego.
Trump is murdering America.
So, sorry Ukraine, and other nations fighting to be free and democratic, we now have our own fight to win.
These first two weeks have been dizzying. Trump and his billionaire bros have attacked multiple aspects of our democracy. They have ripped the guardrails off while Democrats have stood there, dazed and confused. The flurry of bias-motivated executive actions, appointments of merit-less droogs hell-bent on dismantling the imagined “deep state,” inflation driving tariffs, saber-rattling at our allies, and the pardoning of violent criminals who, in 2021, tried stop democracy in its tracks. It’s all too much.
The chaos of Trump, ripped from the pages of Project 2025, is the intent. In a normal world, each action would occupy a few weeks in the news cycle, but there’s a dozen actions a day. The chaos is the point. The opposition is playing Wack-a-Mole to each insane impulse from the orange madmen who is declaring war on our allies with one hand and canceling Black History Month celebrations with other. He’s throwing countless federal employees into economic crisis (as well as those, like me, who are employed by federal grants), while blaming the airline crashes on Obama and dwarves. It’s like being punched in the face over and over again with no chance to land a counterpunch.
Trump didn’t invent this strategy. Bush used it to destroy Iraq in 2003. Twenty-two years ago, they called it “Shock and Awe.” Use the military might of the United States to overwhelm Iraq and out of the chaos, create a machine that would profit post-war contractors. Just Google: Halliburton, Iraq, and Profit. This “shock doctrine” (as Naomi Klein called in her 2007 book) has a history of effectiveness. The disaster capitalism employed in nations like Chile was utilized to generate billions in profits for war contractors in Iraq. This week, as witnessed by the plunging of markets after Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, Trump has brought disaster capitalism to the homeland and he and his billionaire bros stand to take home all the money.
The shock doctrine relies on chaos to shake up markets and political organization. Not only is the opposition stuck on the back foot trying to respond to each affront, economic destabilization paralyzes the working class who is more worried about inflation and holding on to their jobs than developing a strategy to fight back. Meanwhile, oligarchs are positioned to swoop in and calmly reassemble the pieces in a way that permanently protects their power and profit. This happened in Russia in the 1990s and it’s happening here now. It’s like that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when there’s a run on the banks and George Bailey tries to calm the panic, saying, “Don’t you see what’s happening? Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicky and he’s not.”
Trump, unregistered foreign agent Elon Musk, and their army of gangster capitalists are crashing the economy on purpose. Shipping migrant labor across the border, ludicrous tariffs, rampant deregulation, and appointing insanely unqualified loyalists are all meant to tank financial stability. Trump no longer needs his MAGA troops who were told he would lower the price of groceries on “Day 1.” They served their purpose of installing him back in the White House. They will suffer at the checkout line along with the rest of us. But at least they got to “own the libs.” Musk, now with the keys to the U.S. Treasury, can let the air out of America’s tires and jack up his global banking portfolio and Trump’s voters will have no idea what happened.
Like Mr. Potter, Trump’s billionaire bros will come in to “manage” the economic crisis. The German National Socialist Party did this when the Great Depression hit Germany. They consolidated power with the promise of affordable eggs. And now, when we look for the storied institutions of democracy to prevent an authoritarian takeover in the United States, including a free press, an independent judiciary, and a non-partisan Department of Justice, we will find they have been hollowed out during MAGA’s war of the “deep state.” Trump’s vow to purge the FBI of agents and analysts who investigated January 6th should be all the warning Americans need.
It’s easy to draw on the rise of Hitler as a historical parallel. And even though Melania has claimed that Trump kept Mein Kampf on his nightstand, Donald probably isn’t going back 90 years for a playbook. The rise of Putin and the rule of Russian oligarchs provide the formula. Just read Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book, Winter is Coming. Putin used economic calamity and the fear of Chechen terrorists to dismantle Russian democracy, making him President for Life. Dissidents get poisoned or sent to a Siberian gulag. Trump using the federal government to go after his political enemies is a page out of his comrade’s manifesto.
