FASCISM RISING IN PENNSYLVANIA “We are going to build a coalition of Christian nationalists, of Christians, of Christian candidates at the state, local, and federal levels, and we’re gonna take this country back for the glory of God, [Mastriano] is our guy"

I see more than a superficial resemblance between

Mastriano & Mussolini. They share a political ideology & movement.

We have a fascism problem. Solving it requires that we correctly identify this problem and the dangers it creates.

"(WHTM) – While Democrat John Fetterman holds a strong lead over Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania Senate race, the Pennsylvania Governor race is much closer in the early days of the race.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee, holds only a 4-point lead over his far-right Republican rival, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, with just under 13 percent of voters remaining undecided in the race in the newest USA Today Network/Suffolk University poll.

That puts Shapiro’s advantage over Mastriano within the poll’s 4.4% margin of error."

FROM:

ABC (WHTM)

"Since its founding, Gab has been a haven for antisemites, white nationalists, and other bigots who have been kicked off of Twitter and other mainstream social media platforms, creating a cesspool so toxic that even MAGA cultist Bill Mitchell abandoned the platform after growing tired of dealing with its “large white supremacist, bigotry community.”

Mastriano, by contrast, has no such qualms about courting that community; he spent $5,000 promoting his campaign on the platform and has even been interviewed by Torba himself. For his part, Torba has been a vocal supporter of Mastriano, penning a column last week in which he declared that “Christians need to be supporting Doug Mastriano.”

On Friday, Democrat Josh Shapiro, who is running against Mastriano for governor in Pennsylvania, appeared on MSNBC to discuss Mastriano’s ties to Gab, which prompted Torba to hold a livestream response in which he repeatedly made his Christian nationalism explicitly clear.

“We are going to build a coalition of Christian nationalists, of Christians, of Christian candidates at the state, local, and federal levels, and we’re gonna take this country back for the glory of God,” Torba declared. “[Mastriano] is our guy, and this is Pennsylvania’s guy, and he’s going to turn this state around for the glory of God. And that is the mission here, folks.”

“Now that the media is attacking Christian nationalism, they’re attacking Jesus Christ, and that is a very bad move,” Torba warned. “We are going to take back this country for the glory of God. This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country. From its founding, throughout its entire history, it has been an explicitly Christian country, and people are starting to remember that, and that needs to be the focal point of this movement.”

“That is how we are going to win,” Torba proclaimed. “The entire platform is centered around God’s word, is centered around putting Jesus Christ first again, in our schools, in our culture, in our homes, in our media, in our entertainment, in our news, everything.”"

FROM:

RIGHT WING WATCH

‘This Is an Explicitly Christian Movement Because This Is an Explicitly Christian Country’: Andrew Torba Makes a Case for Doug Mastriano

By Kyle Mantyla | July 18, 2022 12:17 pm

"What does abortion criminalization have to do with voter suppression or with denying election defeats (and only defeats)? What does resistance to COVID mitigation have to do with attacking educators’ ability to teach about the history of racism in the U.S.? What does targeting LGBTQ & especially trans folks have to do with laws allowing motorists to run over protesters? On their surface, these issues seem totally unrelated, but each reflects a suppressionist and eliminationist logic that is the defining feature of fascism. They are also each central policy positions of today’s Republican Party. 

Indeed, whether it’s the extremist Court that just overturned the basis for all of its twentieth century civil rights rulings, the 1/6 Insurrection orchestrated by the Republican Party, or the various state-level laws restricting the right to vote, teach, protest, terminate pregnancies, and exist as a queer person, it has become increasingly clear that something is deeply wrong with the Republican Party. That something is fascism…

As fascist dictator Benito Mussolini explained in his 1932 essay, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” the defining feature of fascism is “it[s] will to power, its will to live, its attitude toward violence, and its value.” Fascism first and foremost, in Mussolini’s thinking, is concerned with seizing and exercising power, with exercising unilateral, eliminationist violence against its opponents. “Anti-individualistic,” he explained, “the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State.” In Mussolini’s framework, there is no room for personal preferences, beliefs, or convictions. Under fascism, the state requires total subordination.

