rolling creeping american fascism thread

first they came for facebook . . .

Trump administration lawyers are demanding the private account information of potentially thousands of Facebook users in three separate search warrants served on the social media giant, according to court documents obtained by CNN.

The warrants specifically target the accounts of three Facebook users who are described by their attorneys as "anti-administration activists who have spoken out at organized events, and who are generally very critical of this administration's policies."
One of those users, Emmelia Talarico, operated the disruptj20 page where Inauguration Day protests were organized and discussed; the page was visited by an estimated 6,000 users whose identities the government would have access to if Facebook hands over the information sought in the search warrants. In court filings, Talarico says if her account information was given to the government, officials would have access to her "personal passwords, security questions and answers, and credit card information," plus "the private lists of invitees and attendees to multiple political events sponsored by the page."

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/28/politics/facebook-anti-administration-activists/index.html

Weirdly came across this thread that never got off the ground (because others did)

https://illwill.com/lies

In this piece you getting something that is mapping out the 'rolling creeping'

The “get out and vote” illusion persists, in part, because the US has now devolved fully into what Ernst Fraenkel, a labor lawyer who lived through the rise of the Nazis, referred to as the “dual state,” in which the regime is able “to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws — and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens — while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence,” in the words of scholar Aziz Huq. In this two-track modality, a “normative state” marked by an “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents” continues to operate, while alongside it a parallel “prerogative state” defined by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by legal guarantees” becomes the norm in certain geographic areas or in the governance of particular demographic groups. For Fraenkel, this “lawless” zone does not negate the lawful one outright, but rather operates in tandem with it, even if the “two states cohabit uneasily and unstably” because “people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one” on a political whim. But the trend is clear: over time, the dictatorial “prerogative state would distort and slowly unravel the legal procedures of the normative state, leaving a smaller and smaller domain for ordinary law.”

You'll find not a single second of illusion in that piece.

Good piece. The thing in there I'm less sure about is this

the power of the economic elites sitting behind Trump depends on working people

I don't know if this is changing, or they think it's going to change, or how much. But if the goal is to remove people altogether from the economy altogether then does the become less true. Even before AI really makes any inroads into employment, what proportion of the working people the elites rely are even in the US

Change is being enacted through general economic instability, caused by Tariffs, lack of investment, chaos, etc. that is having just as much of an economic impact as AI (though ofc there's a big bet placed by companies on it).

In the meantime working people can sign up to become an ICE agent and repress discontent in the population. No figures there though I've read a couple of pieces in the past that interview people being recruited into ICE. The perks outlined in the piece are a significant incentive.

Thats the interesting corollary, that the collective power of working people who aren't inclined towards fascism would arguably be reduced if the economy were to rely on them less - and the collective power of working people who are inclined towards fascism increases as they get paid to participate. Alongside a more stochastic role for those that don't necessarily join up to ICE but carry out attacks on the inferred understanding that there won't be any consequences

Which is where the contradiction of the preceding line comes in, the people vastly outnumber the invading force

The issue is that so much of the economy depends on services now— healthcare, education, etc— and most of these sectors are center left or progressive in their makeup. Retail and tangibles workers are definitely progressive, at least in economic opinion.

What I am getting at is it’s not like there’s a rush among people to become ICE goons, and pretending like these economic sectors have simply disappeared into a black hole of fascism and AI is simply not borne out by facts.

In other words, I think the article is spot on.

Dozens of immigrant families protested for better treatment Saturday behind fences at a Texas detention facility where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father were sent this week after being detained in Minnesota. pic.twitter.com/25akWihmno

— The Associated Press (@AP) January 27, 2026

I went to the killing fields in Cambodia recently and what was interesting was learning of the brutal ways the Khmer Rouge used to kill people, but only because they didn’t want to use guns out of fear that people would figure out what they were doing. They used things like big garden hoes with heavy handles or the limbs of old palm trees that grow these saw-like edges to slit people’s throats. The nazis acted in a similar way. Attempting to keep the general public from know the actual atrocities they were committing.

I was thinking of this compared to what the trump administration is doing in broad daylight with crowds of people with phones pointed directly at them. You could say, as many have, that our saving grace is that they’re too stupid to actually pull off their actual goals. Not to minimize the work of the observers and the brave people holding those cameras, but they clearly miscalculated the thirst for this by the American public.

The Ustashe did that, the Nazis were supposedly opposed to it as it went against their self-image of efficient and civilised (take with however large a pinch of salt you prefer)

I'm in two minds on the goal of the public spectacle aspect of this, whether perceived public thirst was a calculation at all, or whether the spectacle aspect has other motivations

Kristallnacht was pretty public.