So what do we do?
We’ve have three weeks of the worst assault on American democracy in our lifetime. We’re all in shock that it’s really this bad. And it’s going to get worse. We can’t depend on Chuck Schumer and the corporate toadies of the Democratic Party save us. Many of them are in line to profit from the consolidation of power by the billionaire class. The Democrats who stand against them need to make themselves known now (or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said). But this is about us first. Us who are battered and defeated by the task at hand. Do we retreat into Netflix binges, or is there a path forward?
This is great opportunity to remember the practices of mindfulness. We’re all in reaction mode right now. Personally, I’ve had to resist the desire to punch someone, especially fellow working class people who think DEI is their enemy while their egg prices skyrocket. This is time to stop. Take a pause and breathe. Then we can start planning. There’s a great device popular in AA circles called “HALT.” Does this situation make me “Hungry Angry Lonely or Tired”? If so, just stop and take stock. So slowing the freakout roll is key.
Swiss sociologist Jennifer Walter offers a simple strategy to re-enage with solutions. First, focus on a few key issues you care about instead of being overwhelmed by the tsunami of fires that need to be put out (to mix metaphors). Second, find trusted sources of information who can do the work of providing needed facts and analysis. Third, if their goal is to overwhelm you, take mental health breaks. Meditation is a favorite “self gift” of mine. Next, Walter suggests taking 48 hours to respond to a news story to let your emotions subside and sort out what’s important. And lastly, build community to share the load. My faculty union president sent out an email last week, entitled, “What to Do in a Burning House,” asking faculty not disengage but step forward. I immediately joined a union committee.
Progressives, real patriots, and those who just care about the price of heat this winter, have been knocked to their knees by the Trump/Musk war on the buttresses of American democracy. But it’s time to stand back up. A lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by lawyers who still have access to the courts to stop Trump’s actions, many of which are illegal and/or unconstitutional. The rest of us who are not the uber rich have a role, whether it’s monkey-wrenching the shock doctrine or building a viable alternative to Trump’s fear-fueled vision of America. Take a breath. We will do this.
As a student of the history of fascism and a teacher of that history, I’m well aware of the echoes of the past. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the first targets of the Third Reich were not Jewish shop owners, but college professors. Germany’s universities were purged of faculty that were Jewish or branded to be communist, socialist, or liberal. Albert Einstein, among other intellectuals, wisely fled his home country. The main work of the Nazi purge was not done by the SS, but by fascist students who were part of the Hitler Youth movement.
One the reasons Einstein and others, including the brilliant social theorists of the Frankfurt School, came to America is because of our value of academic freedom. Academic freedom creates a space for faculty and students to have the right to the free exchange of ideas. One core tenet states, “Academic freedom gives both students and faculty the right to express their views — in speech, writing, and through electronic communication, both on and off campus — without fear of sanction, unless the manner of expression substantially impairs the rights of others or, in the case of faculty members, those views demonstrate that they are professionally ignorant, incompetent, or dishonest with regard to their discipline or fields of expertise.” (Source: Inside Higher Ed)
I highlight this passage because it is clear that Donald Trump plans to go after universities in his second term, which is also laid out in Project 2025, authored by his former and current advisors. Trump has derided universities as engaging in “radical left indoctrination” and promised using federal levers to turn higher ed into centers of ideological loyalism. This includes making it harder for non-wealthy students to attend college, deporting student protestors, and firing accreditors. American universities are encouraging international students to return before Trump reinstates his Muslim travel ban and other draconian travel restrictions. His vow to reclaim universities from the “radical left” is a page torn from 1933.
Trump is not even sworn in and academics are already feeling the pressure as emboldened MAGA students try to out their liberal professors at colleges and on social media. I remember the last version of this in the 1980s when the group, Students for America, tried to publicly ostracize professors they deemed to be leftists. It was chilling. This time those students will have POTUS and the repurposed Department of Education on their side. Teachers and professors, especially those who are un-tenured, may censor their lessons out of fear of being dragged before institutional review boards or disciplinary hearings for making MAGA students feel uncomfortable.
