Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
Our media and politicians need to figure out that it's not a slur to call a fascist a fascist. It's merely descriptive
Ron DeSantis appears to have succeeded in his attempt to bully the College Board into stripping Black Lives Matter, discussion of gay Black thought leaders, and multiple well-known Black authors from their African American Studies Advance Placement course.
Over at the Popular.infonewsletter, Judd Legum et al noted yesterday that the College Board's revenue is increasingly coming from selling these courses (more and more students aren't taking the SATs "- their other revenue source "- as colleges move away from basing admissions on testing), so to maintain their viability and their CEO's $2.5 million annual salary, they apparently decided they pretty much had to bow to DeSantis' threats and those from the right wingers who preceded him and he was imitating.
In addition to threatening teachers with prison if they don't remove books from classrooms, arresting Black men who were told they could vote and did so, and now demanding menstrual histories from high school girls (presumably to look for pregnancies?), DeSantis has laid a reign of terror against minorities of all sort across his state.
Bullying like this is at the core of authoritarian behavior, as I noted in my Daily Take yesterday about DeSantis, and we need to start calling things what they are. And that must start with fascism.
Right now Ron DeSantis and multiple other Republican politicians are trying to out-fascist each other. While the media reports on the various efforts to criminalize women, ban books, end history lessons, and fill our communities with weapons of war, only rarely do they mention the political philosophy behind it all.
Although the word was only coined in the 1920s by Benito Mussolini to describe his movement in Italy, it describes a system of government and method for enacting political change that's as old as civilization.
And it's been on a rapid ascent in America since Trump rolled out his hate-and-fear campaign for president in 2015.
Fascism is intertwined with oligarchy
America's first major confrontation with fascism wasn't World War II: it was the Civil War. During the four decades leading up to that conflict, the American South had abandoned all pretense of democracy.
The Confederacy was an ethno-nationalist police state, run by a small number of plantation-owning oligarch families like Robert E. Lee's, and even being white was no protection from the Confederacy's brutality.
Although they weren't enslaved, poor whites had it rough in the Confederate states. They had no real access to due process, and in most cases were prevented from voting if they didn't own land. Even when they did vote, ballot boxes were stuffed or ballots were burned when elections didn't turn out the way the oligarchs wanted.
Through the period from the 1830s to the 1860s, as I document in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, southern plantation owners' wealth and consolidation of political power radically increased because of the invention of the Cotton Gin that started spreading across the south in the 1820s.
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