Let’s pause and consider Mussolini’s point by examining two issues less commonly associated with fascism in our public discourse: sex and gender. While we rightly consider race and ethnicity as central to fascist projects, policing sex and gender norms are no less crucial. While Hitler initially welcomed openly gay Ernst Röhm as his closest advisor, for example, he had Röhm and others rounded up and killed shortly after he was elected chancellor. That’s both an illustration of power—Hitler needed Röhm to organize the brownshirts (until he didn’t)—and of the relationship between fascism and patriarchal mythology. As Jason Stanley argues exhaustively in the first chapter of How Fascism Works, fascist mythologies tie the imagined greatness of the past to rigid patriarchal power and gender roles. So when, for instance, we see Republicans calling Democrats a “Party of Groomers” (not linking) for supporting LGBTQ rights, what we are seeing is not some weird sexual fixation but a tactic of scapegoating and myth-making used by fascists for a century.

The Republican Party’s recent assaults on LGBTQ rights and reproductive autonomy for women and gender nonconforming folks with uteruses are often framed as a commitment to old time religion—to fundamentalist and austere Christian norms and practices. These claims too—that it’s not fascism if it’s religion—hide the ways that fascists have long used religion to produce a fascist national mythology and as a weapon to exclude, suppress, or eliminate those seeking freedom of thought and action. Mussolini explains this tactic:

The Fascist State is not indifferent to religious phenomena in general nor does it maintain an attitude of indifference to Roman Catholicism, the special, positive religion of Italians. The State has not got a theology but it has a moral code. The Fascist State sees in religion one of the deepest of spiritual manifestations and for this reason it not only respects religion but defends and protects it. 

As the Italian fascist dictator makes clear, religious devotion is not only compatible with the suppressionist vision of the fascist state, but can actually help accelerate it. Note his reference to “the special, positive religion of the Italians.” Here Mussolini invokes the idea of a national religion—Roman Catholicism—that gives life to the nostalgic mythologies around national character and greatness created to serve the regime and suppress outsiders. Mussolini’s argument is echoed almost verbatim in the logic of Samuel Alito’s insistence in Dobbs that rights only exist which are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” In the United States, that argument limits our rights to those recognized in our country’s deeply racist and patriarchal history.…

So what does all this mean for us?

First, it means that we need to understand that, both structurally and ideologically, the protofascism of the Jim Crow era never left us. Rather, it has become the centerpiece of Republican ideology to such an extent that the 2022 Senate GOP election platform repeats fascist ideas and mythologies nearly verbatim. It is an alarming text and indicates the dire situation we now face.

Second, it is absolutely crucial that we understand the way these seemingly-unrelated laws and tactics are part of a totalizing program. If we fail to do so, we not only miss the scope of the fascist project but also Republicans’ substantial progress in bringing it to fruition. Since 2020, Republicans have worked overtime to limit the protections of the state to those who adhere to racist, sexist, classist, and fundamentalist hierarchies of the “great again” fascist nostalgia. A vast network of suppressionist laws, structures, and tactics, then, is already in place.

Third, we must use the state to destroy this fascist movement before it’s too late. That means, for example, prosecuting immediately the Republicans who planned and helped carry out the January 6th Insurrection. It means removing from Congress those who continue to promote the Big Lie and taking steps to prevent fascist propaganda networks from spreading lies and conspiracy theories. Failing to take these steps against the brazen fascism of the Republican Party means allowing them to continue plotting coup attempts and working towards a single-party state, plotting that led directly to a century of explicitly white supremacist rule in the wake of Reconstruction.

Going forward, I will use this space to engage 1) important antifascist thinkers from W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone Weil to Angela Davis, James Boggs, and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), 2) the history and growing threat of fascist organizing in the U.S. and 3) ways we can circumvent or make inoperable the systems of exploitation that Republican fascists hope to control and build towards survival, liberation, and empowerment. While the situation we confront is indeed dire, I believe that we can sabotage fascist systems of power and, in solidarity with one another, seize for ourselves and our communities a more just and livable future.

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Why I Use The F Word (And You Should Too)

We have a fascism problem. Solving it requires that we correctly identify this problem and the dangers it creates.

Dr. William Horne Jul 15"