State of the Reich

How goes the dictatorship?  Control of the military (for external and internal action) and a terroristic police force is usually required to solidify dictatorship.  Those who believed that the ethics of the professional military would protect it might have to think again.  Boss Chaos decapitated that military, installing his own minions in top positions, as was done throughout the government.  So far the military has been malleable, engaging in more than questionable but definitely lethal attacks on little boats in international waters, and now in a bombing campaign in Iran of as yet unknown proportions and length--and consequences.  But at least so far, real military engaged in military action within the US hasn't happened, or really been tried.  Now even the National Guard experiment has been cancelled at the behest of federal courts.

But turning federal agencies normally with limited responsibilities regarding immigration into a very well-funded secret police force--that's been the big experiment.  There's no doubt this force exists, and is absolutely loyal to Boss Chaos and the SM guy behind the throne, as well as in this case their white supremacist agenda.  But its momentum has at least been slowed by persistent mass resistance.  

What are the next steps towards dictatorship that Boss Chaos may take?  Some have been closely watching the attempts to build many so-called detention camps all over the country--in many cases, each one to house more prisoners than established federal prisons.  Rachel Maddow in particular has concentrated on this story--of the ongoing attempts, and the substantial opposition which transcends party lines.  These prison camps are ostensibly to incarcerate those caught up in immigration sweeps--but are they only for that?  Rachel's warning mantra has been: if they build them, they will fill them.

Fill them with who?  Talking Points Memo has highlighted several Chaos Administration attempts to expand who qualifies in their eyes as members of  "Antifa," the only so-called group that Pam Bondi could site as being domestic terrorists that her Injustice Department is investigating.  Despite the embarrassing fact that Antifa doesn't seem to exist as an organized entity, Chaos lawyers have tried to claim a Texas activist was a member of an Antifa "cell."  ("Cell" is a loaded word not accidentally borrowed from J. Edgar Hoover's vocabulary concerning the Communist party, later applied to describe terrorists.) This presumably is a test case.

This is also more Back to the Fifties procedure.  A really big tipoff is that White House resident psycho Stephen Miller, who resembles Joe McCarthy's right hand man Roy Cohn more and more every day,  frequently labels people he doesn't like, including just about all Democrats, as "Communists."

But if this works--if the forces of Chaos can successfully label their political enemies as Antifa, as domestic terrorists, then those prison camps can be filled up very fast.

At least for adherents, the most proximate problem to the ongoing construction of dictatorship would be the upcoming 2026 elections.  Losing control of one or both houses of Congress would be detrimental.  So there are ongoing and proposed efforts to control those elections.  One is a bill in Congress to mandate voter IDs nationally.  It's not likely to pass the Senate, and some believe that even if put into practice it will hurt Republicans at least as much as help them.  The more direct route is to use the established secret police to intimidate selected voters.  A trumped up excuse or two might be offered.

A more comprehensive proposal, which exists in a a 17- page memo that's reportedly been circulating in Chaotic circles, would involve declaring a state of emergency that enables the Reich to take control of elections everywhere.  The excuse would be detected foreign influence (though it couldn't be from Russia, since that's actually real, benefitting Chaos.  Favorite candidate at the moment is China.)  Presumably, the secret police would enforce whatever Boss Chaos dictates be done. 

There are problems with all of these scenarios.  Such an emergency declaration has no basis in law, nor are powers set forth anywhere.  So legal challenge would be swift.  Since the Supreme Court managed to defy Chaos once on tariffs, they might again.  But that might not stop Boss Chaos from trying, and causing a lot of chaos that itself can affect voting.

But the current situation in the US is different in important ways from the usual pre-dictatorship scenarios.  Granted that there has been a lot of capitulation, especially among the higher greed class, and Chaos has seemed to successfully make what used to be outrageous and scandalous into the weary normal--and they keep lowering those standards.  But resistance has also been strong, not only in the streets of Minneapolis and Chicago and elsewhere, but in devastating opinion polls, in the actions of judges and grand jurors, and in voting almost everywhere it has occurred.  

One reason for the resistance is the repeated Minneapolis refrain: I'm protecting my neighbors. It's worth seeing this in an historical context.  Rachel Maddow has dramatized the last mass incarceration in US history, of Japanese extraction (most were native-born American citizens) in the first years of World War II.  Though there are important resemblances with what is now being attempted and enacted, there is a major difference.  I was not yet born at the time, but even growing up in the 1950s, I can attest that many Americans, especially outside big cities, even then had little or no personal knowledge of people of Japanese origin. 

 I can easily imagine that in 1942, many if not most Americans knew little more about the Japanese other that they had bombed Pearl Harbor and were killing Americans in the Pacific. In fact almost all the Japanese sent to internment camps were from a few cities and towns on the West Coast (the rest were from Hawaii.) There were only 127,000 people of Japanese descent in the entire continental US--and only 7,000 of them didn't live on the West Coast.  Their culture was utterly unfamiliar, except through racist caricature.  For most Americans, they may as well have been Martians.  In a time of war, if the government said these people were a threat, they had little if any knowledge otherwise.  Not from the news media, and not from personal experience.

That is not the case now regarding the immigrant groups that Chaos considers prey.  People of all ethnicities in affected places like Minneapolis and Chicago see themselves as defending their neighbors--people they know, people embedded in their communities.  That they are Latin or African immigrants matters less.  They do not fear them, which is Chaos' only hope.  (Those they might well fear, such as certain Russian and Eastern European mob members, are conspicuously not targeted by the forces of Chaos.)

Few Americans knew how the internment of Japanese Americans was conducted, but most Americans paying any attention are well aware of the cruelty and lies, not to mention the assaults and murders committed by the Chaos secret police.  That no one trusts the word of the Chaos administration on anything is evident now in court decisions and the grand juries who refuse to indict Chaos targets--including the recent attempt to criminalize the members of Congress who recited the law on the military's duty to refuse unlawful orders, where not a single grand juror agreed to indict.

The polls for Chaos and his administration show large majorities disagreeing on every question--every issue, every action.  Less than a quarter of Americans polled say they strongly support Chaos--and less than a quarter support war in Iran.  We'll see if any of this changes, but so far it all suggests a lack of trust by three-fourths of the country.

None of this means that the threat of complete dictatorship is over.  And this is apart from the overwhelming evidence that this is already a Fascist government. And that no matter what happens, chaos will be the rule until at least 2029. 

 

There's even some doubt that dictatorship per se is a planned goal for Boss Chaos.  Some version of it may be just a means to what he more directly cares about: feeding the bottomless pit of his ego, using the crime boss model to feed his greed and wreak vengeance, and using all means to fend off further humiliation, such as what may well be hiding in the Epstein files. 

Just his fear of further humiliation after the November voting (such as yet another impeachment, though losing would itself be enough) will most probably drive him to new extremes in the coming months. His band of incompetent grifters and criminals constituting his administration will be fighting for survival as well.  The specter of an end or at least a limit to their corruption and obvious looting of the Treasury and of the future of all seniors by its rapid depletion of Social Security and Medicare trust funds, will likely be highly motivating.

Whether even the new effectiveness of AI disinformation can help them enough also remains to be seen.  But there's going to be more and more of it.  Still, it is worth remembering that desperation often leads to mistakes, and they are right to be desperate.  The state of the Reich is rocky.