This resonates:

Once the illusion of civility collapses, revealing the force and fraud of power as such, new lies emerge to serve classic counterinsurgent functions. Their purpose is to dampen the immediate response to the tyrannical state, to assist it in its repression by outing militant actors, and to hinder any preparation for what is to come. “Don’t give them an excuse,” “Don’t take the bait,” “Don’t give them what they want” — all paired with new conspiracy theories about pre-planted bricks and agent provocateurs. As in 2020, these lies center around the claim that fighting back against the invading army of mercenaries will ultimately give the government an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and impose martial law. This lie appears to have integrity because the regime has repeatedly threatened to do just this. But any trace of logic just as soon evaporates. What would a sufficient “excuse” look like, and why would a regime that has absolutely no compunction violating the constitution, falsifying evidence, and persecuting its opponents need such an excuse? Why not simply fabricate one? Federal officers have invaded a city and are actively assaulting and murdering civilians — this is already a form of martial law, just without the paperwork. More importantly, the entire goal of martial law is to enforce quiescence. Pre-emptively rewarding the regime with precisely what it wants does not so much avoid martial law as make it unnecessary.

The public spectacle aspect is either a) miscalcuation, b) not a miscalculation at all, but done intentionally for the reasons stated above

In the second case any thoughts around the publics appetite for violence can't be miscalculated because its considered no longer relevant what voters think or do

This resonates:

At the moment the entire strategy is centered on clawing back Congress, the one center of power that will soon become available and that enjoys constitutional legitimacy, in the belief that the results of the midterm election can be used to beat back the encroachment of pure authoritarianism and one-party rule. That strategy means driving public opinion away from supporting the GOP and bestowing legitimate power upon the Democratic opposition. So long as the rickety structure of democracy holds, this strategy has value, because most of the public still values and believes in democracy.

If, as many of us speculate, Trump and his minions blatantly attempt to steal the election or ignore the public will, the entire structure by which democracy grants government legitimacy collapses and legitimacy has no locus. Basically, under those circumstances, the ability to use force is in full play for all sides, because legitimacy belongs to everyone and no one.

I just started reading this interview with Alberto Toscano and Harsha Walia, but it looks excellent: https://www.tni.org/en/article/lifeboats-steampunk-and-colonialism-fascism-today

Nick: What do you see as the underlying key reasons for this resurgence of fascist politics in this moment?

Alberto: Among the foremost reasons is the one that Harsha was just alluding to in terms of the lifeboat framing of contemporary far-right and fascist movements. Since the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, and arguably before that too, we have experienced a long period of capitalist stagnation: diminishing socio-economic expectations and the shrinking of the social wage and social safety net, while efforts at more egalitarian or universalist social betterment have been repeatedly crushed or curtailed – often by the forces that present themselves as liberal or indeed even social democratic or left wing.

There has been a spreading ‘common sense’ that things are not going to get any better, that the pie is shrinking. Even climate denialists are often implicitly climate realists, for instance, when they talk about their apocalyptic scenarios of mass migration. After all, why would those mass migrations happen? Oh yes, it’s because of that very thing they’re saying is not the case.

The neoliberal ravaging of social expectations has baked in a sense of precarity and a foreclosed future, which has played a massive role in making the victories of the far right possible. It has created an undercurrent of profound cynicism. Ultimately, my sense is that most people don’t believe in the grand rhetorical visions of becoming ‘great again’ or in futures of affluence or abundance but rather are mobilised by promises that they might retain some material and symbolic goods for whatever ethnic, national, religious or class group to which they belong. If things are inexorably immiserating, so the thought seems to go, perhaps that can be slowed down through policies of exclusion or hierarchy. Often the only goods available are purely symbolic, like the impoverishing or humiliation of others, not your own betterment. Using W.E.B. Du Bois’ term the ‘psychological wages’ may increase while the material ones flatline. This notion of a zero-sum game dovetails with the centrality of anti-migrant racist and xenophobic politics to the far right across the globe.

Harsha: I concur with everything Alberto just said. The rise of fascistic tendencies has shifted from that sense of a nostalgic past to contending with the misery of the present and also, importantly, an unknown misery into the future. There is no sense that things are getting better.

The vast majority of people worldwide understand the crisis of capitalism. The question is what they choose to do in response to that. Fascist tendencies more than anything offer people a sense of winning in a deeply unequal world. And that sense of winning is the psychological wage – it’s the sadism, the culture wars, feeling superior to someone else.