In practice true fascism isn't the Hollywood myth of armed state thugs snarling, "your papers please."
If it were, citizens would never allow it to gain power in the first place-that's just common sense. Rather classic fascism is seemingly paved with freedom and justice for powerful, corrupt political figures. Given this, fascism always, always misuses existing laws in ways they were never intended.
Judge gavel with american flag with RICO ACT text
(Image by focusonmore.com from flickr) Details DMCA
Truthfully, every country has always incorporated fascist elements, and this includes the US where traditionally some misapplication of law has always occurred to silence dissent. Influential critics of US policy have a long track record of also suddenly having an array of mysterious tax evasion issues which mom and pop America pay little attention. Back in 1982, leftist Reagan critic Abby Hoffman was targeted with IRS violations along with more recently far-right conservative Dinesh D'Souza who also quite coincidently had unforeseen tax charges levied against him immediately following the release of his unflattering film on Barack Obama uncanny!
Obama was a master of this, incidentally, by misusing IRS code suspiciously against numerous Occupy members and liberal, antiwar Code Pink activists as Cindy Sheehan, for example. Obama wasn't content just misapplying tax laws, however. He took fascism to a whole new level by gross misapplication of the outdated, largely forgotten, Espionage Act to silence whistleblowers and journalists who oppose his policies or exposed extensive US war crimes.
The over 100-year-old Espionage Act was never intended or imagined to be applied in this manner. It's designed to prosecute actual spies and not journalists or whistleblowers who have a responsibility to expose government wrongdoing-not prosecuted for it.
The unchallenged Obama was broad in his fascist assault on journalism. This famously included ridiculous "espionage" charges against whistleblower, Edward Snowden who thankfully, is still be sheltered by Russia and Julian Assange, of course, still languishing in a British jail on trumped up "espionage" charges completely fabricated by the Lord Obama. Assange, it should be pointed out, has served more than four years for "crimes" of which he has never even been convicted.
The irony of Obama is that he prosecuted the very whistleblowers that he promised repeatedly to protect during the 2008 campaign, being so aggressive on prosecutions that the ACLU published on October 14, 2014, "On leak prosecutions, Obama takes it to 11. (or should we say 526?) An unprecedented 526 prosecutions against whistleblowers exposing government wrongdoings, yet, his blind loyalists still sing his praises as somehow, a liberal hero, proving only that Obama apologists are far more delusional than even Trump backers...
The early stage of fascism merely appears as justice being served and democracy preserved. Fascism never ends with a few popular prosecutions, though, because eventually these same misapplications of existing laws eventually extend to virtually anyone opposing it.
This is exactly what will happen with this misapplication of the RICO Act--it doesn't end with Trump just as Obama's perversion of the Espionage Act didn't end with him--- Trump did it, Biden does it and the next president will too. It's very seldom that an entrenched policy is ever repealed--Biden still puts migrant children in cages, expanded the Trump China, while openly supports fracking and oil drilling in wilderness areas---all things previously strongly opposed by Democratic neoliberals.
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