My job as an educator is to make students feel uncomfortable so I am not looking forward to the Trump Reich. As a sociologist, my entire pedagogy is based on C. Wright Mills concept of the sociological imagination, popularized in his 1959 book of the same name. Mills, writing at a peak moment in the Cold War, wanted Americans to be focused, not just on their (micro) personal lives, but the larger (macro) social structures that affect their personal lives. Mills argued that that happens with two conditions. First people have to be aware of their values and second is some sort of threat to those values. Mills argued that the threat puts people in a “crisis” where they begin to see things in a more sociological way.
I’m here to present the threat.
Don’t get me wrong. College classes are intended to be safe spaces, free from harassment. The threat is presented as challenges based on the Mills model. For example if your values say that women should have autonomy over their bodies, I will present how that right is threatened by politicians (including Trump) who have actively limited access to legal abortion procedures. That news should put you in a state of crisis, where you start thinking about social systems that allowed this to happen.
In my classes, we talk about race, gender, God, class, sex, and a bunch of other “uncomfortable” topics and my goal is to never make students feel more comfortable. (We called my own college Sociology 101 course, taken in 1981, the “everything you know is wrong class,” and I’m better for it.) I’m here to push buttons, but I’m guessing educators like me are concerned that some MAGA snowflakes are not going to respond well to intellectual challenges. They will be encouraged by a president who has positioned himself as the enemy of truth and science and the core values of The Enlightenment that brought us here.
When Trump is sworn in on the 20th, there will be numerous battlefields across the country, including the places where immigrants work and live, where women and girls get health care, and where trans people simply exist. I fear the classroom will also become a battleground. But instead of falling into the us vs. them narrative the fosters more conflict, my work will be to bring those students in, valuing their different views, and engaging them in the magic of academic freedom. I am not afraid.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” – JD Vance, 2022
October 29, 2024
There’s an old adage called Godwin’s Law that states that when an argument reaches the point where somebody is compared to Hitler, that argument is officially over.
But what about somebody that compares himself to Hitler?
The fall of 2024 will forever be known as the moment in American history when a leading candidate for the presidency was outed by his former Chief of Staff for praising Adolf Hitler and not losing a single point in the polls. America, what have we become?
After not one but two of “his generals” confirmed Trump’s praise for the German fascist, Trump headed to off to Madison Square Garden for a fascist rally of his own. Yes, MSG is the site of a thousand historic concerts (Maybe Trump even knew about Elvis’s famous 1972 show there). The Garden was also the site of a hate filled Nazi rally in 1939, organized by an American pro-Hitler group. And 70 years ago, Madison Square Garden hosted a rally for Joseph McCarthy that highlighted anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-communist speakers. Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and boy was the world’s most famous arena rhyming Sunday night.
The coverage of the MAGA hate rally revealed just what you would expect of a celebration of America’s wannabe Fuhrer – The triumph of the shill. “Comedians” and “celebrities” degraded Puerto Ricans, Latinos, black people, women, and called Vice President Harris a prostitute. There was Putin fan boy Tucker Carlson mocking Harris’ ethnicity and other Putin fan boy Trump vowing to round up all undocumented immigrants on “Day 1” of his administration. (How, he, nor his loyal generals, have yet to tell us.)
Those of us who are scholars of fascism have been screaming from the mountain tops, like Julie Andrews, that Trump’s authoritarian fantasies present an existential threat to the very existence of the United States. I first wrote about it on August 24, 2015 (while working in Mexico). Here’s just a sample of the many pieces I’ve written about Trump and fascism.
So we know that Trump has all the hallmarks of a fascist. (4-star General John Kelly, Trump’s longest serving Chief of Staff, has enumerated the qualifications.) We know that Trump’s MAGA base qualifies as a fascist moment, with its fervent religiously justified nationalism and racist xenophobia. We know all this and the perpetual question remains; Why is this still so close?
