Welcome to the third world
It has been a tough week. As Donald Trump set about looting Venezuela, Trumpists are working double-hard on their ethnic cleansing operations at home. Not only to increase their capture numbers but, apparently, to grind down public opposition through fear and mental exhaustion.
The press is still tiptoeing around reporting what is happening before our eyes. In the wake of the snap execution of Renee Nicole Good this week in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, Jim Stewartson over at MindWar is blunt:
A word often used to describe Trump is authoritarian. But this is insufficient. Authority is the recognized right to control outcomes within a set of constraints accepted as binding—familial, religious, cultural, moral or legal.
The U.S. federal government is deliberately destroying the idea of any authority being legitimate except the ability to project coercive violence. We are living in the “might makes right” world of neo-Nazi ideology, a kratocracy.
William Montague defined kratocracy as: a government by those strong enough to seize control through violence or deceit.
What we are seeing is a rejection of law itself, supplanted by the “capability and willingness to commit violence.”
At least twice in the last 48 hours, the Vice President has said that ICE is going “door to door” to hunt for “illegal aliens.”
That is, this administration considers null and void a fundamental right for which American colonists fought a revolution.
Trump and his second, J.D. Vance, Stewartson argues, are “trying to replace constitutional authority with power, legal authority with violence, and truth with state propaganda.”
A friend observes that the propaganda issued on the DHS X feed and home page increasingly resembles statements from the former Nazi site, Stormfront. What must they be saying in private?
“Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?”
DHS is looking to pay racist bullies to get drunk on power. It has a $1 million campaign to recruit thousands more agents from “gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts” (read: militias) as part of a “wartime recruitment” strategy.
That war is against you. DHA recruits need not have a college degree. They are undertrained, undisciplined, armed, and the sorriest excuse for professional law enforcement since Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke. Trump 2.0 is not recruiting law enforcement. They are building Trump’s personal army of armed thugs.
This system has another name, Stewartson argues: totalitarianism.
The goal of an “authoritarian” like Trump is not to gain authority through coercion and violence, but to replace authority with pure power—enforced by constant threat of violence. This is more totalitarian than authoritarian, something even more extreme than dictators like Putin and Orban, who try in superficial ways to pretend they have the legal right to abuse power.
The sheer speed of Trump’s rapid descent into a totalitarian, personalist dictatorship is inseparable from several factors, in my opinion:
- Progressive dementia, exacerbated by age, stress, vascular problems
- Narcissistic collapse over Epstein and his fading popularity
- People around him weaponizing his decline—especially Miller and Vance, ideologues jockeying for power in a post-Trump regime
- Paranoia about the midterms and what it means for the regime’s ability to continue its crackdown
Today, Venezuela and Minnesota. Tomorrow Greenland:
Trump said on Friday morning: “It may be a choice” between the United States staying in NATO, and Denmark handing over their sovereign territory—meaning that Trump will use military force, and destroy our most powerful alliance, if his demands aren’t met. Violence, not authority.
Reporters caught former Minnesota governor, Jesse Ventura, outside his former high school after immigration raiders deployed chemical irritants against students hours after Good’s killing.
Ventura condemned Republicans for ignoring the Constitution.
“We’re a third-world country now,” Ventura argued. “Because in third-world countries they have the military doing their police work in the cities … That’s what happens in a dictatorship,” Ventura continued. What happened in 1930s Germany is happening here, he warned.
I first came across the phrase “might makes right” as a child in a comic book story about fighting Nazis:
The jingoistic lesson, of course, illustrated with images of air combat, was that the Allies eventually defeated fascism because, as Abraham Lincoln proclaimed at the end of his Cooper Union address, right makes might.
LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.