The Rise of the American Brown Shirts

 

“Patriot refers to a person who loves and strongly supports or fights for their country.” 

Webster’s Dictionary

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” 

Kevin Roberts, whose uber-conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, is behind the highly controversial ‘Project 2025’ blueprint for a second Donald Trump presidency, made the comment during an appearance on Real America’s Voice.

“We have to blame someone.” 

Adloph Hitler

I’d like to start today’s blog by looking at what Hitler and Mussolini taught us in the 1920s and 30s. It’s about those hallmarks that are “fascism” indicators, most of which are outlined in Hitler’s Mein Kampf (my struggle). But lest you think that fascism was a purely European phenomenon that only recently found traction here in the United States, you might not know whose portrait hung prominently in Adoplh Hitler’s office: Henry Ford. But what are necessary nutrients that must enrich the soil for fascism to take root and grow?

The variables at the core of fascism are often cast as innocent demands for isolationism (“keep us out of foreign wars and stop building foreign economies with trade”) and efficiency (“get the blockers of our future out of the way”). The notion of democracy is easily dismissed by claiming secret cabals of dangerous minorities plan on using elections to disenfranchise true citizens and patriots. And to silence critics, especially educated “experts,” spread the notion that these “elites” are using media and false assertions to facilitate that minority takeover. “Don’t believe or trust these value-eroding fakes!”

A truly independent judiciary always disappears in these autocracies. Uniformed citizen soldiers appear conveniently. And finally, there needs to be a core of anti-“patriotic” enemies to focus the blame. Hitler had Jews, but today that “radical left” is enlisting “immigrants” to usurp the righteous “forces for good” in the nation. Those destroyers of the “obviously correct path” must purged and subject to the “people’s retribution.” Sound familiar?

Looking at the targeted disassembly of federal experts as part of Trump first 100 days if reelected, Trump has plans for us. According to the Hill, the 900-page Project 2025 handbook is a carefully delineated masterplan, embraced by Donald Trump and his MAGA followers that lays out a path to repeal the Civil Service and replace as many as 50,000 federal employees with vetted Trump loyalists at every meaningful level, from judges to ordinary senior bureaucrats. The handbook “rails against abortion, demanding that the federal government cut funding for abortions in some of its programs and that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reverse its approval of abortion pills, such as mifepristone.

“The foreword states that the next president must ‘make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.’ The foreword said this starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion ‘out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.’” The Hill. See also my May 10th The Role of Courts in the Democracies Transitioning to Autocracy and June 10th It Certainly Isn’t the First Time Nazi "Efficiency and Purity" Found Traction blogs.

Trump’s criminal charges (and his conviction) are viewed simply as efforts by the radical left to marginalize his base with those fake values; immigrants and the federal bureaucracy are their primary enemies. And even while the US Supreme Court slowly reinterprets hundreds of years of their own precedents to repeal and remove obstacles to an autocracy aligned with white Christian values, there are other courts in the federal judiciary that are even too reactionary for most of the Supreme Court. Forum shopping islands, despite efforts to create greater balance.

Indeed, some of the lower federal district courts in southern states, with judges appointed by very conservative Republican presidents (and lots by Trump himself) have become MAGA go-to islands. Jurisdictions where available panels of federal trial court judges are so limited, often just to one or two judges with ultra-rightwing beliefs, that a filing plaintiff is pretty much assured of a rightwing judge with a rightwing result. Like Amarillo U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who ordered a hold on federal approval of mifepristone… after 20 years of safe usage under the eyes of the medical experts at the FDA. That tiny federal district panel is within the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over the federal trial courts in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

The July 2nd Texas Tribune looked at the 5th Circuit cases appealed to the Supreme Court, where three were upheld and an astounding eight reversed: The conservative circuit court saw its rulings on abortion medication, gun control, administrative power and social media moderation all rejected by the Supreme Court.

“Justice Brett Kavanaugh cautioned that the 5th Circuit was taking the judiciary down ‘an uncharted path.’ Chief Justice John Roberts said they were ‘slaying a straw man.’ [Even] Justice Clarence Thomas, the most conservative member of the court, authored two opinions rejecting the 5th Circuit’s interpretation of the law… The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit leaned to the right even before President Donald Trump appointed six judges to the bench. The new judges, many of whom trained in Texas’ conservative legal circles, have attracted a slew of ideologically-aligned cases.

“‘One of the most conservative Supreme Courts we've ever had is still repudiating right-leaning decisions from the most conservative appeals courts in the country,’ said Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. ‘But even then, it’s doing so in cases that should never have gotten to the Supreme Court in the first place.’… Just because these rulings ultimately got knocked down at the Supreme Court doesn’t mean the 5th Circuit is toothless, Vladeck said… ‘These rulings have the effect of taking legal theories that were off the wall, and putting them on the wall,’ he said. ‘Even when they’re losing, the effect is to make these cases of national import and give credibility to those arguments.’”

Defunding federal agencies, recently already hobbled by the Supreme Court rejection of judicial reliance on federal agency expertise, defusing the Constitution itself, prioritizing appointees where loyalty to Trump prevails competence, and removing or overruling judges with any notion of independence or neutrality, pushing MAGA-biased judges everywhere they can… are all basic Trump goals, hardly hidden and ruthlessly promoted.

I’m Peter Dekom, and American democracy is hemorrhaging from a MAGA-inflicted “death of a thousand cuts,” as most Americans do not even believe it is happening.