In this final week, Trump could say he plans on throwing undocumented immigrants in ovens and not lose a single supporter (not even Speaker of the House Mike Johnson). Trump could say he plans to nuke Gaza and give Ukraine to Putin and not lose a single cheerleader (not even Senator Lindsey Graham). Trump could eat a baby on live TV and not loose a single MAGA minion (not even Kid Rock). His base is locked in and it’s ride or die with the billionaire from Queens. How do we explain this fanatical obsession with a man who can barely speak in complete sentences?
I’ve studied fascism for 40 years, both its historical cases and its real time manifestations (including over five years embedded inside white supremacist groups). I could write a dissertation on MAGA. The first attempt to psychoanalyze fascist movements was Wilhelm Reich’s 1933 classic, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, that argued that the emerging German Nazi movement was made up repressed homosexuals. While that might go a ways to explain MAGA’s obsession with drag queens and transgender athletes, sexual repression ain’t what it was in the Weimar Republic.
Put most simply, MAGA is a cult of personality. They could care less about Trump’s foibles or failed policies. His poorly educated base couldn’t define “fascism” if Elon Musk paid them. They just love Trump. He’s rich but, like them, he don’t speak right. His puffed-up faux masculinity gives them an imagined fighter, with a new mail-order-bride on his arm. They see themselves in him and they will follow him into the gates of hell, wrapped in American flag, made in China. His racism, rape charges, and his hyper-nostalgia for a mythical American past just serve to inflate his “fuck the world” strong man con act. MAGA knows their emperor has no clothes, but, as my mother used to tell me, if you stop believing in Santa, he will stop bringing you presents.
So we’ll head into Election Day with half of voters fully aware they are the grip of a madman, finding an intoxicating comfort in feeling like the oppressor instead of the supposed oppressed. And like many of those arrested at the January 6th attack, when it all goes sideways, they may way up from their fever dream, as did Hitler’s willing executioners. But the damage will be done.
I don’t want to pull rank, but I’ve been actively studying the fascist movements since the first Reagan administration. I spent a large chunk of my life from late 1988 to early 1995 imbedded in extremist right-wing groups while working on my Masters Degree and doctorate on the subject. I’ve published widely on the topic including a chapter in the new book, Conspiracy Theories and Extremism in New Times(Lexington Books). So I feel pretty qualified in identifying what is “fascist,” and, conversely, what is not “communist.”
Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have the core elements of fascism and they are weeks away from upending the two and a half centuries of American democracy.
Trump’s insane assertion that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are gobbling up local pets for dinner has unleashed a wave of terror in the small town as MAGA-loyalists phone in repeated bomb threats to the city. But that’s just one factor in the many-sided fascist tactical campaign by the former president and current felon. I’m just going to run through some of the well-agreed upon tenants of fascism that have Trump’s tiny fingers all over them.
Opposition to Marxism
Historians will tell you the first target of Hitler in 1930s Germany was not the Jews, but German communists. Trump has suddenly become fond of calling all his political opposition “communists,” including “Comrade Kamala,” and his followers have fallen suit. My guess is that Donald and the MAGA rank-and-file couldn’t define communism, or be able to tell Karl Marx from Richard Marx, if you paid them. Harris is far from a Marxist, and her proposed $50,000 tax break for small businesses marks her as pretty damn pro-capitalist. Over 200 Bush, McCain, and Romney former staffers (and Dick Cheney) have endorsed her. It’s hard to imagine these legions of Republicans going to bat for a Marxist. Goldman-Sachs, not exactly a communist institution, has publicly declared that a Harris election would be better for the U.S. economy than a Trump victory.
But Trump throwing out terms like “communist” and “Marxist” to his poorly educated base is sure to motivate those who think Harris is a threat to freedom. A similar trend emerged in the the late 1940s, when the America First Committee, rooted in some of the most vile anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, birthed Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, entering the country into a dark period of political witch hunts. Trump has promised much of the same for his return to power.
