Fascism watch thread/news and discussions

[firestar464]

Federal judge halts work on Trump’s ‘anti-weaponization fund’

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/29/politics ... ation-fund

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Gangster Capitalism and Corruption in Trump’s America
By Henry Giroux
May 29, 2026

Introduction:

(Counterpunch) Corruption has never been far from the center of American politics. Some of the most notorious scandals stretch from the cronyism of Warren G. Harding to the abuses of power exposed during the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. Yet many historians argue that what distinguishes Donald Trump from earlier corrupt presidencies is that corruption no longer operates behind closed doors, shielded by the liberal rituals of institutional legitimacy and the euphemisms of political decorum. Under Trump, corruption is performed openly as spectacle, celebrated as a sign of strength, wealth, vengeance, and personal loyalty.

Trump’s ever-expanding regime of corruption is no longer simply hidden financial misconduct but a public display of sociopathic avarice designed to normalize greed, lawlessness, unconstrained power, and the collapse of civic accountability. It reflects a politics of moral nihilism in which fascism no longer appears as a distant threat, but as the future already taking shape.

As a badge of honor, Trump embraces corruption not simply as a mode of governance, but as a spectacle designed to legitimate greed, cruelty, and unchecked power. It functions as what Dominic Wetzel has called the “pornification of the American dream,” a culture in which excess, lawlessness, and predation are celebrated as signs of success and strength. In Trump’s America, corruption metastasizes into a theater of cruelty and violence, saturating political life with the values of fear, spectacle, and disposability. It feeds a broader architecture of domination rooted in toxic hierarchies of race, class, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism, while turning lawlessness and untethered aggression into forms of political entertainment.

Corruption, in this sense, is more than a symptom of institutional decay, moral depravity, or political vulgarity. It becomes one of the central pedagogical and political mechanisms through which fascist politics takes hold, eroding democratic values while legitimating a culture organized around brutality, humiliation, and civic abandonment. In this formulation, corruption functions as a kind of fascist staging ground, creating the conditions that nourish what Jonathan Crary calls in Scorched Earth an “implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.”

Read more here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/2 ... america/

caltrek’s comment: Missing from this article is a recollection of Ronald Reagan’s famous statement of belief: “Greed is good.” In all fairness to Reagan, his statement was made in the context of loosening regulations and allowing the free market to proceed by rewarding the “greedy” who best understood that market. So, Reagan proposed achieving his goals through a legislative process.

Trump simply wishes to totally bypass the legislative branch by a complete disregard of any law or regulation that might impede his corrupt practices. Hence his constant and continual clash with the judicial system which so far has served as a bulwark against some (but not all) of Trump’s more extreme plans of self-aggrandizement.

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DOD Officially Drops 180 Faiths From Military's Recognized Religion List

https://www.military.com/dod-officially ... igion-list

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Fifteen people charged over alleged interference in Minnesota immigration crackdown

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... cy-charges

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Anger at ‘send them back’ chants by rightwing MEPs after EU migration law vote

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/ ... n-law-vote

WTF Europe?

[firestar464]

Trump Administration Tells Federal Employees to Wear “Freedom” Pins—Or Else

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... k-service/

[caltrek]

‘Psychopath’ Ben-Gvir Slammed for Demand That ‘All Lebanon Must Burn’
By Brad Reed
June 19, 2026

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir drew widespread condemnation on Friday when he declared that “all Lebanon must burn” shortly after four Israeli soldiers were killed in a fight with Hezbollah.

In a social media post, Ben-Gvir said that Israel should retaliate for the deaths of the soldiers with a scorched-earth military campaign aimed at killing large numbers of Lebanese people

“For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep,” the far-right Israeli Cabinet member wrote. “Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.”

Ben-Gvir also took a subtle shot at the Trump administration, which has called for Israel to cease its military operations in Lebanon so that the US and Iran can negotiate an end to the illegal war of choice President Donald Trump launched earlier this year.

“With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit,” he wrote. “All of Lebanon must burn.”

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/ben- ... -lebanon

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