It’s getting harder to tell the MAGAs from the Nazis. It’s not just the Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson who thinks those on the right should abandon a dying conservatism for something much more fashy.
Indeed, in a recent blog post responding to Davidson’s recent revanchist manifesto in the Federalist, white nationalist Brad Griffin — aka “Hunter Wallace” — suggests that the distinction between the MAGAs and what used to be called the alt-right has already broken down so completely he can barely distinguish the two. And he’s into it.
“MAGA has become the new Republican establishment,” he writes.
The True Cons have been ousted from power in the Republican Party. In their absence, the conservative base has steadily radicalized and has adopted rhetoric and positions which used to be more associated with us, which has blurred the boundary between the “fringe” and the “mainstream.”
Indeed, he continues,
Liz Cheney is now a fringe figure in the Republican Party while the median Republican voter is far closer to us than these people.
What does this mean in practice? That MAGAs have to a surprisingly large degree, adopted the concerns, the slogans, and the demands, of the fascist right.
At some point, there was a role reversal. I became a garden variety mainstream normie. There isn’t much that I believe anymore which normie conservatives don’t also believe. Everyone agrees now that White people and Christianity are under siege in this country.
Especially if they’re watching Tucker Carlson pound his race-war rhetoric every night.
They have gradually come … around and embraced my positions while rejecting people like Matt Lewis and David French.
He has some advice for those of the new right-wing radicals who still cling to the name “conservative.”
Conservatives who have come around to our way of thinking in recent years should ditch the brand in favor of nationalism. In spite of recent changes, the conservative brand still means “loser” or “false opposition” to lots of young people because of the memory of people like George Will and David French.
“Hunter” really hates David French, in case you haven’t noticed.
Conservatism truly is dead. And what’s coming will be much worse.
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I’d wish that this would be a wakeup call to those clinging to the (R), but I’m not hopeful.
@ C.A. Collins
Yeah, don’t hold your breath
And this just in: they don’t want people entering into asexual marriages, either.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/10/religious-right-now-targeting-sexless-marriages-selfishness-want-ban/
@Full Metal Ox
Weren’t they just insisting that marriage equality wasn’t a concern because LG* people should just enter into platonic cross-gender marriages like…five minutes ago?
*(…and insisting that bisexual people should refrain from entering into same-gender relationships, as if people can just control who they fall in love with?)
Conservative? When all they want to conserve is white people’s illegitimate power (not the power that they, along with all Americans, have a right to) and the 1 percent’s obscene wealth — instead of conserving, say, the planet — they’re not conservative. I’m not at all sure that right-wingers understand that politics is not a game.
@Full Metal Ox
Damn, they have not thought this one through. Do couples in their 80s have to have sex? How will this be enforced? I’m sure that many, many other questions will pop into my head.
Answer: Duh!
Has been for years.
@Unty M: They were still supposed to grit their teeth and think of Dixie and at least have enough sex to breed.
Huh? I always thought the movement was inherently fascist. Hell, 40 years ago when AIDS was becoming news, I assumed that the end game for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson was to become a Nehemiah Scudder and send all gay people to death camps.
I remember the prequel to Dragonriders of Pern having a mandatory breeding rule, but there they have a legitimate reason for it, being a fairly small group, trying to establish a self-sustaining presence on a remote planet, who need all the people and genetic diversity they can manage. Here, I think we’d be better off focusing on supporting and providing for the people we already have, not to mention keeping the planet habitable.
In the same way that the Disney corporation is morphing into a children’s entertainment conglomerate. The Republican Party has been a fascist party for as long as most of us here have been alive, and stopped even pretending otherwise decades ago.
@CA Collins
People who vote Republican want fascism. Taking the masks off will motivate them, not discourage them.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/26/dwqb-o26.html
Jesus fuck. Isn’t that slavery? I thought that had been abolished in every developed country long since?
And this was a decade ago. I can only imagine how much worse this shit has gotten since.