Opposition to Parliamentary Democracy
There was never a greater threat to our parliamentary democracy than the mob Trump sicced on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Their goal was to prevent the constitutional transfer of power and they almost succeeded. Their bloodlust to hang VP Mike Pence and “find” Speaker Pelosi had been ginned up by Trump in the preceding weeks, who repeatedly told them that “his” victory had been stolen. He continues to push this lie, stating that Democrats are trying to steal the 2024 election “again.”
Added to this has been Trump’s pledge to arrest and try his political opponents, including Pelosi, if elected. He’s posted memes, on his Truth Social, of Obama, Fauci, and others being subject to military tribunals. This weekend he threatened election workers with retribution if he reclaims the White House. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country,” he wrote. We saw how in 2020 Georgia election workers faced death threats from Trump supporters and election officials have stated that threats against poll workers have only escalated in 2024.
Threats to the voting process and threatening to transform courts and federal departments into agents of his transactional whims completely destabilizes the balance of power and crashes the very fabric of a democratic system based on the rule of law. Due process, congressional oversight, and the influence of voters are all erased for will of one man. That Trump cited Hungarian dictator Vicktor Orban as his character witness in this week’s debate is evidence that he sees dismantling democratic structures as a sign of “strength.”
Opposition to Political and Cultural Liberalism
Like Orbán, Trump sees himself at war with the “cultural left,” made up of various movements for social equity. This includes his obsession with transgender athletes who, somewhere, are beating up women in the boxing ring. Trump sees all things “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) as upsetting the natural order of straight white cis-gender men (i.e., him). Feminists, like Taylor Swift, Gay Pride, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, or anything that attempts to shine light on the history of oppression and methods to make “all men are created equal” an actual reality are framed as “destroying America.” There’s no room in MAGA for queer folks, women who are, you know, people, and racial minorities who aren’t willing to prop up the basic tenants of white supremacy.
Anyone to the left of Trump are considered “communists.” This includes traditional Republicans who are labeled, “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only). If Ronald Reagan were to be reanimated in 2024, Trump and his cult would brand him a “commie” for his (now) relatively liberal policy positions. Trump’s world is divided in to “us” (all who love Trump) and “them” (libtards).
Totalitarian Ambitions
Other than weaponizing the federal government to jail his political enemies, Trump has joked about wanting to be a dictator on “Day 1” and the end of elections after he’s voted in to power. He admiration for Obán, Putin, Kim Jong Un, and other dictators is even starker in contrast to his complete lack of admiration of leaders of democratic movements and nations. (Although, he occasionally compares himself to MLK.)
Trump is transactional, devoid of any shared values. He cares about what serves him. Witness his recent ping pong positions on abortion. History as shown that today’s Trump allies are likely to be tomorrow’s Trump enemies. He surrounds himself with the “best people” until they no longer serve his interests and then they are deemed to be turncoats. If the former first lady is to be believed, the one book Trump has kept close by is not The Bible, but Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and it shows.
Conservative Economic Programs
As someone who has waded through the 887 pages of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, authored by some of Trump’s more notorious staffers, it’s clear what Trump’s second term will deliver; price raising tariffs, cutting Obamacare, education, environmental regulations and civil rights protections, and giving handouts to billionaires and big business. It reads like Reaganomics on methamphetamine. We saw the impact on the economy during Trump 1.0. Trump 2.0 will turn the wealth gap in America into something we see in third world, where a small group of wealthy oligarchs rule the peasant masses. Say goodby to the middle class as unions are busted and worker protections are rolled back.
Corporatism
The hallmark of fascism in Italy and Germany was corporatism, where private industry joined with authoritarian regimes to bring union labor unions under government control and reconfigure private/public entities to maximize profits. In Trump 1.0, we saw him leverage is status as a “billionaire” (we still haven’t seen his tax returns) to the massive benefit of corporations under his 2017 tax law. When Trump invited right-wing corporatist Elon Musk to play a role in Trump 2.0., anti-fascist scholars saw a giant red flag (and not the kind you see on May Day). Musk, who has been busy re-platforming neo-Nazi (I’m sorry, I mean “free speech”) activists on X/Twitter, has bragged about firing striking workers, to which Trump has shown great admiration. Installing Musk as a federal “auditor” would be a page right out of Mussolini’s playbook. Any federal regulations on economic protection, worker rights and safety, civil rights, and protections for the free market would be struck down as “government waste.”
Hyper-masculinity and Violence
I’ve written countless words in this blog since 2015 about how the pear-shaped billionaire, who never got his hands dirty in the real world of labor, presents himself as a macho fighter for the “little guy,” playing into the fragile anxieties of men in a rapidly changing society. In right-wing memes, he’s barrel chested, with Rambo muscles, carrying an AR-15, standing on a tank. (I doubt if the plump country club lizard has ever fired a gun.) Trump’s public persona routinely advocates for violence. Last weekend, he said of undocumented immigrants who recross the border after being deported, “If you come back you will be executed. You will be killed immediately. It’s not going to be easy, but we’ll do it.” Strong men don’t abide by weak ideas, like due process.
The result of Trump’s macho man talk was on full display on January 6, when Trump told his well armed crowd, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then he sent them to the Capitol, telling them, “ I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.” Of course, he then went back to watch the carnage from the safety of the White House. Since then he has routinely referred to the well over 12,000 Americans arrested as “patriots” and promised to “free them” when elected.
In 2024, the violent rhetoric of an anti-government insurgency has been turned up to eleven in support of Trump. In the federally funded anti-political violence project I work on, Cure-PNW, I monitor rightwing social media sites, like Gab, Rumble, and Trump’s Truth Social. The calls for violence, especially if Trump loses, are clarion and specific. Trump supporters are urged to arm up, stockpile ammo, and invest in trauma aid kits for when the “globalists” (i.e. the Jews) fire back. A popular meme states, “There will come a time when none of them will be able to walk down the street.” Fantasies of cvil war include executing anyone left of Trump, including “RINOs.”
Racism and Xenophobia
Most Americans, when asked to describe to Hitler’s reign of terror, would comment on the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that fueled it. It certainly was a guiding principle of the Third Reich, and their “final solution.” That plan of mass extermination swept in many other groups, including Poles, Romani (“gypsies”), homosexuals, and children with disabilities. My 2022 trip to Auschwitz brought me to my knees when I saw the meticulous scope of the Nazi’s genocidal operations.
Trump, who is sweet on right-wing nutjob Laura Loomer, has leaned heavily on racist conspiracies made popular my modern Nazis, including the lies that Venezuelan gangs have taken over “entire sections” of Colorado and that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are stealing pets and eating them. Now, not surprisingly, immigrants in these states have become the target of threats of violence from Trump supporters stupid enough to believe these claims to be true. President Trump’s Muslim ban and reference to African nations as “shit hole countries” wasn’t a surprise given his (and his father’s) long history of racism before he entered public office. Now, on the campaign trail, he’s ramped up the fear mongering of “migrant crime” to full volume. The fact that violent crime has dropped dramatically since he left office, and is significantly lower among immigrant communities (especially if they are undocumented), is completely erased by a rumor that a black Haitian ate somebody’s cat.
What to Do
This analysis could easily be as long as Project 2025. When we add Christian Nationalism to the mix, 2024 is a doppelganger of 1934. Obviously, the first line of defense is a resounding rebuke of Trump at the polls in November. Harris has to win by a clear margin. But even if pulled a landslide, like Reagan did in 1984, Trump and his droogs will still claim the election was stolen by “them” and call for violent retribution. The defeat of Hitler in 1945 didn’t end Nazism in Germany (as Rachel Maddow’s excellent podcast, Ultra, details). What ended it was a collective revulsion over how fascism only serves the self-appointed strong man and sycophantic club of corporatists.
The way through this is to pull back the curtain of the Wizard of Mar-a-Lago. Behind it is a very small, self-serving man and the potential destruction of a great nation.
Watching the Wheels 