How much longer can this, and stagflation, and etc. go on before there’s an armed revolt?
I know too many people who vote (R) because they always have, and when you tell them the actual policies they’re supporting, they don’t believe it.
Deliberate, willful ignorance vs actually wanting fascism, but the results are the same in the end, The Leopards Eating People’s Faces party gains power.
Semi-OT, given the subject of this thread – Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked with a hammer in their home earlier this morning:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/10/28/politics/paul-pelosi-attack/index.html
Thankfully he’s expected to make a full recovery. Motive for the attack is still technically under investigation, but given the attacker’s social media postings he’s from somewhere in the conservative belief system.
Sure, tying up and beating an 82 year old man who’s just chilling alone in his house is really, really manly and will have an effect on public policy.
As Bugs used to say “What a maroon”.
Glad Mr. Pelosi is going to be OK — skull fractures are bad at any age.
(It took me a while to type this because I couldn’t see the screen, because my eyes had rolled so far I was looking at my frontal lobes for a second.)
@ kWhazit
I recall a small group of meat-eating Heavyworlders (in that ‘verse everyone is vegan or at least vegetarian IIRC, making these people outcasts, if not illegal) ended up alone on a planet crawling with dinosaurs.
They then carefully sexed it up according to a scheme to maximize genetic diversity in the resulting offspring so as to build a healthy society.
Finally, still according to memory here, this becomes revelant to the story when one of Mccaffery’s female characters crashes there and really likes one of the nicely muscular descendants of that little endeavour. (Heavyworlders being huge hulking eight foot tall monsters modified for high G planets, their offspring slowly reverting to regular human stature after a few generations, but tending toward beefcake status.)
I honestly don’t know what to do. Pelosi had an attempt on her life, I saw the article saying we’re on track for the climate to warm by 2.8 C with no credible track to decrease that, Twitter’s going down in flames, all of the states I could afford to do my postgrad in are either red (and starting to introduce ant-LGBT legislation) or at high risk of going red this election thanks to shenanigans, and it really feels like the fascists are winning and it’s only a matter of time before we start being tracked, hunted down and put in the showers (or whatever the American mass execution method of choice is. Probably guns. Maybe they’ll make us run across a gun range while they fire at us and count their tally on our corpses, 1 point per bullet entry wound, with an extra 10 for a clean kill shot to the head.)
I’d consider breaking into Congress to set myself on fire and make them watch me burn to death, but nobody even bothered with the climate change guy who did that to himself several months ago so there’s probably not much point.
It seems like we’re well and truly fucked. Is it even worth trying to plan a future anymore? Should I start working on an exit plan again?
@Seth S:
1.) Have a plan for when things go south, even if it’s just “grab my most essential stuff, run for Mexico or Canada and hope for the best”. Also have an idea how to deal if things get bad but not that bad.
2.) Until that time comes, don’t give into despair, and fight back if you can, even if in very small ways if you’re resource-deprived or risk-adversive. At present, they’re still the underdog, and in real life, underdogs only win when they’re severely underestimated or their opponent is really slumming it. It’s not like they’re guerillas, the vast majority of them act semi-openly and forget other people are monitoring them.
Seth S, Snowberry
One thing I do to soothe my despairing soul is to go down the rabbit hole of watching people who’ve succeeded in improving their lives and their locality.
I’d recommend “The miracle water village” to start – that’s from India.
From china, choose any or all of the videos about restoring the Loess plateau. Then watch /read whatever you find on the Al Baydha project.
Then pick and choose whatever appeals to you from the stuff that turns up as recommended. (There’s some fantastic stuff being done in lots of places in Africa.)
I never noticed a difference between the two groups. Well, I guess actual Nazis dress better than MAGA clowns.
I’m going to say “no” because that shit already happened about forty years ago.
@Full metal ox
I think what they mean is, “Pump out white babies!”
Although it’s hard to see how they can enforce sex within marriage.